January 13 – The Lawrence Welk Show airs its Salute to Mexico episode where Anacani makes her debut with the Champagne Music Makers. That episode also marks the final time Sandi Griffiths and Sally Flynn appear together as the act of Sandi & Sally
March 8 – The TV movie The Marcus-Nelson Murders airs on CBS. This serves as the pilot for the iconic crime drama series Kojak, which returns as a weekly series in October.
March 21 – SitcomAre You Being Served? begins its first regular series on BBC1 in the U.K. (pilot aired September 8, 1972).
March 23 – The longest running daytime game show to date — NBC's Concentration — airs its 3,796th and final show, after a run of fourteen years and seven months. The record will be eclipsed in 1987 by The Price Is Right; today, Concentration ranks fourth in continual longevity among all daytime/syndicated game shows.
March 25 – The pilot episode of Open All Hours airs as part of Ronnie Barker's series Seven of One on BBC1 in the U.K.
April 1 – "Prisoner and Escort", the pilot episode of Porridge, airs as part of Seven of One.
May 17 – U.S. daytime television is interrupted by the Watergate hearings, which would continue until August 7. Each network airs coverage in rotation every third day (ABC is first, then CBS and NBC).
July 2 – U.S. game showMatch Game debuts its 1970s version; it soon becomes the #1-rated daytime television program for 1973, 1974, and 1975, as well as #1 game show from 1973–77.
August 6 – James Beck, who stars as Private Walker in the popular U.K. sitcom Dad's Army, dies of a burst pancreas at the age of just 44. Although the series continues until 1977, the part of Walker is not recast and the show carries on without him.
August 11 – Programme One airs the first part of the Soviet television miniseries Seventeen Moments of Spring, which would run until the 24th. With an audience of between fifty and eighty million viewers per episode, it becomes the most successful television show of its time in the Soviet Union.
August 17 – CBS presents an adaptation of David Rabe's play Sticks and Bones...but only to about half of its affiliates.
October 8 – Pat Phoenix leaves the role of Elsie Tanner on Coronation Street after thirteen years, when she felt that specific length of time was enough to play one character continuously.
November 12 – The record breaking, long-running comedy series in the U.K. and the world, Last of the Summer Wine starts as a series on BBC1 (the pilot had aired on January 4). The 295th and last episode is broadcast on 29 August 2010.
November – Color television is launched in New Zealand. (It will go full-time in November 1975).
December 12 – Kojak's trademark lollipop makes its debut in the episode "Hot Sunday".
December 19 – After reading a news item that said the federal government had fallen behind in getting bids to supply toilet tissue, Johnny Carson inadvertently triggers an unprecedented three-week panic when he announces, on The Tonight Show, that there is an acute shortage of toilet paper in the U.S.