BBC Four

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BBC Four
Launched	March 2, 2002
Owned by	BBC
Audience share	0.4% (November '06, Source:[1])
Replaced	BBC Knowledge
Website	www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour
Availability
Terrestrial
Freeview	Channel 9
Satellite
Sky Digital	Channel 116
Cable
NTL:Telewest	Channel 107

BBC Four is a BBC television channel available to digital television (Freeview, satellite and cable) viewers in the UK. The successor to an earlier digital channel called BBC Knowledge, BBC Four began on 2 March 2002, its first evening's programmes being simulcast on BBC Two. BBC Four is most notable for first showing Larry David's Seinfeld follow-up, Curb your Enthusiasm, and Armando Iannucci's cutting political satire, The Thick of It.

The channel broadcasts a mixture of art and science documentaries, vintage drama (including many rare black-and-white programmes), and non-English language productions such as films from the Artificial Eye catalogue and the French thriller Spiral.

On weekdays the channel shows a 30-minute global news programme called The World, simulcast with and produced by BBC World. It screens a huge number of original documentaries such as The Century of the Self and The Trial of Henry Kissinger.

Drama has given the channel some of its most popular programmes, with The Alan Clark Diaries (2003) and Fantabulosa! (2006) being among the highest rated, with over 800,000 viewers. Another notable production was a live re-make of the 1953 science-fiction serial The Quatermass Experiment, adapted from the original scripts into a single, two-hour version, broadcast on the evening of Saturday 2 April 2005. Discounting BBC Four's previous live relays of theatrical Shakespeare productions, this was the first live made-for-television drama to be broadcast by the BBC for twenty years.

According to BARB the comedy panel game QI has the highest ratings of any show on BBC Four. [2]

At the Edinburgh International Television Festival, BBC Four won the Non-Terrestrial Channel of the Year award in 2004 and 2006.

On the Freeview digital terrestrial television platform, BBC Four is broadcast in a statistically multiplexed stream in Multiplex B that timeshares with the CBeebies channel; broadcasting from 7 pm to 4 am every day.