On BBC2, New Year's Day highlights include the network television premieres of Radio Days and Australia.[2]
2 January – BBC1 shows the network television premiere of The Accused, a graphic and disturbing film starring Jodie Foster, loosely based on the 1983 Cheryl Araujo case.[3]
4 January – BBC2 airs Freddie Mercury: a Tribute, a special programme introduced by Elton John and that celebrates the life and work of Freddie Mercury, who died in 1991.[4]
14 January – The Dreamstone, the children's animated series returns for a brand new series and second season on ITV.
21 January – BBC Select launches overnight on BBC1 and BBC2 as a subscription service showing specialist programmes for professionals including businessmen, lawyers, teachers and nurses. The service ends in 1994.
31 January — The Adult Channel is launched, a satellite-delivered subscription service that featured cable versions of adult movies and broadcasts four hours a day commencing from midnight to 4am.
27 February – BBC 1 airs "Cascade", the sixth series finale of Casualty.[9] The episode, featuring a plane crash and originally scheduled to air on 20 December 1991, was postponed because the airdate fell on the eve of the third anniversary of the Lockerbie air disaster.
February – TV-am closes its in-house news service and contracts out news bulletins to Sky News.
4 March – Sky One begins airing the Australian "adult soap" Chances on Wednesdays and Thursdays at 9.00pm. However, after proving unpopular with viewers, it drops to one episode a week and is shown on Thursdays at 10.00pm, before ending in early 1993. The series is repeated in a late night slot in 1995, but on both occasions of its transmission the final nineteen episodes are not shown.
6 March – ITV airs "If Only We Hadn't", the final new episode of Rainbow to be produced by Thames Television. The programme continues to air until 31 December, but with repeats of previous episodes.
5 April – The Australian soap E Street makes its British television debut on Sky One with a two-hour pilot, before picking up the series at Episode 43 the following day (the opening episodes having achieved poor ratings in Australia). Due to the violent nature of some of the soap's storylines and its broadcast before the 9.00pm watershed, some episodes are heavily edited for their UK transmission.
14 May – Final onscreen appearance of Willy, one of two EastEnders dogs to have appeared in the show since the first episode (the other being Roly). Having been killed off in the series, the dog who played Willy dies on 30 May, two weeks after his final scenes are shown.
18 May – It is announced that Sky Sports will provide live coverage of football's new Premier League. It will show two live matches a week, on Sunday afternoon and Monday evening. Sky have outbid ITV Sport for the rights, with highlights awarded to the BBC, meaning the return of Match of the Day on a weekly basis.
24 May – BBC1 airs the Everyman documentary "E is for Ecstasy", a film exploring the use of the Ecstasy drug in rave culture.[14]
25 May – BBC1 shows the British network television premiere of Psycho III.[15]
June
9–10 June – Episodes 1450–1454 of Australian soap Neighbours are heavily censored by the BBC because they contain an incest storyline between the characters Glen Donnelly (played by Richard Huggett) and Lucy Robinson (Melissa Bell), who had not realised they were half-siblings when they began a relationship. Scenes involving the story are cut from Episode 1450, aired on 9 June, while Episodes 1451–1454 are edited together into one episode, which is transmitted the following day.[16][17] The scenes were shown uncut in repeats aired by another channel some years later.[18]
21 June – ITV airs the first of four editions of Frankie's On..., a series of stand up shows recorded by the late Frankie Howerd shortly before his death in April. Six episodes had been planned, but only four were recorded before he died. The episodes are Frankie's On Board!, Frankie's On The Coals!, Frankie's On Fire! and Frankie's On Call!
25 June – A British adaptation of the US informational docudrama television series Rescue 911 known as 999 begins on BBC1 airing for 11 years up until 2003.
26 June – The final lunchtime edition of Business Daily is shown on Channel 4. The breakfast editions, which are part of Channel Four Daily, continue for another three months.
