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The BBC “is a very British success story”, new chair Samir Shah said in Leeds, England on Tuesday in his first public speech, in which he outlined his vision for the future of U.K. public service broadcasting and his priorities for the BBC.

But amid the rise of streaming, the exec also warned: “The fight is on.” He continued: “Action is needed now to future-proof public service broadcasters, otherwise our very British success story will be part of our halcyon past.”

“Look at it all, it’s fantastic, isn’t it? Is this a good thing? Of course, it is,” Shah began. “I daresay many of you have a few subscriptions. I certainly do. From Slow Horses to Stranger Things, from Champions League football to Test Match cricket… My leisure time has been infinitely enriched by the options now available to me.”

Shah said of PSBs: “Of course, we...

Edison Research announces the Top 25 Podcasts in the UK based on reach for Q2 2024 among weekly podcast listeners age 15+.

Making their debuts in the Top 25: The Overlap with Gary Neville climbed to the #24 spot following the launch of its new season in late March. The Rest is Entertainment quickly gained momentum after its late November 2023 launch, securing the #17 spot. Meanwhile, Just One Thing - with Michael Mosley earned the #20 spot, with the unfinished TV version of the series set to be released by the BBC following the passing of host Michael Mosley. Call Her Daddy continues to rise in popularity, reaching the #22 spot, reflecting Alex Cooper's growing influence beyond the U.S.

Data from Edison Podcast Metrics is available in both the UK and the U.S. For more information on how to become a subscriber to the full datasets, please contact info@edisonresearch.com.

Edison Podcast Metrics...

Martin Scorsese’s deep love of film shines through in his exploration of the marvelous movies by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. As directors with a true artist’s eye, Powell and Pressburger crafted some of Britain’s most imaginative and meaningful pictures. Through their company, The Archers, they strove to elevate cinema as an expressive art.

In Made in England, Scorsese brings their extraordinary body of work to new viewers. With infectious passion, he shares insights into their techniques and themes—and how deeply their films enriched his own career. At the documentary’s heart, of course, are illuminating clips and discussions that bring Powell and Pressburger’s brilliance alive. From The Red Shoes to Black Narcissus, their images leave a lasting imprint.

What makes this documentary so wonderful is Scorsese’s obvious joy in celebration. He treats cinema not as formula but as expressions of life. With Made in England,...

Edison Research announces the Top 25 Podcasts in the UK based on reach for Q1 2024 among weekly podcast listeners age 15+.

Remaining in the Top Three from Q4 2023 to Q1 2024 are The Joe Rogan Experience, The Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett, and Sh**ged Married Annoyed.

New to the Top Five is TikToker-turned-podcaster Gk Barry’s Saving Grace. The show enjoyed success with a sold-out tour in February, with Barry also getting a feature in January’s Cosmopolitan. ShxtsNGigs enters the Top Ten for the first time. The show is currently in the middle of a U.S. tour.

Making their debut in the Top 25, The Chunkz & Filly Show has quickly risen to #10 following the launch of their podcast in October 2023. The Fellas secures the #16 spot. Fellas Studios continues to expand their offerings, including the recent launch of a pioneering paid streaming service called Fellas Loaded.

What's Good with Miniminter and Randolph earns the #23 spot,...

While filmmaking duo Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger — aka The Archers — may be best known for their extravagant color films like “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp,” “A Matter of Life and Death,” “Black Narcissus,” and “The Red Shoes,” their underseen black-and-white, post-wwii potboiler “The Small Back Room” may be their most daring.

Following a wartime weapons expert whose experiences studying and disarming bombs have led to injuries and a nasty drinking habit, the film came at a time when audiences were ready to look past the fighting, so it didn’t perform well at the box office. Now, thanks to Rialto Pictures, the film is set to hit theaters once again on June 28 with a 4K restoration. Watch the new trailer, an IndieWire exclusive, below.

The restoration, handled by The Film Foundation and the BFI National archives, in association with StudioCanal, was also conducted with the help of...

Legendary film editor Thelma Schoonmaker is honoring the films of filmmaking duo Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger with an upcoming retrospective at MoMA.

Titled “Cinema Unbound: The Creative Worlds of Powell and Pressburger,” the screening series is presented in collaboration with the BFI and will take place from June 21 to July 31. The program includes more than 50 films — many of which are new restorations — and was curated by conservation experts, archivists, and curators at the BFI National Archive.

Oscar-winning editor Schoonmaker will open the series on June 21 with an introduction to the new digital restoration of “Black Narcissus” (1947). Schoonmaker was married to British director Powell from 1984 until his death in 1990.

Powell and Pressburger’s cultural legacy is most notably recognized in their film “The Red Shoes” (1948), which has inspired sequences in films such as Luca Guadagnino’s “Challengers,” Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan,” and Martin Scorsese’s “Raging Bull,” which Schoonmaker edited.

