Paramount Comedy Channel is to change its name to Comedy Central from April 6, taking the name of its US parent, and the brand used in recent launches throughout Europe.
The channel began life on November 1, 1995 as plain The Paramount Channel, born out of long held plans to launch a UK version of Nick at Nite. However, the formula of archive shows from the Paramount TV library failed to find favour and the channel increasingly turned to comedy,
Subsequently it has enjoyed relative success with a mix of US imports and a small amount of UK content drawn largely from Channel 4.
Last autumn UKTV Gold, which has access to the BBC comedy library, repositioned itself as comedy channel GOLD.