Further, not all programmes appeal nationwide: Birds of a Feather does not go down well in Scotland.The report details the scale of the problem with television light entertainment. By the early 1990s, the stream of hit shows was drying up, except for Noel’s House Party. Nor can the BBC match ITV’s drama budgets.
Major disappointments such as Eldorado and A Year in Provence, “which fail to deliver either in audience or artistic terms”, the report admits, have tarnished the channel’s reputation.The report promises action: an increase in quantity and quality of popular drama; something new to be scheduled throughout the year, including the dead summer period; more drama made in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and from regional English centres. The BBC will pilot a second daily mini-drama on Radio 1, introduce adaptations of popular literature to Radio 2, and try to vary Radio 4 drama to appeal to more people. Radio 3 will also have major seasons of classic drama.Costume productions such as Middlemarch and Martin Chuzzlewit are safe.ENTERTAINMENTThe BBC feels the mission to entertain is getting harder, and the cost of hiring top stars is rising hugely because of competition. With two outstanding exceptions, Eastenders and Casualty, it has failed to combine artistic ambitions with accessibility and mass audience appeal. Yet popular drama is at the heart of successful schedules, reaching across class boundaries.

DRAMA

Popular drama is a key problem for BBC1,facing hugely successful ITV series night after night. Dr Shaywitz and his colleagues studied 19 right-handed men and 19 right-handed women. They were given a series of nonsense words and asked to check whether they rhymed, but without speaking them out loud.. The studies were limited because of the radiation dose to the patients. They mapped the flow of oxygenated-blood into active areas of the brain by detecting tiny magnetic fields given out by the atomic nucleus of the oxygen in the haemoglobin of the blood.Previous attempts to image the brain relied on injecting mildly radioactive tracers into the blood and measuring the concentration in different brain centres, using a PET scanner.

Men are more “lizard-like” in handling emotions, employing centres of the brain that developed early in evolution, whereas women employ more recent mammalian structures to handle emotion.The technique used by the researchers to analyse language represents “a major breakthrough” in imaging the human brain while it is working, according to Professor Michael Rugg, of the School of Psychology at St Andrews University. Women use more of their brains when it comes to language, with the processing more generally distributed across both hemispheres.The latest instance of gender differences in the brain comes just a few weeks after another study which suggested women and men use different areas of their brains when it comes to emotion. The results, reported in today’s issue of the scientific journal Nature, reveal that men tend to use the left hemisphere of their brains when thinking about language. BY TOM WILKIE

Science Editor
When it comes to talking, women’s brains work differently to men’s, according to scientists from Yale University.Bennett Shaywitz and a team of US researchers have produced the first clear evidence that males and females differ in the way their brains are organised for language.

Projects, including full-scale demonstrator aircraft, will be developed in total secrecy with tight security.. nTop-secret future aircraft, weapons and military technologies are to be developed at a secure “black” projects complex. British Aerospace is developing its Warton airfield site, near Preston, Lancashire, to include a network of secure buildings, similar to Lockheed’s famous “Skunk Works” in the United States.
According to Jane’s Defence Weekly, the centrepiece of the complex is a “black” or classified aircraft hangar, now half-finished. Once he wrote to BR complaining about late trains which he claimed had cost him three hours while attending a Birmingham seminar.But his own meticulous records of rail journeys gave him away, showing he was not in Birmingham, but on trains in the Weymouth and Newport areas..