The media, sports and economics of Great Britain

Media of the Great Britain

There are several different types of media in the United Kingdom: television, radio, newspapers,
magazines and websites. The country also has a strong music industry. The United Kingdom has a diverse
range of providers, the most prominent being the publicly-owned public service broadcaster, the British
Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). The BBC's largest competitors are ITV plc, which operates 13 of the 15
regional television broadcasters that make up the ITV Network, and American global media
conglomerate Comcast, which owns the broadcaster Sky Ltd. Regional media is covered by local radio,
television and print newspapers. Trinity Mirror operates 240 local and regional newspapers, as well as national
newspapers such as the Daily Mirror and the Sunday Mirror.

National media centres and organisations

London
London dominates the media sector in the United Kingdom as national newspapers, television and
radio networks are largely based there. Notable centres include Fleet Street and BBC Broadcasting House.
Specialist local paper City A.M. is a free, business-focused newspaper published in print Monday to
Friday. It is typically available from around 6 am at London commuter stations and is handed out at key points
in the City, Canary Wharf and other central London locations.

Greater Manchester
Greater Manchester is also a significant national media hub. Notable centres include MediaCityUK a
200-acre (80ha) media production facility in Salford and Trafford.
The Guardian national newspaper was founded in Manchester in 1821, and was known as
the Manchester Guardian until 1959. In the 1950s, coinciding with the growth in television, the Granada
Television franchise was set up by Sidney Bernstein. Consequently, the Granada Studios were the first
purpose-built television studios in the United Kingdom. The franchise produced television programmes such
as Coronation Street and the Up Series. The BBC currently has two of its six major business divisions based
here BBC North Group that comprises a number of important departments including BBC Breakfast, BBC
Children's, BBC Sport, BBC Radio 5 and BBC North West. The other division is BBC Future Media. In
addition ITV has two major divisions of its business based here ITV Studios responsible for UK and
international network production and ITV Granada its regional service provider. The University of Salford also
has a media campus and research center based at media city.[5]
The United Kingdom is known for its large music industry, along with its new and upcoming artists.
In the UK, media is spread through the forms of TV, newspapers, magazines, websites, and radio.
The Daily Mirror was founded in 1903.[6] The Sunday Mirror, the sister paper to the Daily Mirror, was
started in 1915.[7]

Sport in the Great Britain

Sport in the United Kingdom plays an important role in British culture. The United Kingdom has
given birth to a range of major international sports including: association
football, rugby (both unionand league), cricket, netball, darts, golf, tennis, table
tennis, badminton, squash, croquet, fives, bowls, modern rowing,[1] hockey, boxing, water
polo, snooker, billiards, and curling.
This has meant that in the infancy of many sports, England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland formed
among the earliest separate governing bodies, national teams and domestic league competitions.
After 1922 some sports formed separate bodies for Northern Ireland though some continued to be organised on
an all-Ireland basis.
In a small number of sports, these teams are supplemented by high-profile events featuring a
combined team representing one or more nations.
 For information on sports in a British home nation you may wish, therefore, to consider reading
the Sport in England, Sport in Scotland, Sport in Wales or Sport in Northern Ireland articles, or the Sport in
Ireland article where appropriate.
Overall, association football attracts the most viewers and money though the nation is notable for the
diversity of its sporting interests, especially at the elite level. Major individual sports
include athletics, golf, cycling, motorsport, and horse racing. Tennis is the highest profile sport for the two
weeks of the Wimbledon Championships, but otherwise struggles to hold its own in the country of its
birth. Snookerand Darts, too, enjoy period profile boosts in line with the holding of their largest events. Many
other sports are also played and followed to a lesser degree. There is much debate over which sport has the
most active participants with swimming, athletics, cycling all found to have wider active participation than
association football in the 2010 Sport England Active People survey.
Cricket
The Ashes urn, competed for between Australia and England in cricket
Cricket had become well-established among the English upper class in the 18th century, and was
a major factor in sports competition among the public schools. Army units around the Empire had time on
their hands, and encouraged the locals to learn cricket so they could have some entertaining competition.
Most of the Empire embraced cricket, with the exception of Canada.[4] Cricket test matches
(international) began by the 1870s; the most famous is that between Australia and Britain for "The
Ashes."

