Early years BBC Midlands is the oldest of the BBC English Regions, having been formed (as the Midland Region) in 1927, when the new
Borough Hill high-powered radio transmitter at
Daventry became the first to replace the earlier lower-powered city-based radio stations, such as Birmingham's
5IT, and make regional and national broadcasting a technical possibility. The Daventry transmitter broadcast two channels, and as further regional transmission stations followed (starting with
London's
Brookmans Park in 1929), this quickly established the pattern for pre-war broadcasting.
5XX from Daventry (later – from 7 October 1934 – from
Droitwich) carried the
BBC National Programme originating in London, while
5GB broadcast the
BBC Regional Programme, the regional controller of which was free to schedule, as he saw fit, a mix of networked programming from London, regional programmes produced by the Birmingham base, and items taken from the output of other regions. The first director of the new Midland regional service was
Percy Edgar, who had been the announcer and Head of Programming for 5IT on its opening night in 1922 and was to be the dominant figure in Midlands broadcasting from its birth until 1945. Edgar was a strong believer in the value of local production and fought to establish the Midland Region as an independent source of programming, pioneering community-focussed initiatives such as the
Midland Parliament programme, where members of the public debated controversial issues on air with major public figures. By 1935, the BBC's Midland Region covered an area extending from
The Potteries to
Norfolk and was producing 40% of its broadcast output itself - a greater proportion even than that of
BBC Scotland. With 14 producers, it was the largest BBC department outside London.
The television era Regional radio was suspended during
World War II, but in July 1945, the
BBC Home Service was launched on a similar regional basis to the pre-war Regional Programme. The Midlands Region continued under new director Dennis Morris in the independent and innovative vein established by Edgar – pioneering on-air listener feedback with
Listeners Answer Back in 1946 and launching the longest-running and most popular programme in the history of radio –
The Archers – at the beginning of 1951. Despite these successes, two technological developments gradually started to make the old regional system untenable. The development of
FM radio made it possible to fit a far greater number of channels into the spectrum without conflict and interference, which opened the possibility of more towns and cities having their own radio stations. The Midlands Region opened the BBC's first
local radio station,
BBC Radio Leicester, in 1967, and with many more of these planned, the relevance of the regional radio station broadcasting from the Welsh border to the North Sea was immediately cast into doubt. Television was also presenting more of a threat than an opportunity. Although the Midlands had been the first area outside London to receive television coverage with the opening of the
Sutton Coldfield transmitting station in 1949, the greater cost of television production compared to radio meant that it was always going to be a more centralised service. A television studio was opened in Birmingham in 1950 and early successes included
Come Dancing in 1949 – the first regionally produced television programme to establish itself as a regular in the national network schedule - and
Midlands Today in 1964, one of the UK's first daily regional news programmes. Regional television had been established in 1957 with the launch of local evening news bulletins. Although it fared better than the struggling
BBC North or
BBC West (which was threatened for a while with being absorbed by the Midlands Region), it was clear that if BBC Midlands was too large to be truly local in the radio market, it was equally too small to be as self-sufficient across the full range of television programming as it had been in radio.
Division of the Region The result was the radical shakeup that took place following the publication of the
Broadcasting in the Seventies report in 1969. The eastern part of the region was reborn as the
Norwich-based
BBC East, with both it and the smaller remaining BBC Midlands focussing entirely on regional television (primarily regional news) and local radio. Regional radio ceased almost entirely (save for regional opt-outs on Radio 4 until 1980), and all television and radio production for national networks was transferred to the separate
BBC Birmingham network production centre. The cost of television production technology decreased throughout the 1980s and 1990s and this had several effects on the BBC in the Midlands. Smaller, more local channels became viable. The BBC's Midlands coverage had long been accused of being excessively Birmingham-centric, and in 1991, television broadcasting from the
Waltham transmitting station and the
BBC Radio Leicester,
BBC Radio Nottingham and
BBC Radio Derby radio stations were given over to a new
Nottingham-based
BBC East Midlands. A more radical move in this direction took place in 2006 when the BBC Midlands Region piloted the BBC's
Local TV initiative, with television news programmes produced for six local areas, all much smaller than the traditional TV regions, and in the case of
Birmingham and the
Black Country, even smaller than those covered by local radio stations. This programming was broadcast on
digital television and over the
internet only. The experiment came to an end as planned in September 2006 and has not been repeated since. On the 15 January 2021, BBC Radio launched a new temporary station called BBC Radio Wolverhampton. ==Studios==