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This chapter offers an introduction and reconsideration of regional broadcasting in Britain. As part of this effort, it examines an important, but overlooked, aspect of broadcasting history and regional broadcasting during the Second World War. For, although the BBC suspended its regional networks during the war, regional programmes continued to be made and broadcasted on the home service and forces programme, which is a completely ignored part of the broadcasting history. Another example of English disregard for the Scots, Welsh and Irish, wartime regional broadcasting saw the BBC, for the first time, project a truly multi-national image of Britain as regional productions had to be carried by the one of the two national networks.

This chapter focuses on the BBC in Northern Ireland. Broadcasting in Northern Ireland was quite distinct from broadcasting in Scotland or Wales. The sectarian divide between Catholic and Protestant inevitably dominated BBC policy in Northern Ireland. Yet, despite the neutrality with which Northern Irish broadcasters sought to conduct themselves, the BBC in Northern Ireland strove to forge an ‘Ulster’ identity for the region. ‘Ulster’ represented an organic, primeval community, based on geography and history. Although the whole purpose of ‘Ulster’ identity was to represent the differences between Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State in a way that minimized the role of religion, it was, de facto, a Protestant identity. In addition to this state-building function, the BBC in Northern Ireland represented a vital link to the rest of the Britain. Small and peripheral, Northern Ireland needed the BBC to reaffirm its Britishness as well as its regional identity. Indeed, the BBC itself became one of those institutions through which the Northern Irish Protestants could recognize their British national identity.

Chapter 2 examines the history and development of regional broadcasting in the United Kingdom, from the beginnings of the BBC in the 1920s to the arrival of Channel Four in 1982, paying particular attention to the regional organisation of the ITV network and the development of regional broadcasting at the BBC. This chapter concludes with a case study of one aspect of regional broadcasting in the 1960s-70s: the structure and organisation of regional television in the Midlands, explored through the example of the Victoria Theatre Company in Stoke-on-Trent which produced TV dramas for four different Midlands TV companies from 1965-74.

This chapter presents an introduction on the BBC's treatment of two national, integrative, ‘British’ institutions, the empire and the monarchy. It demonstrates the extent to which the BBC championed the British imperial ideal in its programmes, and constructed the monarchy as a guarantor of a peculiarly British individualism, freedom and pluralism. The BBC's focus on empire and monarchy to represent British national identity was neither innovative nor risky; the BBC did not try to change fundamental ideas of what it meant to be British, but it did help to refashion these traditional symbols of Britishness during a period of significant social and political change. Furthermore, this chapter turns to the work of the BBC in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and examines the tensions between the BBC's efforts to project a uniform Britishness and its commitment to local and regional broadcasting in these areas.