Sports culture
British Prime Minister John Major was the political leader most closely identified with promotion of sports. In
1995 he argued:
We invented the majority of the world's great sports.... 19th century Britain was the cradle of a leisure
revolution every bit as significant as the agricultural and industrial revolutions we launched in the
century before.[7]
The British showed a more profound interest in sports, and in greater variety, than any rival. This was
chiefly due to the development of the railway network in the UK before other nations. Allowing for
national newspapers, and travel around the country far earlier than in other places. They gave pride of
place to such moral issues as sportsmanship and fair play. [8] Cricket became symbolic of the Imperial spirit
throughout the Empire. Football proved highly attractive to the urban working classes, which introduced
the rowdy spectator to the sports world. In some sports, there was significant controversy in the fight for
amateur purity especially in rugby and rowing. New games became popular almost overnight, including
golf, lawn tennis, cycling and hockey. Women were much more likely to enter these sports than the old
established ones. The aristocracy and landed gentry, with their ironclad control over land rights,
dominated hunting, shooting, fishing and horse racing. [9][10] Many modern Olympic sports trace their roots
back to Britain.

Four sports in the United Kingdom operate high-profile professional leagues. Football is the
most popular sport and is played from August to May. Rugby league is traditionally a winter
sport, but since the late 1990s the elite competition has been played in the summer to minimise
competition for attention with football. Rugby union is also a winter sport. Cricket is played in the
Summer, from April to September. There is also a professional Ice Hockey league operating
in Great Britain called the Elite Ice Hockey League.
The modern global game of football evolved out of traditional football games played in England in the
19th century and today is the highest profile sport in the United Kingdom by a very wide margin. This has
been the case for generations, but the gap is widely perceived to have increased since the early 1990s, and
football's dominance is often seen as a threat to other sports. Each of the four countries in the UK organises its
own football league; there are however a few teams who play in another country.
The only major national team competition won by a Home Nation is the 1966 World Cup, which England
hosted and won, though clubs in both the Scottish and English domestic leagues have had success in European
club competitions, most notably the UEFA Champions League or its predecessor the European Cup.
Glasgow's Celtic won the 1966-67 European Cup, becoming the first British team to do so, with a team
composed entirely of players born and raised within the local area around the club's stadium, while the
following year, Manchester United became the first English club to win the competition, 10 years after the
team had been the victim of a notorious air disaster in Munich while playing in the same
competition. Liverpool, with 5 wins, is the most successful English, and British, team in European football,
while the competition has also been won by Manchester United 3 times in total, Nottingham Foresttwice,
and Aston Villa, from Birmingham and Chelsea from London once each.
Rugby Football
Like association football, rugby union and rugby league both developed from traditional British
football games in the 19th century. Rugby football was codified in 1871. Dissatisfaction with the governance
of the sport led, in 1895, to a number of prominent clubs establishing what would become rugby league. The
estranged clubs, based in mainly working class industrial regions of northern England, had wished to be
allowed to compensate their players for missing work to play matches but they had been opposed by those
clubs that were predominantly middle class and often based in the south of the country. Subsequently, rugby
league developed somewhat different rules. For much of the 20th century there was considerable antagonism
towards rugby league from rugby union. One Member of Parliament described it as "one of the longest (and
daftest) grievances in history" with anyone over the age of 18 associated with rugby league being banned
forever from rugby union.[20] This antagonism has abated since 1995 when rugby union's international
governing body, now known as World Rugby, "opened" rugby union to professionalism.
Basketball
Basketball is a minor sport in the United Kingdom. The top level league is the British Basketball
League with the English Basketball League and Scottish Basketball League below them. While following an
American franchise format rather than using promotion and relegation like most European leagues, the
majority of recent additions have come from the English league. As with football, the home nations teams
were encouraged to work together for the Olympics, while British international basketball teams have not
achieved any major successes since then, FIBA officials stated that if they re-entered the European competition
after the Olympics as individual nations, they will be treated as unranked newcomers. After meeting with
FIBA officials, Basketball Wales voted against making the merger permanent citing amongst other things, the
lack of opportunity for Welsh players within a United Kingdom framework (no players in either the men's or
women's Olympic squad were Welsh) and for the advancement of the game domestically (The BBL announced
intentions to expand into several United Kingdom cities but neither Cardiff nor Swansea had been suggested).
Boxing
The United Kingdom played a key role in the evolution of modern boxing, with the codification of the
rules of the sport known as the Queensberry Rules, named after John Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry in
1867.[41]Britain's first heavyweight world champion Bob Fitzsimmons made boxing history as the sport's first
three-division world champion. Some of the best contemporary British boxers included; super-middleweight
champion Joe Calzaghe, featherweight champion Naseem Hamed, and heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis.
Welshman Calzaghe's display against Jeff Lacy in 2006 prompted Lacy's trainer to state "I have never seen a
better performance than that in the world."

