Comment Re:Grannar (Score 2) 173
Many nouns referring to a group of individuals are plural in English where they are singular in American, for example band names. English is always "BandOfYourChoice *are* playing at...", never "is".
"The BBC" is debatable, I think - is it the singular Corporation, or the collection of people who make it up? I'd tend towards the latter, in the same way I'd expect (in English) to see "Apple are launching the new iThing 47 next week". I'd only really expect it to be singular when it's the object of the sentence - "the BBC was formed by SomeActOfParliament in XXXX..."