Media in Birmingham
[6] Reach plc additionally own What's On Magazine Group, running since 1986 and currently producing six monthly regional entertainment titles, including What's On Birmingham and LGBT+ publication Midlands Zone.
Reach plc previously published the now defunct Birmingham News, a weekly freesheet distributed to homes in the suburbs.
Birmingham is the hub for various national ethnic media, including The Phoenix Newspaper,[14] The Sikh Times, Desi Xpress, and The Asian Today.
[23] 5IT pioneered many innovations in early broadcasting, launching Children's Hour in 1922,[24] developing sophisticated methods of programme control and employing the first full-time announcers in 1923.
[25] The station's first announcer on its opening night was its general manager Percy Edgar,[26] who was to be the dominant figure in Birmingham broadcasting and the BBC's most influential regional director until his retirement in 1948.
[30] The Broad Street studios now controlled and made programmes for a region stretching across central England from The Potteries to Norfolk.
As Director of the Midland Region Percy Edgar fought against the efforts of Lord Reith to increase control over the BBC from London, writing to Reith in 1929 that "the ever growing policy of centralisation in London has clearly gone a good deal further and more rapidly than public opinion here is prepared to accept"[31] and positioning himself almost as an independent entrepreneur within the wider organisation.
[34] Notable programmes included the detective series Paul Temple which was produced in Birmingham and broadcast nationally from 1938 until 1968.
In 2012, Orion Media announced that BRMB would be rebranded as Free Radio Birmingham, along with its sister West Midlands stations Beacon, Mercia and Wyvern.
The launch of the Sutton Coldfield transmitting station in December 1949 made the Birmingham area the first in Britain outside London to receive a television service.
[38] The most notable achievement of the early years of Birmingham television was Cathy Come Home, described by the BBC itself as "the most famous and groundbreaking TV drama ever made",[39] and judged the second greatest British television programme of the twentieth century in a 2000 survey of broadcast industry professionals by the British Film Institute.
In 1968, ATV won the contract to serve the area seven days a week and built new studios off Broad Street at the heart of the city featuring the landmark Alpha Tower.
Other television programmes to have been made or filmed in Birmingham include Blockbusters, Boon, Survivors, Brum, Dalziel & Pascoe, Father Brown, Land Girls, New Faces, Pot Black, Rosie & Jim, The Sky at Night, Spitting Image, The Golden Shot, Woof!, WPC 56, One Born Every Minute, and Gladiators.
As of August 2012, most of The Mailbox facility sat unused after the BBC moved the factual departments to Bristol and Cardiff.
[55] BSkyB have a base at the University of Birmingham's campus in Edgbaston, including a news bureau and a studio with broadcast, editing and production facilities, covering an area from Mid-Wales to Norfolk and from Sheffield to Oxford.
[70] Albert Austin (born 13 December 1881 or 1885) was an actor, film star, director and script writer, primarily in the days of silent movies.
[71] With Britain having no significant film industry outside London until the 1990s, BBC Birmingham has been seen as "the nearest Britain had to an integrated regional film culture", producing challenging films that attracted both large national audiences and critical approval, such as Philip Martin's Gangsters (1975), a surreal but gritty portrayal of Birmingham's multicultural criminal underworld, and David Rudkin and Alan Clarke's Penda's Fen (1974), which explored the pagan mythology and Mercian identity of the English Midlands.
[73] Twenty five years later Atom Egoyan's Felicia's Journey (1999), adapted from the novel by William Trevor and described by the Guardian as "a small, low-key, atmospheric masterpiece"[74] used many of the same landmarks, but this time as symbols of decay, depicting "two lost souls ... subjugated to the vast inhuman industrial landscape of the city".
[81][82][83][84] Other films with scenes shot in Birmingham include Prostitute (1980), Clockwise (1986), Brassed Off (1996),[85] Sex Lives of the Potato Men (2004), Clubbed (2009), Danny and the Human Zoo (2015), The Girl with All the Gifts (2016),[86] American Assassin (2017), Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017), Jawbone (2017) and Ready Player One (2018).
The Electric on Station Street opened on 27 December 1909, and is the oldest independent working cinema in the UK; continuing to operate, despite multiple threats of closure over the years.
[90][91][92] In 1931, the Birmingham Film Society was established, with an inaugural screening on 18 January 1931 at the Hampton Cinema in Livery Street.
Established in 2003, the CSV Media Clubhouse's portfolio of courses comprises industry-standard multimedia production training.