Great Britain at the Olympics

The United Kingdom competes in the Olympics as Great Britain during Olympic competition.
The British Olympic Association is responsible for the promotion of the Olympic Movement within the United
Kingdom and for the selection, leadership and management of Great Britain and Northern Ireland at every
Olympic accredited event. By longstanding practice, athletes of Northern Ireland have the option of being part
of either the Great Britain or Ireland teams.[50]
After the 2004 Summer Olympics Great Britain was third in the all-time Summer Olympic medal
count(ranked by gold medals), although the majority of the medals are accounted for by some very large tallies
in the first few Olympic Games. British medal tallies for much of the post-war period were generally
considered disappointing, but the 2000 Summer Olympics marked an upturn and this was sustained at the 2004
Summer Olympics when Great Britain finished tenth in the medal table and the 2008 where it finished fourth
behind only China, the US and Russia. This was seen as a great success, and there was a victory parade
through the streets of London. This trend continued in the 2012 Games in London. Great Britain again finished
fourth in the total medal table (behind the US, China and Russia), but was third in the gold medal count behind
the US and China. The sports in which the British team has won most medals in recent Summer Olympics
include rowing, sailing, cycling and athletics. In addition to the 2012 Summer Olympics, London hosted the
Games in 1908 and 1948.
Winter sports only play a minor role in British sporting life because the winters are not cold enough
for them to be practised out of doors very much. Great Britain is not a leading nation at the  Winter Olympics,
but has had a few successes in sports such as figure skating, curling and bob skeleton. A number of athletes
represented Great Britain in the freestyle skiing discipline when it debuted at the 2014 Winter Olympics.
[51]
 Snowboarder Jenny Jones made history at those Games as the first British competitor to win a medal in an
event on snow when she took a bronze in the slopestyle competition

Economy of the Great Britain

The economy of the United Kingdom is highly developed and market-orientated.[27][28] It is
the fifth-largest national economy in the world measured by nominal gross domestic
product(GDP), ninth-largest by purchasing power parity (PPP), and twenty second-largest by GDP per
capita, comprising 3.5% of world GDP.[29]
In 2016, the UK was the tenth-largest goods exporter in the world and the fifth-largest goods
importer. It also had the second-largest inward foreign direct investment,[30] and the third-
largest outward foreign direct investment.[31] The UK is one of the most globalisedeconomies,[32] and it is
composed of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.[b]
The service sector dominates, contributing around 80% of GDP; [33] the financial services
industry is particularly important, and London is the world's largest financial centre.[34] Britain's aerospace
industry is the second-largest national aerospace industry. [35] Its pharmaceutical industry, the tenth-largest
in the world,[36] plays an important role in the economy. Of the world's 500 largest companies, 26 are
headquartered in the UK. [37] The economy is boosted by North Sea oil and gas production; its reserves
were estimated at 2.8 billion barrels in 2016,[38] although it has been a net importer of oil since 2005.
[39]
 There are significant regional variations in prosperity, with South East England and North East
Scotland being the richest areas per capita. The size of London's economy makes it the largest city by
GDP in Europe.[40]
In the 18th century the UK was the first country to industrialise,[41][42][43] and during the 19th century
it had a dominant role in the global economy, [44] accounting for 9.1% of the world's GDP in 1870.
[45]
 The Second Industrial Revolution was also taking place rapidly in the United States and the German
Empire; this presented an increasing economic challenge for the UK. The costs of fighting World
War I and World War II further weakened the UK's relative position. In the 21st century, however, the
UK remains a great power with the ability to project power and influence around the world.
Government involvement is primarily exercised by Her Majesty's Treasury, headed by
the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. Since
1979 management of the economy has followed a broadly laissez-faireapproach.
 The Bank of England is the UK's central bank, and since 1997 its Monetary Policy
Committee has been responsible for setting interest rates, quantitative easing, and forward guidance.
The currency of the UK is the pound sterling, which is the world's fourth-largest reserve
currency after the United States Dollar, the Euro and the Japanese Yen, and is also one of the 10 most-
valued currencies in the world.
The UK is a member of the Commonwealth, the European Union (Currently negotiating
withdrawal), the G7, the G20, the International Monetary Fund, the Organisation for Security and Co-
operation in Europe, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, Asian Infrastructure Investment
Bank and the United Nations.