1 January – Channel 4 airs One in Five, a late-night profile of homosexual lifestyles. This programme and The Eleventh Hour: Veronica 4 Rose, featuring two schoolgirls discussing lesbianism, lead to extreme criticism for the channel and an attempt by Conservative MP John Carlisle to have the channel banned.[1]
3 January – Children's ITV launches as a new branding for the late afternoon programming block on ITV, replacing Watch It!.
4 February – The US sitcom Cheers, starring Ted Danson makes its UK debut on Channel 4.
6 February – The Australian soap opera Sons and Daughters makes its UK debut when Central becomes the first ITV region to begin showing the programme. All other ITV regions soon follow suit.
8 February – Minipops makes its debut on Channel 4. Though a ratings success, it is axed after only one series due to heavy media criticism.
17 February – Woodland Animations introduces a new stop-motion animated series, Gran, on BBC1 following the success of Postman Pat.
22 February – The US television series Knight Rider makes its debut on ITV with the feature length pilot episode, the following episode is shown two nights later, however, scheduling of the show varies from other ITV regions, with STV not broadcasting the hit series until the 5th April.
TV-am cuts its Daybreak programme to 30 minutes, allowing Good Morning Britain to begin half an hour earlier. Original Daybreak presenters Robert Kee and Angela Rippon are both replaced, with Gavin Scot on weekdays and Lynda Barry on weekends.[2][3]
BBC1 begins broadcasting a 30 minute Ceefax slot prior to the start of Breakfast Time. It is called Ceefax AM.[4] It is first mentioned in the Radio Times on 21 March.[5]
Amid falling ratings and mounting pressure from investors, Peter Jay steps aside as TV-am's Chief Executive allowing Jonathan Aitken to take on the role.[6][7][8]
Channel 4 broadcasts in-vision teletext pages for the first time. Two magazines are shown, 4-Tel on View and Oracle on View and in fifteen minute bursts which are repeated several times each day prior to the start of each day's transmissions. Teletext pages are only shown on weekdays.
23 March – The BBC regrets that because of an industrial dispute at the printers in next week's edition of Radio Times are in short supply, but copies will be available in the South West, West, North East, parts of the South and North of England, but no S4C listings in the Wales edition.
April
1 April – Roland Rat makes his first appearance on TV-am.[9] Created by David Claridge and launched by TV-am children's editor Anne Wood to entertain younger viewers during the Easter holidays,[10][11] Roland is generally regarded as TV-am's saviour, being described as "the only rat to join a sinking ship".[12]
2 and 9 April – Two issues of Radio Times fail to be published, due to industrial action.
5 April – Debut of First Tuesday on ITV, the subject matter was mainly social issues and current affairs stories from around the world, with programmes being shown on the first Tuesday of the month.
7 April – ITV airs an evening of programmes under the banner of ITV's Channel Four Showcase. It includes both current and upcoming Channel 4 programmes.[1]
12 April – Timothy Aitken succeeds his cousin Jonathan as chief executive of TV-am, due to the IBA rules regarding MPs operating a television station.[13]
2 May – From that day, Ceefax pages are broadcast during all daytime downtime although BBC2 continues to fully close down for four hours after Play School. Teletext transmissions also begin on Channel 4 at around this time.
4 May – Jack Scott retires from the Met Office and presents his final national forecast for BBC Weather after 14 years and joining Thames News as its weatherman for five years.
5 May
London-based listings magazine Time Out is not allowed to publish full day's television listings for BBC, ITV and Channel 4 programmes altogether, for some reasons that the Radio Times (BBC television/radio) and TVTimes (ITV/Channel 4) has brought the rights to publish other magazines such as newspapers, before the deregulation of television listings from 1 March 1991.
Top of the Pops celebrates its 1000th edition. The programme is also broadcast on BBC Radio 1 to allow viewers to listen to the programme in stereo.[16]
23 May – TV-am's new look begins as Daybreak is axed,[18] with Good Morning Britain extending to start at 6:25am. Commander David Philpott is moved to present the weather at the weekends only, with Wincey Willis becoming the new weekday weather presenter.[19]
25 June – The network television premiere of the 1979 Dracula film on ITV, starring Frank Langella.
27 June – The shareholders of Satellite Television agree a £5 million offer to give News International 65% of the company.[20][21]
July
16 July – Debut of The Mad Death on BBC1, the three-part series examined the effects of an outbreak of rabies in the United Kingdom and was noted for its occasionally chilling content.
5 August – After 14 years on the air, the final edition of Nationwide is broadcast on BBC1.
16 August – ITV broadcasts Woodentop as part of its Storyboard series. It would later be turned into a series and renamed The Bill, commencing on 16 October 1984 and lasting until 31 August 2010.
