Andrew Thorman (born 20 March 1950) is a British journalist and television executive; as Head of Rural Broadcasting at the BBC, he moved Countryfile in April 2009 to 7pm on Sunday evenings where it went from 1.5 million to 7 million viewers.
Countryfile is a British television programme which airs weekly on BBC One and reports on rural, agricultural, and environmental issues in the United Kingdom.
He attended the independent Clayesmore School in Dorset. At North Devon College he studied for A levels in Law and Economics.
Clayesmore School is an independent school for boys and girls of the English public school tradition in the village of Iwerne Minster, Dorset, England. It is a member of The Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference (HMC).
Dorset is a county in South West England on the English Channel coast. The ceremonial county comprises the unitary authority areas of Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole and Dorset. Covering an area of 2,653 square kilometres (1,024 sq mi), Dorset borders Devon to the west, Somerset to the north-west, Wiltshire to the north-east, and Hampshire to the east. The county town is Dorchester which is in the south. After the reorganisation of local government in 1974 the county's border was extended eastward to incorporate the Hampshire towns of Bournemouth and Christchurch. Around half of the population lives in the South East Dorset conurbation, while the rest of the county is largely rural with a low population density.
North Devon College was a further education college in Barnstaple, North Devon. It is now part of Petroc.
He joined the Western Morning News as a trainee. He moved to Australia to work on newspapers there.
The Western Morning News is a daily regional newspaper founded in 1860, and covering the West Country including Devon, Cornwall, Isles of Scilly and parts of Somerset and Dorset in the South West of England.
He started at BBC Radio Oxford in 1976. He was involved with the creation of BBC Radio 5 Live in 1994. In 2001 he won a Gold Award at the Radio Academy Awards.
BBC Radio Oxford is the BBC Local Radio station for Oxfordshire, UK.
BBC Radio 5 Live is the BBC's national radio service that broadcasts mainly news, sport, discussion, interviews and phone-ins. It is the principal radio station covering sport in the United Kingdom, broadcasting virtually all major sports events staged in the UK or involving British competitors.
The Radio Academy Awards, started in 1983, were the most prestigious awards in the British radio industry. For most of their existence, they were run by ZAFER Associates, but in latter years were brought under the control of The Radio Academy.
As Head of Rural Affairs at the BBC [1] [2] , he was responsible for programmes such as Farming Today and Costing the Earth ; under his leadership, listeners of Farming Today went from 500,000 to 1 million; in the late 1990s Farming Today was to be possibly ended. He left the BBC in 2012, having worked at the BBC for over 35 years. Rural affairs at the BBC had been headquartered at BBC Birmingham until 2012.
Farming Today is a radio programme about food, farming, and the countryside broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in the United Kingdom.
Costing the Earth is a programme on BBC Radio 4 about the environment. According to the programme´s website, it looks at man's effect on the environment and how the environment reacts, questioning accepted truths, challenging those in charge and reporting on progress towards improving the world.
BBC Birmingham is one of the oldest regional arms of the BBC, located in Birmingham. It was the first region outside London to start broadcasting both the corporation's radio and television transmissions, the latter from the Sutton Coldfield television transmitter.
In April 2009 he moved Countryfile to early Sunday evenings, where it became the most-watched programme on BBC One on Sundays, and became Britain's most-watched television factual programme.
BBC One is the first and principal television channel of the British Broadcasting Corporation in the United Kingdom, Isle of Man and Channel Islands. It was launched on 2 November 1936 as the BBC Television Service, and was the world's first regular television service with a high level of image resolution. It was renamed BBC TV in 1960, using this name until the launch of the second BBC channel BBC2 in 1964, whereupon the BBC TV channel became known as BBC1, with the current spelling adopted in 1997.
He lives in Hereford.