Edison Research is proud to announce the Top 25 Podcasts in the UK for Q4 2023.

The Joe Rogan Experience, The Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett, and Sh**ged Married Annoyed are the top three podcasts in the UK based on total weekly audience reach among weekly podcast listeners age 15+ for Q4 2023. The complete list of twenty-five is below.

Joe Rogan and Steven Bartlett remain in the top two spots for the third survey period in a row. Sh**ged Married Annoyed takes the #3 spot this quarter which was previously held by That Peter Crouch Podcast in Q3 2023, now ranked #6.

The Rest Is Football makes its Top 10 debut at #8. Uncanny, which debuted its third season in late September, makes the Top 25 for the first time at #11.

Desert Island Discs moves to #15 after a change to the BBC’s commercial division last year. With the announcement of a UK tour drama surrounding a viral episode,...

In the narrator’s seat for David Hinton’s eloquent documentary on the filmmaking duo Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, Martin Scorsese is the ultimate fan. Tracing his all-around movie obsession to his first viewing of the U.K.-based pair’s 1948 tour de force, The Red Shoes, he leads us through a dozen of their features and a few of Powell’s solo efforts, connecting key sequences to memorable scenes in his own work. But beyond its clear explication of the films’ imaginative and technical power, Made in England is also a testament to mentorship and friendship; Scorsese was close to Powell, who died in 1990, for the last decade and a half of the British director’s life, and Powell married Scorsese’s longtime editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, in 1984.

The documentary ignites a longing to see the movies, whether for the first time or the umpteenth (many are available on...

It’s not often that a doc about the transformative power of cinema will deliberately use bad clips of the movies it’s talking about, but that’s part of the point of this insightful, sprawling film, corralled by director David Hinton. Though the masterpieces made by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger at the height of their big-screen, Technicolor powers were visually impeccable, their subversive emotional power could still pack a punch through a 16-inch TV screen, even from the most scratched, butchered, and washed-out black-and-white prints.

This is, famously, how the young Martin Scorsese discovered The Archers (as the pairing styled themselves), and in this lengthy discourse he gets to position them both as an influence on his own movies and as unsung heroes in the history of world cinema. Now, there are plenty of people who will immediately say that Powell and Pressburger have actually been sung quite a bit,...

Martin Scorsese will narrate and present Made In England: The Films Of Powell And Pressburger, a documentary about the legendary filmmaking duo. It’s out in May.

In the 1940s and early 50s, filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger made some of the best and most important films to emerge from the UK. Among their most admired works are The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp (1943), Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948).

Whether they were wartime romances, comedies or dramas with a hint of the fantastical, the duo’s films were beautifully shot uniquely their own, largely because – unusually – they wrote, directed and produced their movies, with almost no studio interference, under their company banner, The Archers.

Narrated by Martin Scorsese, Made In England: The Films Of Powell And Pressburger will explore the pair’s singular life and work, with the feature-length documentary running to a generous 129 minutes. Fittingly, given...

In 2023 (January to November) there were over 2 billion plays of radio, music and podcasts on BBC Sounds, as listeners continue to enjoy a wide range of audio content from across the BBC.

Podcast listening saw an uplift of 34% on BBC Sounds compared to the same period last year. New and popular returning podcast titles helped drive listeners to BBC Sounds with something for everyone and a wide range of topics from history, comedy, current affairs, drama and true crime.

Podcasts Detail The top ten most popular podcasts of 2023 in the UK

(based on BBC Sounds plays between January and November)

Newscast Just One Thing – with Michael Mosley You’re Dead To Me Uncanny Limelight Gangster: The Story Of John Palmer Sliced Bread I’m Not a Monster – The Shamima Begum Story Lady Killers with Lucy Worsley Americast

Jonathan Wall, Director of BBC Sounds said: “It’s fantastic to see the...

British actor Ian Pepperell has died after long illness aged 53, the BBC has announced.

Pepperell appeared in TV soap EastEnders, but was best known for playing hotelier Roy Tucker in the BBC’s longrunning radio drama The Archers.

The show’s editor, Jeremy Howe, said:

“He loved being part of an ensemble, relished the camaraderie and gossip of the green room, and had a seemingly effortlessly fine tuned vocal technique.

“Like all the very best radio actors he could think on his feet and change the way he played a scene in the blink of an eye.

“Thanks to Ian’s brilliance, he created in Roy a character who managed to face in two directions simultaneously in almost every scene he played. He captured Roy as both genial and anxious, funny and sad, easy-going and permanently stressed – a man who could hold down with ease a top job, yet who...