27–28 August – BBC2 Rocks Around the Clock by broadcasting non-stop music programmes all day and also all night.[22]
29 August – The game show Blockbusters is launched on ITV, presented by Bob Holness and features sixth-form students as contestants.
6 September – ITV broadcasts Killer. It would later be turned into a series and renamed Taggart.
9 September – London Weekend Television launches a computerised version of its ident with the tagline "Your Weekend ITV".[23]
12 September – The children's animated series Henry's Cat, created by veteran animators Stan Hayward and Bob Godfrey makes its debut on BBC1.
16 September – BBC2 closes down during the day for the final time, all future daytime downtime is filled by Pages from Ceefax.
19 September – Daytime on Two launches on BBC2. Broadcasting during term time from just after 9am until 3.00pm, the strand encompasses the BBC Schools programming previously shown on BBC1 and the BBC's adult educational programmes which are shown at lunchtime. A special version of the its 'Computer Generated 2' is launched to introduce the programmes and a special sequence of Ceefax pages called the Daytime on Two information Service which is broadcast during the longer gaps between programmes.[24][25]
September – Central finally launches its East Midlands service. An industrial dispute had prevented Central from launching it when it first went on air at the start of 1982.
October
October – Ceefax in Vision is seen through the morning and into the afternoon on BBC2 at the weekend for the first time during the Open University’s off-season. They continue to be shown on weekend mornings until the end of January when the OU reopens for the new term.
2 October – ITV shows a live top flight football match for the first time since 1960. This marks the start of English football being shown on a national basis rather than on a regional basis, resulting in The Big Match becoming a fully national programme.
Debut of the Welsh children's animated series SuperTed on BBC1 which was based on a series of stories written by Welsh writer, producer and animator Mike Young to help his son overcome his fear of the dark. The series became so popular it was spawned into merchandising and was broadcast in many countries worldwide.
Gerry Anderson and Christopher Burr's science-fiction puppet series Terrahawks makes its debut on ITV, the show was Anderson's first in over a decade to use puppets for its characters and made use of latex Muppet-style hand puppets to animate the characters in a process Anderson dubbed "Supermacromation".
16 October – Satellite Television officially begins broadcasting in the UK. The channel had launched the previous year on cable in various European countries but to view the channel in the UK, a satellite dish approximately 10 feet (3 meters) wide had been required due to the channel being broadcast via the Orbital Test Satellite.[26]
24 October – Sixty Minutes launches on BBC1, replacing Nationwide but ended less than a year later.
3 November – The network television premiere of Battlestar Galactica The Movie on ITV. Unbilled as such, this was the extended television version of the film, rather than the theatrical release version.
6 November – The final edition of Sale of the Century is broadcast on ITV after 12 years on the air.
18 November – The famous "turkey" episode of Family Fortunes is broadcast on ITV in which one contestant (Bob Johnson) while playing the Big Money round, offered the answer to the first three questions, it scored zero for the first two questions and 21 points for the third question. Earlier in the episode, both families struggled to name a famous Irishman.
20 November – ITV begins showing the BAFTA and Golden Globe winning three part miniseries Kennedy, starring Martin Sheen as US President John F. Kennedy.
25 November – BBC1 airs a special feature-length episode of Doctor Who to celebrate the 20th anniversary of its first broadcast with The Five Doctors, featuring all the previous Doctors alongside Peter Davison's current Time Lord. In the US, Chicago PBS station WTTW show the programme two days before the UK on the 23rd November.
29 November – BBC1 airs An Englishman Abroad, based on the true story of a chance meeting of actress Coral Browne, with Guy Burgess (Alan Bates), a member of the Cambridge spy ring who spied for the Soviet Union while an officer at MI6. The production was written by Alan Bennett and directed by John Schlesinger; Browne stars as herself.
An episode of ITV's animated series Danger Mouse has viewing figures reaching 21.59 million,[29] an all-time high for a British children's programme.
5 December – Following the end of the Daytime on Two term, Ceefax is shown non-stop throughout the day on BBC2 for the first time with transmissions running continuously from around 9am until the start of programmes at 5:35pm.
10 December – ITV airs The Day After, about a fictional war between the NATO forces and the Warsaw Pact countries that rapidly escalates into a full-scale nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union which were due to start World War III.
21 December – The network television premiere of The Fog, John Carpenter's 1980 horror film on BBC1.[30]
27 December – The network television premiere of Oh, God! on BBC2, Carl Reiner's comedy about an unassuming supermarket manager chosen by God to spread his message and starring George Burns and John Denver.[31]
^News International buys 65% of satellite group. By Bill Johnstone, Electronics Correspondent. The Times, Wednesday, 29 June 1983; pg. 13
^Title The franchise affair: creating fortunes and failures in independent televisionAuthors Asa Briggs, Joanna SpicerEdition illustratedPublisher century, 1986Original from the University of MichiganDigitized 9 Oct 2006 ISBN9780712612012