BBC Asian Network is a British radio station serving those originating from and around the Indian subcontinent. The music and news comes out of the main urban areas where there are significant communities with these backgrounds. The station has production centres in Birmingham, Leicester and London (Television Centre & Western House). Its 'parent' station is BBC Radio 2 at Western House and it is part of the BBC Audio and Music division.
BBC Asian Network broadcasts mainly in English, but also have programmes in five south Asian languages – Hindi/Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, Gujarati and the Mirpuri dialect of the Potwari language. Despite the name, Asian Network serves only those from India and the surrounding region; with the vast majority of Asia not catered for. The station's output consists largely of music and talk programmes, although there is a daily documentary series Asian Network Reports and a now-discontinued daily soap opera Silver Street. Over mid-2009, the Asian network provided coverage at melas across the UK as part of the 'Summer Of Melas'.
In March 2010 the station, which has the highest per-listener budget of all UK radio stations, was threatened with closure, along with BBC 6 Music. A year later, following consultation the BBC Trust announced it was reconsidering its plan to close the station in favour of reducing its budget, although it stressed no final decision had been made.
Read more about BBC Asian Network: Programmes and Presenters
Famous quotes containing the words bbc, asian and/or network:
“To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer.”
—Anonymous. quoted in “Quote Unquote,” Feb. 22, 1982, BBC Radio 4.
“Exploitation and oppression is not a matter of race. It is the system, the apparatus of world-wide brigandage called imperialism, which made the Powers behave the way they did. I have no illusions on this score, nor do I believe that any Asian nation or African nation, in the same state of dominance, and with the same system of colonial profit-amassing and plunder, would have behaved otherwise.”
—Han Suyin (b. 1917)
“How have I been able to live so long outside Nature without identifying myself with it? Everything lives, moves, everything corresponds; the magnetic rays, emanating either from myself or from others, cross the limitless chain of created things unimpeded; it is a transparent network that covers the world, and its slender threads communicate themselves by degrees to the planets and stars. Captive now upon earth, I commune with the chorus of the stars who share in my joys and sorrows.”
—Gérard De Nerval (1808–1855)