BBC North

BBC North was the former name of the BBC Yorkshire and BBC Yorkshire and Lincolnshire regions of the BBC - and before 1968 had been name of the larger BBC North Region centred on Manchester.

Programmes

Based at the Broadcasting Centre in Woodhouse Lane, Leeds it was the production centre for the regional news programme "Look North" and BBC Local Radio station BBC Radio Leeds. This region was split and renamed in June 2004, with BBC Yorkshire based in new premises in St. Peter's Square Leeds, transmitting from Emley Moor (and satellite channel 976) to a population of around 4 million - and BBC Yorkshire and Lincolnshire in Queen's Court in Hull transmitting from Belmont (and satellite channel 977) to around 1.7 million.

History

The Leeds "island site" went on air on 25 March 1968 as a response to the imminent opening of Yorkshire Television, the new ITV contractor based in Leeds serving the area east of the Pennines, formerly covered by part of the Granada Television area. And in a similar manner to the impending ITV east-west Granada-Yorkshire split, the BBC divided the old North Region (based in Manchester) into BBC North-West (Manchester) and the new BBC North (Leeds).

This enabled a separate edition of "Look North" to be produced, initially from All Souls in Blackman Lane - a church hall near Woodhouse Lane - using equipment from a redundant OB scanner plus "mobile" telecine and film processing vans (the latter obtained from BBC TV News in London). Until this time, BBC viewers here had only the Manchester edition of the regional opt-out to watch, just as on ITV, Granada had been the only choice of regional news magazine programme for the entire Lancashire & Yorkshire viewing area.

Leeds was to have the third incarnation of the BBC programme called "Look North", the others continued to be produced in Newcastle, another "island site", and in Manchester, which was also the BBC "Network Production Centre" (NPC) in the north of England.

In the early seventies the programme moved into a new colour studio equipped with EMI 2001 cameras in the newly built Broadcasting Centre adjacent to Broadcasting House, in Woodhouse Lane, where it then stayed for over thirty years until the studio was demolished in 2004. [ [http://www.asperceived.com/media/041223.htm Corporation shall speak destruction unto demolition contractor] asperceived.com]

Full Circle

. [ [http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2007/05_may/31/salford.shtml Move to Salford gets green light] BBC]

It is believed that the BBC's very first regional TV studio was also in Manchester – Studio A at Dickenson Road – which it had bought from Mancunian Films in 1954. [ [http://www.itsahotun.com/history.html History of the Mancunian Film Studios] It's a hot'un]

ee also

* BBC English Regions
*

References

External links

* [http://www.bbc.co.uk/bradford/features/look_north_anniv.shtml Look North 35th anniversary.]
* [http://www.lmu.ac.uk/the_news/feb06/bbc.htm Old Broadcasting House] coord|53.805754|-1.548498|region:GB_type:landmark_scale:2000_source:wikimapia