29 June – Susie Dent premieres as lexicographer on Countdown, a role she holds to this day.
June – Yorkshire and Tyne Tees television merge as a result of financial strain brought on by the amount each paid to retain their ITV franchises.[20] The merger begins a process that will see the consolidation of ITV over the next decade.
July
3 July –
Columbia TriStar and Canwest, two backers of the four strong Channel 5 Holdings Ltd consortium, withdraw their support for the project, leaving Thames Television and Canadian businessman Moses Znaimer to take the project forward. As Channel 5 Holdings are the only current bidders for the Channel 5 licence there are concerns for the future of the process ahead of the deadline, but Channel 5 Holdings says it intends to put forward its bid as planned.[21]
After more than seven years on air, Terry Wogan's thrice-weekly chat show Wogan is broadcast for the final time.[22][23]
6 July – BBC1 launches the ill-fated Eldorado, a soap about a group of ex-pats living in Spain.[24] The series is axed the following year.
7 July – Date of the initial deadline for applications to run the Channel 5 service. One application to run the channel is submitted by Channel 5 Holdings Ltd.[11]
18–19 July – ITV stages its third and final nationwide Telethon fundraising effort. The 28-hour show attracts criticism from disability campaigners, who protest outside London Weekend Television's headquarters, feeling that ITV's charity appeal films for the programme used "pitiful" stereotypes that would not help them to achieve equality.[25]
19 July – Vanessa Binns wins the 1992 series of MasterChef.
25 July−9 August – The BBC becomes the exclusive broadcaster of the Summer Olympic Games in the UK when it shows live coverage of the 1992 Summer Olympics. Around 15 hours a day of mainly live coverage is provided although Games coverage is interrupted for coverage of other sport, mostly cricket and horse racing, rather than showing non-Olympic sport on the other BBC channel.
4 August – ITV airs Katie and Eilish, an edition of the documentary strand First Tuesday about Siamese Twins in Ireland. The film, narrated by Julie Christie is a 1993 Peabody Award winner.[26]
6 August – Lord Hope, the Lord President of the Court of Session, Scotland's most senior judge, permits the televising of appeals in both criminal and civil cases, the first time that cameras have been allowed into courts in the United Kingdom.[27]
15 August –
Match of the Day returns to BBC screens on a weekly basis following the BBC's purchase of highlights of the newly formed Premier League.
Sky Sports launches Sports Saturday to co-inside with the launch of the new Premier League. It follows the same format as the BBC's Grandstand programme featuring a mix of sporting action, concluding with the day's football results.
16 August – Sky Sports shows its first live Premier League match. The channel launches an afternoon-long football programme called Super Sunday which allows for two hours of pre-match build-up and one hour of post match analysis.
18 August – Emma Bunton, who would later achieve fame as a member of the Spice Girls, makes her television acting debut in an episode of EastEnders, playing a mugger.
20 August – Central Television broadcasts the final episode of the Australian soap The Young Doctors, making it the first ITV region to complete the series.
21 August – The final edition of London Weekend Television's Friday evening magazine programme Six O'Clock Live is aired; the programme is ending to make way for changes to London's regional news service for ITV that will come in from January 1993.
Sky Movies stops showing non-movies programming. It had previously shown selected premium content such as live boxing, music concerts and World Wrestling Federation due to it having being Sky's only encrypted channel and had been known as Sky Movies Plus until 1 September 1993 before the launch of the multi-channels package.
6 September – Channel 4 launches its live coverage of Italian football's Serie A. The first match to be shown is Sampdoria v Lazio. The channel continues to show Italian football for the next ten years.[31]
12 September –
Casualty returns to BBC 1 for a seventh series,[32] moving from its previous Friday evening slot to Saturday evenings.
