UK Gold was the first of many UKTV brand stations in the (duh) UK, and certainly not the last. When it first started, UK Gold was a joint venture between the BBC and Thames Television (newly deposed as London ITV contractor), showing a mix of Thames' ITV programmes and old BBC programmes with randomly splodged in commercial breaks (though their decisions on where to put the breaks have become more streamlined as of late). This continued for a few years until Thames left and was replaced by Flextech, who also owned a number of cable stations including Bravo and UK Living (completely unrelated except by name to the UKTV brand, and it has since bcome Living*). Curiously, despite this change of ownership, the channel still shows some ITV shows such as early Men Behaving Badly and The Bill.

UK Gold started out in 1994 with a logo which was simply their name on a gold bar-hence TV gold. After this, they gained the familiar |UK|_GOLD_ logo which would later be spread to the other channels which were springing up, such as UK Horizons and UK Arena. Recently the whole UKTV network has adopted new logos-UK in superscript and then the channel name in normal sans-serif lettering. A low point was the needless bandwagon jumping which led to UK Gold having awful lifestyle idents (are there any other kind?). So what does this channel show, then? Well, it shows the best of British television up to the present day, with shows such as:

• My Family (Man flees money-grubbing wife and kids)
• The Vicar Of Dibley (Chocoholic servant of Christ)
• Men Behaving Badly (Beer, tits and fags. Fun for the whole family)
• Blackadder (all four series)
• Bottom (two alcoholics kill each other. Hilarity ensues)
• The Young Ones (went on to affect comedy programmes for decades after...somehow)
• The Bill (police-y drama-y thing)
• Eastenders (Also known as "The About-As-Realistic-As-Pong Show")
• Red Dwarf (Fun fun fun in the sun sun sun etc.)

As you can see, UK Gold mostly shows comedy, and some fucking brilliant comedy at that, with a nice blend between old and new. They also occasionally show films such as Platoon.

It is by far one of the most popular channels on satellite and cable and, despite the best efforts of BSkyB, has become something of a satellite BBC One.

Since opening the UKTV channels, Flextech has gone on to create FTN, which shows combined output from their channels , plus a few new programmes (such as the utterly hilarious Dilbert) but does not draw anything from the UK* line and therefore can be considered unrelated to them.