In 2014 and 2015, Vertigo published Si Spencer’s eight-issue graphic novel Bodies, a mind-bending mystery about four police officers from different historical eras who discover the same corpse in the same London location, decades apart. Featuring detectives from the present day, the 1940s, the 1890s and 2053, it’s a complex conspiracy thriller about a very dark future. Originally illustrated by four artists – Dean Ormston, Phil Winslade, Meghan Hetrick and Tula Lotay – each era had its own distinct feel and look.

Spencer, who had also written on other Vertigo titles including Judge Dredd and Books of Magick: Life During Wartime, sadly passed away in February 2021, meaning he wasn’t able to see Paul Tomalin’s eight-part Netflix series adapted from his work. It’s out now, with a sprawling cast of characters including Boiling Point and This Is England’s Stephen Graham, several established actors and a handful of newcomers. Here’s more about them.

The 1980s was a good decade for British soaps. New ones were popping up all over the shop – first Channel 4 launched Brookside in 1982, then the BBC began broadcasting EastEnders in 1985 – but in 1988 an altogether different kind of soap arrived: Park Avenue, the world’s first teletext soap.

For the uninitiated (aka people under 30), teletext was kind of like the internet for your TV in the eighties and nineties, accessed via your remote control, with hundreds of pages of text and rudimentary graphics detailing the latest news, weather, TV listings, and sports results. You could even play games and book a cheap package holiday. And between 1988 and 1992, thanks to Park Avenue, you could also read a soap opera.

Yes, that’s right – who needs moving pictures anyway? Those TV soaps were just showing off, and don’t get us started on radio soap The Archers, with all its high-falutin’ sound effects.

“Fleabag” star Angus Imrie and “Am I Being Unreasonable?” actor Juliet Cowan have joined the cast of the provocatively-titled short film “Does Your Condom Make You Fat?”

Described as an “awkward” comedy-drama, the film explores a world in which men can become pregnant. The script is from Danielle Papamichael.

Imrie plays Owen, a happy-go-lucky lad, whose reliance on the Zap App for effective contraception is disrupted when his phone battery dies. This realization triggers his fears of an unwanted pregnancy, amplified by his date’s early unannounced departure. Throughout the film, Owen grapples with a rollercoaster of emotions as he confronts the unintended consequences of his actions.

Imrie’s other credits include “The Crown,” in which he played a young Prince Edward, as well as “Star Trek: Prodigy” and “The Archers.” Meanwhile, Cowan recently starred in “The Power,” “Flatshare” and “Everything I Know About Love.”

Other cast members include BAFTA-nominated...

Rylan Clark has said that he can count his celebrity friends “on one hand”.

Appearing on Joe Lycett’s live Channel 4 show Late Night Lycett on Friday (7 April), Clark was asked by comedian Lycett to name his famous friends.

Admitting that he could “count them on one hand”, Clark listed Ruth Langsford and Eamonn Holmes, as well as Claire Richards from Steps.

“They’re my little nook,” he said.

Lycett responded by joking that his celebrity fans could be counted on 10 fingers, one for each of the 10 members of the band Blazin’ Squad. To demonstrate this, he held up a prop hand with five extra fingers stuck onto the palm.

Clark has been vocal in the past about his love of Langsford and Holmes, who he worked with on This Morning.

In his memoir Ten: The Decade That Changed My Future, published last year, the presenter said that a...

Rylan Clark has said that he can count his celebrity friends “on one hand”.

Appearing on Joe Lycett’s live Channel 4 show Late Night Lycett on Friday (7 April), Clark was asked by comedian Lycett to name his famous friends.

Admitting that he could “count them on one hand”, Clark listed Ruth Langsford and Eamonn Holmes, as well as Claire Richards from Steps.

“They’re my little nook,” he said.

Lycett responded by joking that his celebrity fans could be counted on 10 fingers, one for each of the 10 members of the band Blazin’ Squad. To demonstrate this, he held up a prop hand with five extra fingers stuck onto the palm.

Clark has been vocal in the past about his love of Langsford and Holmes, who he worked with on This Morning.

In his memoir Ten: The Decade That Changed My Future, published last year, the presenter said that a...

Rylan Clark will appear in a special Eurovision-themed episode of Radio 4 soap The Archers.

In an episode of the long-running radio show, Clark will stop by the fictional village of Ambridge on his way to Liverpool to judge the village’s Eurovision Variety Show.

The former X Factor star is part of this year’s Eurovision presenting team, and will be commentating on the semi-final shows alongside Scott Mills.

Clark said: “I’m looking forward to getting my wellies on and checking out what Eurovision excitement Ambridge’s residents have to offer as I pop into the iconic Archers.

“I’ve seen some drama throughout my time but nothing compares to what’s about to unfold in Ambridge.”

The episode will air on Friday 12 May, ahead of the Eurovision final in Liverpool on Saturday 13 May.

The Archers editor Jeremy Howe said: “We’re delighted to have Rylan stop over in...