Comedienne Victoria Wood narrates and voices a new animated series for children on BBC1 called Puppydog Tales. The series focus on four dogs lead by the streetwise Rosie in which she tries to teach her naughty friend Ruff some lessons along with jokes, stories and songs that appear at the very end.[33]
25 September – Channel 4 airs the final Channel Four Daily. The news based breakfast television show was axed due to poor ratings. From Monday 28 September it is replaced by The Big Breakfast, a programme which takes a lighter tone and proves to be more popular with viewers.
Comedian and television presenter Leslie Crowther sustains serious head injuries after his Rolls Royce veers out of control and crashes on the M5 near Cheltenham. He subsequently undergoes surgery to remove a blood clot on his brain.[36][37]
20 October – Channel 4 airs Burning Books on Sex, a programme reviewing Madonna's book, Sex which is published the following day. On 21 October the channel airs Ross Meets Madonna, in which Jonathan Ross talks to the singer.
29 October – Veteran children's television presenters Andy Crane and Violet Berlin present a brand new factual program including videogames and computer technology called Bad Influence!.
31 October – The controversial one-off drama Ghostwatch is broadcast on BBC1, a 'live' investigation into a haunted North London house.[42][43]
November
1 November – UK Gold is launched. It is a joint venture between the BBC and Thames Television and shows programmes from the archives of both broadcasters.
2 November – Channel 4 celebrates ten years on air. On that day, the Fourscore theme used in the idents is replaced.
3 November – An artile in Variety magazine indicates that a number of American companies are interested in acquiring TVS, including TCW Capital, International Family Entertainment Inc. (IFE) and Lorne Michaels.[44] TCW Capital subsequently goes on to make an offer to rival IFE,[45] but pulls out a few weeks later after reviewing the TVS accounts.[46]
9 November – ITV's News at Ten was given its first major relaunch, in part to address the criticism it had attracted over the last few years. In a bid to regain the personal touch that had been lost, the programme dispensed with the dual-presentation team in favour of a sole newscaster, Trevor McDonald, who subsequently became one of the most well-known newscasters in the UK. Julia Somerville, John Suchet and Dermot Murnaghan each presented News at Ten when McDonald was absent. The bulletin carried this format until 5 March 1999.
20 November – Bob Mills presents a late night programme on ITV set in his home called In Bed with Medinner in which he specialised in a cynical view of life and its everyday objects, and in pastiches of popular culture icons.
26 November – The Times reports that IFE have increased their offer to purchase TVS to £45.3m.[48]
30 November – To mark the 53rd European Council meeting, held in Edinburgh on 11–12 December, BBC1 Scotland begins a week of programming dedicated to Europe, including comedy, sport, documentaries and political programmes. Reporting Scotland also carries a week of reports about Britain's relationship with Europe.
11 December – The Times reports that IFE's bid to buy TVS has been blocked on technical grounds by Julian Tregar amid concerns that the offer is too low.[51]
17 December – Ahead of the loss of its franchise, the final edition of the Thames Television-produced current affairs series This Week is broadcast.
20 December – The famous classic children's stories written and illustrated by beloved author and illustrator Beatrix Potter are brought to life with traditional hand drawn animation from TVC London (the company behind the UK's best known animated works such as Yellow Submarine, Father Christmas and The Snowman) in a brand new animated series The World of Peter Rabbit and Friends. The series will be played on BBC1 starting off with The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny (as The Tale of Peter Rabbit was the first book Potter wrote and Peter always comes first).
Channel 4's testcard ETP-1 is shown for the final time.
Sky stops broadcasting via the Marco Polo satellite.
December – The ITC rejects the Channel 5 Holdings Ltd bid to run the UK's fifth television channel amid concerns about its business plan and investor commitment to the project.[11]
Joshua Jones (1992)
/
Bucky O'Hare and the Toad Wars (1991)
/
The Night of the Red Hunter (1989)
Peter Pan and the Pirates (1990–1991)
Funnybones (1992)
G.P. (1989–1996)
The Magic Roundabout
