The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a news company based in Westminster, London that makes CBeebies, and by extension the Learningblocks shows. The BBC is the world's oldest national broadcasting corporation, and the biggest in terms of employees, employing over 22,000 staff in total.
History[]
It was founded on 18 October 1922 by HM Government as the British Broadcasting Company, but due to liquidation sale[1], the company was dissolved on 31 December 1926 and all of its assets were transferred to the now called British Broadcasting Corporation five years later, on 1 January 1927. Meanwhile, on the 22nd of August 1932, experimental television broadcasting has begun. 4 years later on the 2nd of October 1936, the corporation started their BBC Television Service (that's what BBC ONE used to be called in the early years of the company) which was located in a converted wing of the Alexandra Palace in London. The service begun with the song "Television" which was sung by Adele Dixon. Unfortunately, the broadcasts have stopped on the 1st September 1939 when Germany unexpectedly declared war on Poland. The last programme to air before WWII was a Mickey Mouse cartoon titled Mickey's Gala Premiere.
7 years later, the date was the seventh of June 1946. The BBC reopened with Jasmine Bligh saying the following words:
"Good afternoon everybody. How are you? Do you remember me, Jasmine Bligh? Well, here we are after that nearly seven years ready to start again. And of course, we're terribly excited to be sure that the great days that last arrived and this station is once now ready to go on the air. Artists, cameramen, producers, teammen and all sorts of people are here ready to make this afternoon's programme."
In 1953, the first so-called "television symbol" nicknamed "the Batwings" was first aired on BBC stations. The ident was quite controversial at first and it was replaced in 1960 with the now iconic "blocks" logo and a map of Great Britain's areas like England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland where some BBC channels were located alongside the rebrand of the network to BBC TV. However, the British map was replaced with the famous globe ident in 1963. But, let's rewind a bit to 1955: the BBC's first competitor, ITV (Independent Television) has made its debut.[1] The first ITV station to be awarded a franchise was Associated-Rediffusion (1955, later called Rediffusion London). Then followed ATV (1955, Associated TeleVision LTD.), ABC (1956,Associated Broadcasting Company) and Granada Television (1956). Nowadays, ITV consists of 15 stations representing the 15 regions of the United Kingdom: Meridan, London, Westcountry, Anglia, Cymru Wales, Central, Yorkshire, Tyne Tees, Granada, Border, STV (Scottish Television), UTV (Ulster Television) and Channel. But enough blabbering about the ITV network, back to our topic: One year later after 1963 on the 20th of April the network's second channel, BBC TWO, was ready to be launched. In preperation, BBC TV has been once again rebranded to BBC ONE. However, a power failure caused by a fire at the Battersea Power Station stopped the crew from premiering the programming, so the launch date was pushed back to the next day. The first program to be shown on the channel was Playschool and in overall the first day of BBC TWO was a great success. By 1967, BBC TWO started airing programmes in colour, also at the time being the first European channel to broadcast in living colour. and two years later BBC ONE began to do it too. In 1985, the globe ident which was a mechanical model filmed in front of the cameras has been replaced with a CGI globe, thus giving the ident the nickname "the Computer Originated World". That same year, the members of the station wanted to launch a seperate channel that would air children's programming all throughout the day, so the Children's British Broadcasting Corporation (Children's BBC) was born as a seperate channel from the BBC (it would be later known as the CBBC after the 1997 rebrand). However, in 2002, the employees wanted more. They thought of a channel simular to CBBC, but for the kids aged 2-7. With that in mind, CBeebies was launched in 2002 and throughout the years entertained children around the world with timeless cartoons and programmes, including the three shows that have inspired everyone in the Learningblocks community to establish this wiki.
Today, it is one of the creators of 2 of the 5 main UK terrestrial channels: BBC ONE and BBC TWO that are alongside ITV, Channel Four and Channel Five.
Also, the BBC is one of the biggest TV companies in the whole world. It has launched many channels, including but not limited to, BBC ONE, BBC TWO, BBC THREE, BBC FOUR, CBBC, CBeebies, BBC News, and much, much more. It even has a UK-exclusive streaming service - BBC iPlayer! On CBeebies, it has aired many shows for the age demographic of children 2-7 years old, including Numberblocks, Alphablocks, and Colourblocks.