George McGhee Controller, Programme Acquisition  BBC United Kingdom

What are your acquisition strategies?

Each BBC Channel has a different strategy re Prog Acquisitions:

BBC ONE  - We run very few bought in series on BBC ONE as the BBC makes many drama series itself. Neighbours is on ONE as is Medium with Patricia Arquette but Prog Acquisition mainly supplies feature films to the channel - "Shrek", "Pirates of the Caribbean" and other high profile blockbusters. In Daytime we currently run "Monk", "Murder She Wrote" and "Diagnosis Murder".

BBC TWO - TWO has been the home of many well known US series in past years  - "24", "X Files", "Buffy" etc but at the moment we are not running as many as we only show the most distinctive ones. Coming up on TWO this autumn is the Spielberg produced mini-series "Into the West" and the "9/11" mini -series currently in postproduction for ABC in the US. We also play the sitcoms "How I Met Your Mother" and "Kath and Kim" on TWO as well as "Family Guy" and "American Dad", which are hit animations.

BBC THREE - mainly makes its' own programs with few acquisitions - high profile feature films compliment their own home-made drama and comedy.

BBC FOUR - Foreign Language features are a key part of this channels strategy and they come from all over the world - "Les Choristes", "Amores Peros", "The Devil's Backbone" etc and recently we played two foreign language series - "Heimat 3" and the fantastic French thriller series "Spiral". Very few US programs play on FOUR but we do support their own themed documentary season with English language films. The classic series The Avengers is currently playing on this channel as well.

What programs are you looking for?

We are always looking out for high quality drama and comedy series for our channels and MIPCOM is extremely useful for finding out about which series are being planned by the distributors.