United Kingdom

Television

Terrestrial television in the UK is provided on five channels. Two are run by the publicly-funded BBC (BBC1 and BB2), and one each by ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5. All of these provide news coverage and entertainment, with BBC1 and ITV being the mass-market channels, whilst the others cater to more niche markets.

Freeview (Terrestrial digital TV), Cable and Satellite all provide further general entertainment channels run by the organisations above, plus the usual selection of 24 hour news (BBC News 24 and Sky News, along with CNN, Bloomberg, etc. on Satellite), MTV and other music channels, and various other forms of entertainment.

Newspapers

All major UK newspapers have an online edition, which usually provides at least the contents of that day's paper for free. Click on the links below for details. The Guardian in particular has an extremely good searchable website with the contents of the paper and additional material for several years.

The leading serious newspapers are:

• Daily Telegraph (politically right-wing)
• Guardian (politically left-wing)
• Times (politically right-wing newspaper of the ruling classes)
• Independent (politically centre-left)

The big mass-market tabloids are:

• Sun (right-wing)
• Mirror (left-wing)

Radio

Partly thanks to the limited availability of airspace, radio in the UK is less genre-based, and more geographically-based than in other countries. This means that national stations such as BBC Radio 1 and Virgin cater to a fairly wide range of popular genres. Most of the national stations listed below can be listened to over the internet - click on a link to see details of the website. In addition to these, there are a range of commercial local radio stations providing non-stop adverts and mass-market hits, and BBC local radio stations providing full up-to-the-minute coverage of jumble sales and church fetes. They're probably available on the internet as well - you can put any old rubbish on there nowadays.

The national stations likely to be of interest are:

• BBC Radio 1. Current-ish pop during day, giving over to good shows covering various popular genres during the night.
• BBC Radio 2. Mostly light-weight pop and MOR music from the last 20 years or so.
• BBC Radio 3. Serious classical music. Very elitist reputation.
• BBC Radio 4. News, plays, magazine shows and other talk radio.
• Virgin Radio. Current and classic pop. Nothing to alarm the horses, guaranteed.