Latest Television in the United Kingdom Stories

* On-Demand Viewing Grows by 33 Percent in Less Than a Year * Virgin Media is Second Favourite Place to Watch On-Demand, Only Behind YouTube * TV Viewing Habits to Enter "New Era" LONDON, Sept. 26, 2008 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Leading entertainment and communications company, Virgin Media (Nasdaq:VMED), today announced a massive increase in on-demand viewing, jumping from 34 million views in January to 45 million views in August on its TV platform. This is an increase of 33 percent in...

RETIREMENT means different things to different people. Take the case of former classmates Gloria Hunniford and Billy Gordon. They were classmates at Portadown College in the 1950s, Gloria being the celebrity radio-TV personality with no notion of retiring. And Billy Gordon - whose teaching career ended in 1995 with early retirement - has just gained his Master of Science degree from Queen's University. First Gloria, and why should she retire? At 68, she is hosting shows like Cash in the...

Ofcom yesterday published proposals aimed at delivering super- fast broadband to UK homes and businesses. The communications regulator said it expected the proposals to remove barriers to investment and ensure competition and consumer choice in the market. It said next-generation broadband would deliver speeds of up to 100mbps, or megabits per second, through technology including fibre optic cables rather than copper wires, which currently deliver speeds of up to 8mbps to most homes....

By Alice Wyllie Reality TV is synonymous with the dumbing down of broadcasting, but a new generation of more 'high-brow' programmes is reviving the genre - and teaching us something in the process. IN THE world of television, "reality" has become a dirty word. After the first, highly experimental, series of Big Brother in 2000, the genre rapidly declined to become the junk food of the TV world - fast, cheap and not particularly nourishing. But at a point when we thought things could not get...

By Ian Burrell INTERVIEW ALAN YENTOB Alan Yentob, the creative director of the BBC, sips champagne with superstars like Jay-Z and hangs out with rock heroes like The Edge - but he is a serious documentary maker and knows the BBC must take risks to prosper. He tells Ian Burrell his stories It is one-third of a century since Alan Yentob made Cracked Actor, his stunning Omnibus documentary on David Bowie in the wake of the "killing off" of the singer's alter-ego Ziggy Stardust, yet the man...

MY LIFE IN MEDIA Christine Bleakley, 28, is Adrian Chiles's co-presenter on The One Show, the BBC lunchtime magazine show. She was born and raised near Belfast and gave up a politics degree to take a position with BBC Northern Ireland. Performing runs in the family; her father is a drummer who has worked with Van Morrison and was managed by Louis Walsh. She is taking part in the new series of Strictly Come Dancing and has been partnered with Matthew Cutler, who won last year's show with...

By eamonn holmes I WENT through a whole range of emotions watching Channel 4's new series The Family. If you haven't seen it, it's a brilliant show and great idea - cameras in the home of a "normal" family (below) for 100 days to give us a snapshot of modern Britain. It certainly did. From the gobby stroppy teenager to the frazzled mum, from the poor dad who's screamed and glared at most of the time to the youngest son who will probably be teased for forgetting the cameras were there and...

SINGER Rosie Havel is hoping to follow in the footsteps of Katherine Jenkins and Charlotte Church by winning a part in a new opera. The classically-trained musician, 22, has fought off thousands of other girls in an X Factor-style competition that is searching for the female lead to star opposite ex-G4 star Jonathan Ansell in stage show A Night At The Opera. She appeared on ITV1's The Alan Titchmarsh Show last week - and is now down to the final four girls. The winner is being decided...

Text of report by private Nigerian newspaper The Guardian website on 18 September [Unattributed article: "The SSS Invasion of Channels TV and NAN"] The dimension which the security clampdown on Channels Television and the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) has taken in the last 24 hours is alarming and dangerous. It is unfortunate enough that sensitive news which turned out to be untrue, was inadvertently published about the nation's president. But to revoke the licence of a broadcasting station,...

Last Night's TV THE FAMILY CHANNEL 4 Axe Men FIVE "Nothing remarkable about this family at all," said John Simms introducing us to the Hugheses. "Except for one thing. They were asked if they'd be filmed round the clock for 100 days and nights to give an unprecedented portrait of family life - and they were brave enough to say yes." OK, let's just freeze-frame there a moment. Can we run a quick vocabulary check on a couple of words in that sentence? Let's take "unprecedented" first of all,...