BBC1's New Year's Eve special Live into 85, broadcast from Gleneagles Hotel in Scotland, ends broadcasting in England, Wales and Northern Ireland as scheduled 40 minutes earlier than in Scotland after a series of disasters brought on by poor organisation from the production team.[1]
Channel 4 achieves its highest ever audience as 13.8 million viewers tune in for the final part of the miniseries A Woman of Substance.
6 January – The first Screen Two broadcast takes place.
7 January – The BBC ends its experiment with afternoon broadcasting and from that afternoon Pages from Ceefax is shown on BBC1 between the end of lunchtime programmes and the start of children's programmes and on BBC2 Ceefax pages are shown continuously between 9am and 5:25pm apart from when Daytime on Two is in season and when sporting events are being shown.
17 January – Thames makes a deal with international distributors for American production company Lorimar to purchase the UK broadcasting rights for the drama Dallas, thus taking it from the BBC and breaking a gentlemen's agreement between the BBC and ITV not to poach each other's imported shows. Thames have paid £55,000 per episode compared to the £29,000 paid by the BBC. The deal is condemned by both the BBC and other ITV companies who fear the BBC will poach their imports in retaliation and push up prices.[6] In response to the Thames deal, the BBC plan to delay transmission of the episodes they already have so that they will clash with the episodes being shown by Thames. Ultimately, however, pressure from several ITV companies, especially Yorkshire Television to the Independent Broadcasting Authority forces Thames to sell the series back to the BBC at a loss. The controversy leads to the resignation of Thames managing director Bryan Cowgill who feels the board have not supported him, he leaves the company on 12 July.[7][8]
18 January – Debut of The Practice, a twice-weekly medical drama intended to become Granada's second soap produced for the ITV network. But viewing figures are not as healthy as had been hoped and the series first run ends in May. It returns for a second series in 1986 before being axed.
20 January – The American sitcom The Cosby Show makes its UK debut on Channel 4.
23 January – A debate in the House of Lords is televised for the first time.[9]
An element of stripped and stranded programming is introduced.
At 5:35pm, the legendary mechanical "mirror globe" ident, in use in varying forms since 1969, is seen for the last time on regular rotation on BBC1, although the regional versions are seen for the final time an hour later. Its replacement, the COW (Computer Originated World), makes its debut at 7pm.
The first usage of the COW ident introduces the first edition of the relaunch of Terry Wogan's eponymous talk show which is now shown as a thrice-weekly live primetime programme.
Computer-generated graphics replace magnetic weather maps on all BBC forecasts.[11]
19 February – Debut of the long-running soap opera EastEnders on BBC1, set in the East End of London.[12]
17 March – BBC2 begins airing a two-part series of The Executioner's Song, a film about the life of killer Gary Gilmore who demanded the implementation of his death sentence for two murders he committed in Utah.[13] The second part of the film is shown on 24 March.[14]
19 March – BBC1 begins showing The Day the Universe Changed, a ten-part series in which science historian James Burke looks at how advances in science and technology have shaped western society over the last five centuries.[15]
29 March – Play School is shown in the afternoon for the final time on BBC1.[16]
30 March – Doctor Who goes on an unexpected hiatus following the broadcast of part 2 of Revelation of the Daleks due to a dispute between the show's staff and BBC controller Michael Grade, a notorious detractor of the show, the long-running science fiction series will resume airing the following year.
13 April – Michael Praed appears for the final time as Robin Hood in the ITV series Robin of Sherwood, after being dramatically killed off in the second season's finale.
19 April – The final episode of the game show Odd One Out airs on BBC1.
28 April – The World Snooker Championship Final between Dennis Taylor and Steve Davis draws BBC2's highest ever rating of 18.5 million viewers. The final goes on past midnight and this broadcast remains a record for a post-midnight audience in the UK.
7 May – The American action series Street Hawk makes its UK debut on ITV.
8 May – The 40th anniversary of VE Day is marked by a service of remembrance at Westminster Abbey attended by politicians and members of the royal family, broadcast on television.[18]
11 May – A fire breaks out at the Valley Parade stadium in Bradford during a football match between Bradford City and Lincoln City. The match is being recorded by Yorkshire Television for transmission on their Sunday afternoon regional football show The Big Match for the following day. Coverage of the fire is transmitted minutes after the event on the live ITV Saturday afternoon sports programme World of Sport. BBC's Grandstand also transmits live coverage of the fire.
17 May – Screensport covers the Football League Trophy Southern Area Final between Brentford and Newport County, the first time a match in an English senior competition has been broadcast exclusively on a satellite channel.[19] The Northern equivalent and the Wembley final will also be shown.
19 May – The long-running American crime detective series Murder, She Wrote makes its UK debut on ITV, starring London-born Angela Lansbury.
29 May – The Heysel Stadium Disaster is televised live by BBC1 at the European Cup final in Brussels, Belgium, between Liverpool and Juventus: 39 Juventus fans are killed when a wall collapses during a riot at the Heysel Stadium.
