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 March 2 2002 – its first evening's programmes being simulcast on BBC Two.

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 its most popular programmes, with The Alan Clark Diaries (2003) and Fantabulosa (2006) being the highest rated, with over 800,000 viewers. A notable recent 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.

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

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.

Controllers of BBC Four

• 2002–2004: Roly Keating
• 2004–present: Janice Hadlow

External links

• BBC Four website

BBC television channels in the United Kingdom | 2002 establishments

BBC Four