BBC West Midlands schedule - and "Midlands Today" in 1964, one of the UK's first daily regional news programmes. Regional television had been established in 1957 with the launch of local evening news bulletins. Although it fared better than the struggling BBC North or BBC West (which was threatened for a while with being absorbed by the Midlands Region), it was clear that if BBC Midlands was too large to be truly local in the radio market, it was equally too small to be as self-sufficient across the full range of television programming as it had been in radio. The result was the
BBC Learning Zone service played out encrypted programming for professions such as medicine and law overnight between 1992 and 1994. In 1997, when the BBC rebranded, The Learning Zone was renamed BBC Learning Zone, became a separate strand of programming in its own right and became independent of BBC Two. The service would begin after BBC Two's closedown and transfer to Pages from Ceefax, with the service beginning at 12.30am until 7.00am (3.00-5.00am Fridays and Saturdays). In 2004 the service started at 2am every day and continuing until approximately 6am when programming on BBC Two would begin, however this was not always the