3 June – ITV London and Southern regions begin showing "V": The Series, the follow-up series to the cult US sci-fi alien visitors drama. Other ITV regions air the show shortly afterwards, with ITV Midlands on 26 August; however, STV do not show it until 10 March 1986 following a repeat of the original miniseries.
5 June – The crime drama Bulman, a spin-off from Strangers makes its debut on ITV.
12 June – David Dundas who composed the Channel 4 theme, wins a legal battle to retain all rights to the music and £1000 a week in royalties.[3]
21 June – Channel 4 airs Europe in Concert, a three-and-a-half-hour sequence of classical performances presented by Peter Sissons.[3]
28 June – The end of the 1984/85 school year sees the closure of the Daytime on Two information service and when it returns in September the gaps are filled by interval captions and, for breaks of more than 10 minutes, the usual Ceefax miscellany.
Debut of Tandoori Nights, a sitcom about rival Indian restaurants in London's Brick Lane starring Saeed Jaffrey which is Channel 4's first Asian comedy.
June Brown makes her EastEnders debut as Dot Cotton, appearing on-screen until 1993 before returning in 1997 and remaining in the soap until 2020.
7 July – Debut of The Rock 'n' Roll Years on BBC1, a series that looks at the music and events of a particular year, starting with 1956.[22]
13 July – The Live Aid pop concerts are held at Wembley Stadium in London and the JFK Stadium in Philadelphia and are televised around the world. The Wembley concert is shown in its entirety on BBC2 from midday, with BBC1 showing the Philadelphia concert later this evening. Over £50 million is raised for famine relief in Ethiopia.[23]
14 July – Watchdog launches as a stand-alone programme on BBC1,[24] having previously been a segment within the teatime news magazine programmes Nationwide and Sixty Minutes.
30 July – Debut of the pop music culture series No Limits on BBC2.[26]
31 July
The BBC announces it has pulled At the Edge of the Troubles, a documentary in the Real Lives strand in which filmmaker Vincent Hanna secured an interview with Sinn Féin's Martin McGuinness and his wife. The announcement leads to a one-day strike by members of the National Union of Journalists and the eventual overturning of the ban. A slightly edited version of the programme is shown in October. The controversy damages the Director-Generalship of Alasdair Milne who eventually resigns from the post in 1987.[27]
The War Game, made for the BBC's The Wednesday Play strand in 1965 but banned from broadcast at the time, is finally shown on television as part of BBC2's After the Bomb season.[28]
August – After a series of high-profile football hooliganism events and a dispute between the Football League and the broadcasters over revenue, televised league football is missing from British TV screens until the second half of the season. The Charity Shield and international games are the only matches screened.
1 August – The nuclear war docudrama Threads is repeated on BBC2 as part of the After the Bomb series.[29]
5 August – The popular American animated series Transformers makes its UK debut on ITV's TV-am morning programme. Each episode is split into 5 minute segments and shown over the course of the week. It is initially broadcast during Roland Rat's weekday morning slot, before moving to TV-am's subsequent children's weekday segment Wacaday in October 1985, using the same format. TV-am will also go on to show the rival animated show Gobots, several weeks later during the weekend slot Wide Awake Club.
13 August – ITV airs the American intergalactic whodunnit Murder in Space. The film is shown without the ending and a competition held for viewers to identify the murderer(s). The film's concluding 30 minutes is shown a few weeks later, with a studio of contestants eliminated one by one until the winner correctly solves the mystery. There is a prize of £10,000.
24 August – S4C airs Helfa Drysor, a pilot for a Welsh-language version of Channel 4's Treasure Hunt, with Robin Jones and Sioned Maid taking on the roles of Kenneth Kendall and Anneka Rice. The show is not picked up for a series, making the programme a one-off special.[30]
28 August – Central launches a new presentation package that sees its moon logo redesigned into a three-dimensional shape dubbed by viewers as the "Central Cake" logo.
30 August
Debut of Granada's ill-fated "continuing drama series", Albion Market. The series, set in a market in Salford and intended as a companion for Coronation Street, is panned by critics and suffers from poor ratings. It is axed a year later.
The weekday lunchtime Financial Report, broadcast on BBC1 in London and the south east, is broadcast for the final time ahead of the launch of a lunchtime regional news bulletin for viewers in the BBC South East region.
31 August – Scottish Television launches a new computer-generated ident.[31]
Ealing Cable launches Home Video Channel which shows low-budget movies devoted to horror, action/adventure, science fiction and erotica; subsequently rolled out to other cable operators by sending tapes and a copy of the programme schedule so that can be played out locally.
2 September
A regional news bulletin is broadcast after the Nine O'Clock News for the first time.[33]
BBC1's EastEnders moves from 7pm to 7:30pm to avoid clashing with ITV's Emmerdale Farm which airs in the 7pm timeslot on Tuesdays and Thursdays in many ITV regions.
7 September – The American sci-fi adventure series Otherworld makes its UK debut in the HTV region. The series is aired by the Anglia, Border, Central, Grampian and Granada regions from 2 November with most other companies starting to show it in 1986, the exception being Thames/LWT which never airs it.
