London, United Kingdom - November 11, 2012, London, United Kingdom - George Entwistle, director-general of the BBC, announced that he decided to step down from his post.
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Mr. Entwistle was appointed director-general of the BBC in July this years. He was appointed Director of BBC Vision in April 2011. A member of the BBC's Executive Board, the Director, Vision, he is responsible for BBC One, BBC Two, BBC Three, BBC Four, BBC One HD, BBC HD, BBC Films, Vision Productions and has editorial oversight for UKTV. A trustee of Comic Relief, he was also made a non-Executive Director of the BBC Worldwide Board in June 2012. Programmes broadcast under his tenure include Call The Midwife, Frozen Planet, The Voice UK, Shakespeare Unlocked, The London Season, The Men Who Made Us Fat, Birdsong, Britain in a Day, and Mrs Brown’s Boys.
Before this, Mr. Entwistle was the BBC's Controller of Knowledge Commissioning and the Controller of Editorial Standards for BBC Vision. He was also the Advisory Chair of the Edinburgh International TV Festival 2011. As Controller of Knowledge Commissioning, since January 2008, Mr. Entwistle was responsible for delivering the Knowledge and Learning strategies across the BBC, on TV and on the web, from landmark series to documentaries and online products; and across specialisms including arts, history, natural history, business, science, religion, consumer journalism and contemporary factual.
He led BBC Vision's Knowledge, Learning and Multiplatform commissioning teams, who commission programmes and multiplatform content from Vision Productions and the independent sector – which together produce more than 1,600 hours of TV output a year.
During his time at BBC Knowledge, Mr. Entwistle championed high profile pan-channel and pan-BBC seasons, including in 2010: World Of Wonder, the BBC's year of science programming which increased Science audience reach by over four million people on the previous year; the Opera season across BBC Two, BBC Four and Radio 3; and the Battle Of Britain season across BBC One, Two and Four in the autumn of 2010. He coordinated the religion and events coverage of the Papal Visit across radio and television in autumn 2010.
Mr. Entwistle began his career as a writer and magazine editor with Haymarket Magazines and went on to join the BBC in 1989 as a Broadcast Journalism trainee. He became an assistant producer on Panorama, where he worked on the programme's coverage of the first Gulf War, the fall of Margaret Thatcher, and an investigation into how the Tiananmen Square protest leaders were spirited out of China.
In January 1993, Mr. Entwistle became a producer for On The Record and subsequently went on to be a producer, assistant editor and deputy editor on BBC Two's flagship current affairs programme Newsnight between 1994 and 1999.
He became Editor of Newsnight in 2001, starting work in his new post the day before the 9/11 attacks on the Pentagon and Twin Towers in the USA. During his editorship, the show won five RTS Awards, including Best News Programme; as well as picking up a Broadcast Award and a Bafta nomination for Best News Programme.
Mr. Entwistle's career has embraced a broad range of factual programme-making. In 1999, after 10 years in current affairs, he joined the science department as deputy editor of BBC One's popular science show Tomorrow's World where he remained for two years before returning to Newsnight as Deputy Editor.
In 2004 he left Newsnight for BBC Arts to become executive editor of Topical Arts on BBC Two and BBC Four. There he launched The Culture Show for BBC Two and executive-produced arts films for BBC Four. He also spent several months as Chair of the Knowledge Building workgroup on Mark Thompson's Creative Future strategy review.
In late 2005, he was appointed Head and Commissioning Editor of TV Current Affairs and joined BBC Television's factual commissioning team. With Peter Fincham, then Controller of BBC One, Mr. Entwistle returned Panorama to a weekday peak-time slot. He also commissioned a wide variety of current affairs documentary series for BBC Two, including The Conspiracy Files, Michael Cockerell's series Blair: The Inside Story, Tropic Of Capricorn with Simon Reeve, Adam Curtis's series The Trap, the Falklands War drama-doc Sea Of Fire, Peter Taylor's four-part Age Of Terror, and Norma Percy's multiple award-winning Iran And The West.
In April 2007, he became Acting Controller of BBC Four and led the channel during a period which saw the first runs of Mad Men and Flight Of The Conchords. Mr. Entwistle also commissioned the highly successful Golden Age Of Steam season whose standout shows – Julia Bradbury's Railway Walks series and Ian Hislop's documentary on the Beeching closures – remain among the most watched factual programmes in the channel's history. ■