BBC Radio 4 is a radio station owned and operated by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) that broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes including news, drama, comedy, science and history. It replaced the BBC Home Service in 1967. The station controller is Gwyneth Williams, and the station is part of BBC Radio and the BBC Radio department. The station is broadcast from the BBC's headquarters at Broadcasting House, London. On 21 January 2019 Williams announced she was quitting the role. There are no details of when or who will be her replacement.
BBC Radio Lincolnshire is the BBC Local Radio service for the major part of the English county of Lincolnshire. It broadcasts from studios near Newport Arch in Lincoln on 94.9 and 104.7 (Grantham) FM, 1368 AM and online.
The BBC Natural History Unit (NHU) is a department of the BBC which produces television, radio and online content with a natural history or wildlife theme. It is best known for its highly regarded nature documentaries, including The Blue Planet and Planet Earth, and has a long association with David Attenborough's authored documentaries, their notably called Life on Earth.
Pat Sharp is an English radio, television presenter and DJ. In the UK, he is known mainly for his work on the children's television programme Fun House, and his extensive radio career. In mainland Europe, he was better known in the 1980s as one of the Sky Channel's VJs and for presenting Coca-Cola Eurochart Top 50 and Nescafé UK Top 50.
BBC News is an operational business division of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) responsible for the gathering and broadcasting of news and current affairs. The department is the world's largest broadcast news organisation and generates about 120 hours of radio and television output each day, as well as online news coverage. The service maintains 50 foreign news bureaus with more than 250 correspondents around the world. Fran Unsworth has been Director of News and Current Affairs since January 2018.
Roger Mosey is a British author, broadcaster, and current Master of Selwyn College, Cambridge. Mosey was previously the Head of BBC Television News and Director of the Beijing 2008 and London 2012 Olympic Games coverage. His other positions have included being Producer to the BBC's New York bureau and Editor of Today on BBC Radio 4. Mosey serves as a trustee of the Royal Institute of British Architects.
One Man and His Dog is a BBC television series in the United Kingdom featuring sheepdog trials, originally presented by Phil Drabble, with commentary by Eric Halsall and, later, by Ray Ollerenshaw. It was first aired on 17 February 1976 and continues today as a special annual edition of Countryfile. In 1994, Robin Page replaced Drabble as the main presenter. Gus Dermody took over as commentator until 2012.
Anita Rani Nazran, better known as Anita Rani, is a British radio and television presenter.
Anita Anand is a British-Indian radio and television presenter and journalist.
Mihir Bose is a British Indian journalist and author. He writes a weekly "Big Sports Interview" for the London Evening Standard, and also writes and broadcasts on sport and social and historical issues for several outlets including the BBC, the Financial Times and Sunday Times. He was the BBC Sports Editor until 4 August 2009.
Sean Fletcher is an American-British journalist and radio broadcast personality, currently working with ITV and BBC.
James Wong is an ethnobotanist, television presenter and garden designer in the United Kingdom, best known for presenting the award-winning television series Grow Your Own Drugs, being a panellist on the long-running Radio 4 series Gardeners' Question Time, and reporting on the popular BBC rural affairs series, Countryfile.
Graham Torrington is a British radio presenter and broadcaster.
Miriam O'Reilly is an Irish television presenter. Until 2009, she was a presenter on the BBC One rural affairs show Countryfile.
Charlotte Victoria Smith is one of two main presenters of BBC Radio 4's Farming Today.
Thomas John Gillespie "Tom" Heap is the Rural Affairs Correspondent of BBC News, and a United Kingdom television and radio reporter and presenter best known for his contributions to the BBC One programme Countryfile, the same channel's Panorama programme, and the BBC Radio 4 programme Costing the Earth. Since February 2012, he has also been Director and media presenter of the media company Checked Shirt TV Limited.
John Raymond Craven, is an English journalist and television presenter, best known for presenting the BBC programmes Newsround, Countryfile and Beat the Brain.
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| Preceded by | Head of Rural Affairs at the BBC 1995 - 2012 | Succeeded by Defunct organisation |
| Preceded by | Editor of Countryfile 1998 - | Succeeded by |