BT Group plc (trading as BT) (LSE: BT.A, NYSE: BT) is a British multinational telecommunications services company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It is one of the largest telecommunications services companies in the world and has operations in over 170 countries. Through its BT Global Services division it is a major supplier of telecoms services to corporate and government customers worldwide. Its BT Retail division is a leading supplier of telephony, broadband and subscription television services in the UK, with over 18 million customers.

BT's origins date back to the founding of the Electric Telegraph Company in 1846, the first company in the world to develop a nationwide communications network. In 1912, the GPO, a government department, became the monopoly telecoms supplier in the UK. The Post Office Act of 1969 led to the GPO becoming a public corporation. British Telecom was formed in 1980, and became independent of the Post Office in 1981. British Telecom was privatised in 1984, with more than 50 per cent of its shares sold to investors. The Government sold its remaining stake in further share sales in 1991 and 1993.

Maureen Diane Lipman CBE (born 10 May 1946) is a British film, theatre and television actress, columnist and comedienne.

Lipman was born in Hull in the East Riding of Yorkshire, England, the daughter of Maurice Julius Lipman and Zelma Pearlman. Her father was a tailor; he used to have a shop between the Ferens Art Gallery and Monument Bridge. She attended Newland School for Girls in Hull and was encouraged into an acting career by her mother, who used to take her to the pantomime and push her onto the stage. Lipman trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.

Lipman worked extensively in the theatre following her début in a stage production of The Knack at the Palace Theatre, Watford. In order to get the post she pretended that a documentary producer wanted to follow her finding her first job-this was a lie but it seemed to work. She was a member of Laurence Olivier's Royal National Theatre Company at the Old Vic. She made an early film appearance in Up the Junction. After early appearances in the sitcoms The Lovers, and Doctor at Large, Lipman first gained prominence on television in the 1979 situation comedy Agony, in which she played an agony aunt with a troubled private life. She played the lead role in the television series All at No 20 and took on a range of diverse characters when starring in the series About Face. She is well known for playing Joyce Grenfell in the biographical show Re: Joyce!, which she co-wrote with James Roose-Evans, and another memorable character Beatrice Bellman (Beatie/BT), a Jewish grandmother in a series of television commercials for British Telecom. She has continued to work in the theatre for over thirty years, playing, amongst other roles, Aunt Eller in the National Theatre's Oklahoma! with Hugh Jackman.

Stephen William Hawking, CH, CBE, FRS, FRSA (born 8 January 1942) is a British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author. His key scientific works to date have included providing, with Roger Penrose, theorems regarding gravitational singularities in the framework of general relativity, and the theoretical prediction that black holes should emit radiation, which is today known as Hawking radiation (or sometimes as Bekenstein–Hawking radiation).

He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a lifetime member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and in 2009 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States. Hawking was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge between 1979 and 2009. Subsequently, he became research director at the university's Centre for Theoretical Cosmology.

Hawking has a motor neurone disease related to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a condition that has progressed over the years. He is now almost completely paralysed and communicates through a speech generating device. He has been married twice and has three children. Hawking has achieved success with works of popular science in which he discusses his own theories and cosmology in general; these include A Brief History of Time, which stayed on the British Sunday Times best-sellers list for a record-breaking 237 weeks.