Short answers, pulled from the story.
The BBC was founded on the 18th of October 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company Ltd, a consortium of leading wireless receiver manufacturers. It became the British Broadcasting Corporation on the 1st of January 1927, operating under a royal charter.
The BBC is funded principally by an annual television licence fee, which cost £169.50 per household as of April 2024. The fee is set by the British government, approved by Parliament, and payment is enforced under criminal law.
John Reith, a Scottish Calvinist, was appointed general manager of the British Broadcasting Company in December 1922 and became the BBC's first director general when the corporation was chartered in 1927. He shaped the BBC's founding philosophy of broadcasting to inform, educate and entertain, and maintained strict moral and editorial controls over programming until his departure from the corporation in 1938.
From 1935, MI5 secretly vetted BBC job applicants for their political views without their knowledge, operating from Room 105 in Broadcasting House. The arrangement was publicly exposed in an article by David Leigh and Paul Lashmar in The Observer in August 1985, and in October 1985 the BBC announced it would largely cease the vetting process.
BBC television broadcasting was suspended from the 1st of September 1939 to the 7th of June 1946 because of World War Two. Radio operations were moved out of London to Bristol and then Bedford, where the BBC broadcast concerts, religious services and major wartime addresses, including 33 speeches by Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
The BBC World Service broadcasts in more than 40 languages and is available in over 150 capital cities, making it the world's largest external broadcaster in terms of reception area, language selection and audience reach. It was launched in 1932 as the BBC Empire Service and has an estimated weekly audience of 192 million, with its websites reaching 38 million people per week.