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Press Releases
George Entwistle announced as acting Controller at ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Four
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Head of TV Current Affairs, George Entwistle, has been announced acting Controller of ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Four for six months, from the beginning of May.
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Current Controller Janice Hadlow has requested a sabbatical in order to focus on writing her book on George III. She will also spend some time consulting on the wider ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Vision strategy.
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Director of ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Vision, Jana Bennett, said "I'm delighted that George is taking on the challenge of running the channel for a few months.
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"Having commissioned both current affairs and arts programmes for ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Four since its inception, George really understands the channel and I know he will steer it effectively and creatively through the next six months.
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"Janice has done a fantastic job raising the profile of ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Four over the past three years. When she came back to the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ we agreed that, when the time was right, she would take some time away from ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Four to finish her book.
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"Three years on, with the channel looking so confident, it is a good time to do this.
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"I'm pleased that over the next six months she will still be involved in developing the wider strategy for ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Vision and I look forward to her returning to ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Four towards the end of the year."
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Janice Hadlow said: "I'm very grateful to Jana for allowing me to step back from running the channel for a while so that I can finish my book."
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ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Four was named Channel Of The Year at the Edinburgh International Television Festival in 2006. Michael Sheen won a Royal Television Society (RTS) award for Best Actor for the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Four drama, Fantabulosa earlier this year. The channel has also won numerous awards for its highly-regarded comedy The Thick Of It.
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This Monday (16 April), the channel's Edwardian season opened with Edwardian Supersize Me, which peaked at 555,000 and was the largest factual audience ever for the channel.
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Janice Hadlow was appointed Controller of ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Four in 2004, when she came back to the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ from Channel 4, where she was Head of Specialist Factual. She began her career at the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ as a Production Trainee in 1986.
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George Entwistle was appointed Head of TV Current Affairs in November 2005. He was previously Executive Editor in Topical Arts, where he was Launch Editor of ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Two's The Culture Show.
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George joined the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ in 1989 as a Broadcast Journalist trainee. He went on to be Assistant Producer on Panorama where he worked, among other things, on the programme's coverage of the first Gulf War, the fall of Margaret Thatcher and the investigation into how the Tiananmen Square protest leaders were spirited out of China.
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In January 1993, George became Producer of On The Record and subsequently went on to be: Producer, Assistant Editor, Deputy Editor and Editor on Newsnight until 2004.
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During this time, the programme won RTS Awards for Best News programme, for Innovation with the Baghdad Blogger programme, and was twice winner in the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ News category, as well as picking up a Broadcast Award for Best News Programme.
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Karen O'Connor will cover George Entwistle's role as Head and Commissioning Editor of TV Current Affairs.
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Karen is currently Creative Director of the in–house Current Affairs Department, responsible for highly successful recent output including The Conspiracy Files, Blair: The Inside Story, Suez, and the This World: Child Slavery With Rageh Omaar. She also has extensive experience of commissioning independent producers for the This World strand.
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ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Press Office
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