8 September – BBC1 'closes down' on Sunday mornings for the final time, albeit since 1983 with broadcasts of Pages from Ceefax, as from next year repeats are shown during the adult educational Sunday morning slot's annual Summer break.
10 September – ITV airs the Wales vs Scotland World Cup qualifier from Cardiff's Ninian Park. The match, played against the backdrop of escalating football hooliganism is notable for the death of Scotland manager Jock Stein who collapses shortly before Scotland secure their place in the 1986 FIFA World Cup.
15 September – ITV airs Murder in Space: The Solution in which the puzzle of the sci-fi murder mystery is finally solved, hosted by Anneka Rice and Roger Cook (the latter making his debut for ITV).
17 September – Screensport covers, and sponsors, the Football League Super Cup, a competition designed to compensate clubs banned from European competition following the Heysel Stadium disaster.
22 September – Channel 4 celebrates 30 years of ITV with an evening of classic programmes from them.[3]
26 September - Mooncat and Co (formerly known as Get Up and Go!) is broadcast for the final time.
27 September – EastEnders begins airing on TVNZ in New Zealand, making it the first country outside the UK to air the soap.
28 September – After 20 years on the air, ITV's Saturday afternoon sports programme World of Sport is broadcast for the last time.
1 October – ORACLE revamps its service. The pages on ITV become more news focused and more regional pages are added and the content on Channel 4 becomes more magazine focussed. The changes also see the end of duplicate pages on both channels.[35]
2 October – The Times reports that Thames Television have paid the BBC £300,000 in compensation to make up for the additional costs it paid for new episodes of Dallas.[36]
3 October – Roland Rat, the puppet rodent who saved an ailing TV-am in 1983, transfers to the BBC. Commenting on the move, he says, "I saved TV-am and now I'm here to save the BBC."[37]
4 October – Puddle Lane, a television programme for preschoolers and the replacement programme for Get Up and Go!/Mooncat and Co, makes its debut on ITV.
5 October – The first weekend of horse racing is shown on Channel 4.
6 October – The final episode of the classic sitcom Open All Hours is broadcast on BBC1, although it will be rebooted in 2013 as Still Open All Hours.
28 October – An edition of ITV's World in Action series casts doubt on evidence used to convict the Birmingham Six of the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings.[38]
29–30 October – Thames broadcasts its second Telethon.
4 November – BBC2 shows the first episode of the acclaimed drama, Edge of Darkness, in which a mourning father uncovers a conspiracy around his daughter's death. Starring Bob Peck and Joanne Whalley.
11 November – The 1000th episode of Emmerdale Farm, which airs the following day, is celebrated with a special lunch attended by Princess Michael of Kent. Not recognising any of the cast members, she later admits that she never watches the show.
14 November – A special edition of Tomorrow's World examines how effective the proposed Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars) might be at destroying any nuclear weapons launched at the United States.[39]
30 November – Debut of the dating game show Blind Date on ITV, presented by Cilla Black.
4 December – Due to a clash with ITV morning broadcaster TV-am for a 0900 UK time kick off, Scottish Television production Scotsport is screened on Channel 4 for the only time, broadcasting Australia v Scotland in a 1986 Football World Cup Qualifier.
6 December – BBC1 airs John Lennon: A Journey in the Life, an Everyman special marking the fifth anniversary of the murder of John Lennon. The programme includes archive footage of Lennon, dramatisations of parts of his life and contributions from some of his friends.[40]
9 December – 25th anniversary of the first episode of Coronation Street.
22 December – Having been broadcast every Sunday teatime since the launch of BBC2 in 1964, News Review airs for the final time. It is replaced in the new year by NewsView, a Saturday early evening bulletin which combines the day's news with a look back at the week's news.
Minder on the Orient Express, is also a feature-length episode of the series Minder, and is broadcast as the highlight of ITV's Christmas Day schedule.[43]
The network television premiere of the 1980 romantic comedy film Gregory's Girl on ITV.
26 December
Boxing Day highlights on BBC1 include Tenko Reunion, a feature-length episode of Tenko that reunites the cast in a story set five years after the original series.[44]
29 December – The network television premiere of Richard Attenborough's eight-time Oscar-winning 1982 biopic Gandhi on BBC1, starring Ben Kingsley.
30 December – Channel 4 celebrates Granada's 30th birthday with an evening of programmes from the 1960s, including Bootsie and Snudge and a compilation of From the North.[3]
London Weekend Television comes to an agreement with TVS to help to fill its schedules with domestically produced programming while not having to increase its budget. This helps TVS to get more of its programmes onto the ITV network.
Swindon's cable service is rebranded as Swindon Cable and its news programme is renamed as part of this move and becomes Focus on Swindon. The channel increases the programme's frequency from twice a week to three times a week.
^"The BBC, the State and Cold War Culture: The Case of Television's The War Game (1965)". English Historical Review vol. CXXI No. 494. Oxford University Press. 2006. JSTOR4493713.
