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BBC East is one of BBC's English Regions covering Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire and parts of Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire (including the City of Milton Keynes). It is headquartered in The Forum, Norwich since 2003. It was also separated into two areas, one with the East area covering mostly in Norfolk, Suffolk & Essex, and another from the West area which covers from Cambridge, serving mostly Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire and the three counties.
Former programmes include Weekend, East on Two, Matter of Fact and the football magazine show Late Kick Off (produced by the independent production company Kevin Piper Media).
On weekdays, all six stations open transmission at 4am with a shared regional early morning show before carrying local programming between 6am and 10pm. There is also a shared regional programme broadcast across the stations from 10pm to 1am on weeknights, except for BBC Essex who has a stand-alone schedule, and other shared programmes at weekends.
The opening of the Tacolneston transmitting station enabled programmes to be broadcast from Norwich purely for East Anglia on the VHF edition of the Home Service, and regular broadcasts from St Catherine's Close began on Tuesday 5 February 1957. Daily news bulletins for East Anglia began on Monday 10 March 1958, on VHF from the Norwich studios, under the supervision of Richard Robinson.
The launch of regional BBC television news in September 1957 initially saw East Anglia being covered by the service for London and the South East, but in June 1959, with the forthcoming launch of Anglia Television in mind, the Corporation gave the go-ahead to create a TV operation in Norwich with the purpose of transmitting a bespoke ten-minute news bulletin for the region each weekday. Paul Hayes, X, 5 October 2024 The BBC's general policy was to ensure a regional TV news service was launched ahead of the regional ITV franchise.
The first TV news bulletin for the east from St Catherine's Close was broadcast at 6.05pm on 5 October 1959, nearly four weeks ahead of the launch of Anglia. In September 1962, the programme was extended to 20 minutes in length and renamed East Anglia at Six, before becoming East at Six Ten due to a timeslot change the following year. In September 1964, another change of timeslot saw it become Look East, a title the programme still goes under today.
The Norwich-based operation was initially a satellite of the larger BBC Midland region, based in Birmingham. East Anglia was given greater autonomy within the BBC in 1969 after the Broadcasting in the Seventies report recommended the large Midlands and East Anglia region should be split into two, enabling the region to produce and broadcast more of its own regional programming.
During 1997, an opt-out service (originally titled Close Up) was introduced to provide local bulletins for Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire, Peterborough and Milton Keynes. This service provided separate teatime and late bulletins Monday to Friday in an area referred to on EPGs as BBC East (West) rather than BBC East (East) which is the sub-region for Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex. The last of these bulletins was broadcast on Friday 16 December 2022, as a result of the BBC restructuring of regional programming leading to budget cutbacks.
1980, regional radio programming was provided by an East Anglia opt-out on BBC Radio 4, consisting largely of daytime news bulletins and a weekday breakfast show, Roundabout East Anglia. The first BBC Local Radio station in the region, Radio Norfolk, was opened on 11 September 1980 and followed by the rollout of stations in Cambridgeshire (1 May 1982), Northamptonshire (16 June 1982), the Three Counties of Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire & Buckinghamshire (24 June 1985), Essex (5 November 1986) and Suffolk (12 April 1990).
BBC East also has local radio studios and newsrooms in Cambridge, Chelmsford, Northampton, Ipswich, and Dunstable.
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