Bravo (Canada)

Bravo (styled bravo) is a Canadian English language Category A cable and satellite specialty channel that is owned by Bell Media. Bravo maintains an entertainment format, with a particular focus on television dramas and films.

The channel was founded as a Canadian version of the U.S. channel Bravo (which is now owned by NBCUniversal). However, the channels have since diverged from a focus on the arts; Bravo in the U.S. was relaunched with an emphasis on fashion and pop culture programming in 2003, while Bravo in Canada began to add more dramatic series to its lineup beginning in 2006. Aside from still airing programming such as Inside the Actors Studio, a 2012 rebranding effectively separated the Canadian Bravo from its American counterpart.

History

In the 1980s, a precursor to Bravo existed called C Channel. The service was a national commercial-free pay television channel that focused on arts programming. C Channel launched on February 1, 1983 before it went bankrupt and ceased operations five months later on June 30 of that year due to its inability to attract a sufficient number of subscribers at a price of $16 per month.

Bravo (UK TV channel)

Bravo was a British television channel, owned by Living TV Group, a subsidiary of BSkyB. Its target audience was males in their 20s to early 40s and it showed a variety of both archive programming (such as Knight Rider and MacGyver) and original productions.

The Bravo channel closed on 1 January 2011, its most popular programmes moved to other Sky channels including: Spartacus: Blood and Sand (now on Sky1), Chuck, Leverage (now on Fox), Dog the Bounty Hunter (now on Pick), Star Trek (now on CBS Action), TNA Wrestling (now on Challenge), Sun, Sea and A&E, Motorway Patrol, Highway Patrol, Brit Cops and Caribbean Cops (now on Pick and Sky Livingit).

History

Bravo was launched on December 31, 1985, as a cable only channel, created by United Artists Programming and broadcasting mainly black & white B-movies from the 1950s and 1960s. Initially, the channel was a cassette-delivered service delivered to cable headends for automatic play-out.

In 1991, United Artists merged with their largest shareholder TCI (now Liberty Media), to form the largest cable operator in the US. TCI and US West announced a joint venture, and in 1992, the joint venture company became Telewest Communications. In 1993, talks were held with Tele-Communications Inc. which resulted in Flextech acquiring TCI's European programming business in exchange for shares. By January, the deal was complete with TCI, which allowed TCI to acquire 60.4% of Flextech while Flextech acquired 100% of Bravo, 25% of UK Gold, 31% of UK Living, and 25% of the Children's Channel which increased its share in that channel.

Bravo (U.S. TV network)

Bravo Media, LLC, more commonly known as Bravo, is an American basic cable and satellite television network and flagship channel, launched on December 1, 1980. It is owned by NBCUniversal and headquartered in the Comcast Building in New York City. The channel originally focused on programming related to fine arts and film; it currently broadcasts several reality television series targeted at females ages 25 through 54, acquired dramas, and mainstream theatrically-released feature films.

As of July 2015, approximately 90,891,000 American households (78.1% of households with television) receive Bravo.

History

Bravo originally launched as a commercial-free premium channel on December 1, 1980. It was originally co-owned by Cablevision's Rainbow Media division and Warner-Amex Satellite Entertainment; the channel claimed to be "the first television service dedicated to film and the performing arts". The channel originally broadcast its programming two days a week and—like Bravo's former sister network Nickelodeon, which shared its channel space with Alpha Repertory Television Service—shared its channel space with the adult-oriented pay channel Escapade, which featured softcore pornographic films. In 1981, Bravo was available to 48,000 subscribers throughout the United States; this total increased four years later to around 350,000 subscribers. A 1985 profile of Bravo in The New York Times observed that most of its programming consisted of international, classic, and independent film. Celebrities such as E. G. Marshall and Roberta Peters provided opening and closing commentary to the films broadcast on the channel.

Audience (magazine)

Audience magazine is an American literary quarterly founded in June 2004 as an ezine. It first appeared in print in June, 2006 (and as an ezine). The editor-in-chief of Audience is M. Stefan Strozier and it is published by World Audience Publishers. Audience derives its name from a literary journal of the same name published (hardcover) in America in the 1970s, and edited by Geoffrey Ward and Robert Strozier.

The work of many noted writers and artists has been published by Audience, such as Hugh Fox, Lee Stringer, Chyna, Ernest Dempsey, M. Stefan Strozier, William Harwood, Mordecai Roshwald, Matthew Glenn Ward (Skive Magazine), Raymond Hammond (New York Quarterly), Hareendran Kallinkeel, Anthony Rubino, Jr., William Holder, Sergey Cherepakhin, Burton H. Wolfe, Frank Romano, Louis Phillips, Kyle Torke, as well as the work of emerging writers and artists.

References

External links

Vaněk plays

The Vaněk Plays use are a set of plays in which the character Ferdinand Vaněk is a main character. Vaněk first appeared in the play Audience by Václav Havel. He subsequently appeared in three other Havel plays (Protest, Unveiling, and Dozens of Cousins), as well as plays by his friends and colleagues, including Pavel Landovský and Tom Stoppard.

Origins

Ferdinand Vaněk first appeared in the play Audience in 1975 as a stand-in for Havel. Vaněk, like Havel, was a dissident playwright, forced to work in a brewery because his writing has been banned by the Czechoslovak Communist regime. In the course of the play, it become clear that the brewmaster has been asked to spy on him. A long, rambling, comic dialogue proceeds, in the course of which the brewmaster eventually becomes a sympathetic figure, rather than a villain.

Since Havel's work was banned, the play was not performed in any theater. Instead, it was performed in living rooms and as samizdat. However, the work became quite well known in the Czech Republic despite that.

Audience (band)

Audience is a cult British art rock band which existed between 1969 and 1972, and reformed in 2004.

The original band consisted of Howard Werth (born Howard Alexander Werth, 26 March 1947, The Mother's Hospital, Clapton, East London) on nylon-strung electric acoustic guitar and vocals, Keith Gemmell (born Keith William Gemmell, 15 February 1948, Hackney Hospital, Hackney, East London) on tenor and alto sax, flute and clarinet, bass guitarist and vocalist Trevor Williams (born Trevor Leslie Williams, 19 January 1945, Hereford General Hospital, Hereford, Herefordshire, and drummer/vocalist Tony Connor (born Anthony John Connor, 6 April 1947, Romford, Havering).

Formation

Audience rose from the ashes of a semi-professional soul band named 'Lloyd Alexander Real Estate', which had included all the Audience members except Connor, who had unsuccessfully auditioned for the earlier band when John Richardson left to form The Rubettes. However, when Werth, Williams, and Gemmell decided to form their new band, they thought of Connor. The 'Lloyd Alexander Real Estate' issued one 45rpm single on President PT157 in 1967 "Gonna Live Again"/"Watcha' Gonna Do (When Your Baby Leaves You)", a Mod R&B record.