Also in 2007, ITV said that they intended to merge ITV West with ITV Westcountry and close the studios at Plymouth, running the news operation from Bristol. This was met with considerable opposition from business leaders and councils. In 2005, ITV launched ITV Local, a broadband news and information service.
A woman who beat anorexia to become a top beauty queen has blamed social media and the NHS for shocking figures revealing a growing eating disorder crisis in the UK. Alisha Cowie, 23, who is one of Britain’s most successful beauty queens, says she ‘wasn’t surprised’ by this week’s worrying stats following her own experience. In the 2016 Tech Nation report, a limited talent supply was highlighted by 68% of local tech businesses surveyed as the main brake on Cornwall’s tech growth, with close to half saying low sector awareness and limited access to finance were other challenges. In Cornwall, the huge growth in teaching and learning in the creative and Cornwall Media sectors in our universities have resulted in a large number of highly-skilled graduate entrepreneurs who want to maintain the Cornwall lifestyle and grow their business here. A start-up company is a newly-formed business with particular momentum behind it based on perceived demand for its product or service. The intention of a start-up is to grow rapidly as a result of offering something that addresses a particular market gap.
This is home to rare plants, such as the Cornish Heath, which has been adopted as the county flower. During the British Iron Age, Cornwall, like all of Britain , was inhabited by a Celtic people known as the Britons with distinctive cultural relations to neighbouring Brittany. The Common Brittonic spoken at the time eventually developed into several distinct tongues, including Cornish, Welsh, Breton, Cumbric and Pictish. Although satellite television was gradually available throughout the 1980s, it was only available to owners of large dishes and the channels were intended to supply cable networks across Europe and domestic reception was not the prime audience. In 1989, Sky Television plc’s direct-to-home four channel service started and was followed by the launch of BSB in 1990. Daphne du Maurier was chosen by Peter Cadbury, as an iconic and famous Cornish resident to be on the Westward board of directors.
The opening night film was a charity screening of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Some changes have been made since opening, including the projectors now replaced with Cinemeccanica Victoria 9s, and the ticket office and foyer have been modified. During 2012–13 the main auditorium, already the largest screen and auditorium in Cornwall, was subject to a £1.5 million transformation. To increase the number of screens from 4 to 6 the auditorium was partitioned, and two screens were placed underneath the circle. April 2011 saw another phase of redevelopment at the Regal with two screens going digital, screen 7 and screen 3 boasting Dolby 3D.
It would be another twenty six years before the BBC National Programme was audible in Cornwall, from the then new long wave transmitter at Daventry, although BBC transmissions began in 1922. The transmission, coming a long way from Cornwall, , was crackly and barely audible at night-time, and it was a solitary listening experience, as sets were only equipped with a single earpiece, and not a loudspeaker. In 1910, the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society in Falmouth started showing films in the Arts Centre.
Enid Blyton’s 1953 novel Five Go Down to the Sea is set in Cornwall, near the fictional coastal village of Tremannon. David Cornwell, who wrote espionage novels under the name John le Carré, lived and worked in Cornwall. Nobel Prize-winning novelist William Golding was born in St Columb Minor in 1911, and returned to live near Truro from 1985 until his death in 1993. Rosamunde Pilcher grew up in Cornwall, and several of her books take place there. Medieval Cornwall is the setting of the trilogy by Monica Furlong, Wise Child, Juniper and Colman, as well as part of Charles Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake. A welcome sign to Penzance, in the English and Cornish languagesCornish, a member of the Brythonic branch of the Celtic language family, is a revived language that died out as a first language in the late 18th century.
The flamboyant Peter Cadbury made several enemies with the Independent Broadcasting Authority and also with high-profile community leaders. With financial troubles besetting the company, Westward lost the franchise in 1981, to be replaced by Television South West (going on air on New Year’s Day 1982), who inherited all the staff and the studios. On 6 July 2007, OFCOM announced that Channel 4 Radio had won the licence to operate the second national commercial DAB multiplex. However, Channel 4 Radio subsequently announced that they would invest a large amount of money in new transmitters, but that there would be no coverage for the new service in Cornwall due to potential interference with stations in Republic of Ireland. When the Cornwall Circuit Group of cinemas was taken over by The Rank Group, the cinema was later sold off to independent Vivian Bartle, and in 1983 the former café area was converted into an 80-seat screen 2.