BBC1's 1984–85 New Year's Eve special Live into 85, broadcast from Gleneagles Hotel in Scotland, is closed down early after a series of disasters.[1]
New Year's Day highlights on BBC1 include the World War II film The Guns of Navarone, and the Alan Ayckbourne play Absurd Person Singular.[2]
Channel 4 airs It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, a theme night celebrating the 1960s.[3]
Brookside is moved from Wednesdays to Mondays which means the soap can now be seen on Mondays and Tuesdays.
2 January – Channel 4 begins airing the acclaimed series A Woman of Substance, a miniseries based on the novel of the same name by Barbara Taylor Bradford. The series airs over three consecutive nights, and garners the channel an audience of 13.8 million, its largest to date.[3][4]
3–6 January – The UK's last VHF405-line television transmitters close down with transmissions in 405-lines ending in Scotland on the 4th.
4 January – Channel 4 achieves its highest ever audience as 13.8 million viewers tune in for the final part of the mini-series A Woman of Substance.
7 January – The BBC ends its experiment with afternoon broadcasting and from this date 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 9 am and 5.25 pm apart from when Daytime on Two is in season and when sporting events are being shown.
11 January – BBC2 debuts Victoria Wood as Seen on TV.[5]
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 – American television sitcom The Cosby Show is broadcast in the United Kingdom for the first time.
23 January – A debate in the House of Lords is televised for the first time.[6]
January – Thames Television makes a deal with international distributors for US production company Lorimar to purchase the UK broadcasting rights for US 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.[7] 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 in July.[8][9]
February[]
4 February – US detective drama Miami Vice makes its British television debut on BBC1, with the feature-length episode "Brother's Keeper".[10]
12 February – Debut of Television, a 13-part Granada documentary series narrated by Ian Holm that explores the history of television.
16 February – BBC1 airs the first showing on British television of John Landis' 1981 horror comedy film An American Werewolf in London, starring David Naughton, Griffin Dunne, Jenny Agutter, John Woodvine and Brian Glover, with special appearances by Frank Oz and Jim Henson from The Muppets.
18 February – BBC1 undergoes a major relaunch. At 5.35 pm, the legendary mechanical "mirror globe" ident, in use in varying forms since 1969, is seen for the last time in regular rotation on national BBC1. Its replacement, the COW (Computer Originated World, a computer-generated globe) debuts at 7.00 pm. On the same day, computer-generated graphics replace magnetic weather maps on all BBC forecasts, and Terry Wogan's eponymous talk show is relaunched as a thrice-weekly live primetime programme. EastEnders launches the following day.
19 February – EastEnders, the BBC1 soap opera, goes on air for the first time.[11]
March[]
17 March – BBC2 begins a two-part presentation 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.[12] The second part of the film is shown on 24 March.[13]
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.[14]
29 March – Play School is shown in the afternoon for the final time.[15]
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; Doctor Who would resume airing the following year.
31 March – BBC2 begins airing a season of films directed by Francis Ford Coppola, beginning with the Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now, a film inspired by the Joseph Conrad novella Heart of Darkness. This is the first showing of Apocalypse Now on British television.[16]
April[]
1 April – Bertha, another stop-motion animated series from Woodland Animations (the team behind Postman Pat), debuts 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.
May[]
5 May – As part of the VE Day 40th anniversary celebrations, ITV airs A Royal Celebration: 40 Years Of Peace, featuring the music of British artists such as Lonnie Donegan, Paul Jones, Brian Poole, Joe Brown, Wayne Fontana, Marty Wilde, and Cliff Richard.
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; the event is broadcast on television.[17]
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 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.
29 May – Heysel Stadium Disaster 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.
May – TSW unveils a computerised version of its ident.[18]
June[]
5 June – The first episode of crime drama Bulman, a spin-off from Strangers airs 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 as when Daytime on Two returns in September, the gaps are filled by interval captions and of for breaks of more than 10 minutes, the usual Ceefax miscellenary is shown.
July[]
4 July – Debut of Tandoori Nights, a sitcom about rival Indian restaurants in London's Brick Lane starring Saeed Jaffrey, and Channel 4's first Asian comedy.
6 July – For the first time ever on British television, US sitcom Family Ties starts airing on Channel 4.
7 July – Debut on BBC1 of The Rock 'n' Roll Years, a series that looks at the music and events of a particular year, starting with 1956.[19]
13 July – Live Aid pop concerts are held in Philadelphia and London and televised around the world. Over £50 million is raised for famine relief in Ethiopia.[20]
14 July – Watchdog launches as a stand-alone programme[21] having previously been a segment within teatime news magazine programmes Nationwide and Sixty Minutes.
27 July – BBC2 airs "Blues Night", an Arena special dedicated to the Blues, and featuring artists from the genre, including Sonny Boy Williamson, B. B. King, Blind John Davis, and Big Bill Broonzy.[22]
30 July – Debut of the pop music culture series No Limits on BBC2.[23]
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.[24]
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.[25]
August[]
August – After a series of high-profile football hooliganism and a dispute between the Football League and the broadcasters over revenue, televised league football is missing from British 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.[26]
5 August – Central Television launches a new presentation package that sees its moon logo redesigned into a three-dimensional shape.
13 August – ITV airs the US intergalactic whodunit 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 are 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.[27]
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.[28]
September[]
1 September – Debut of the drama series Howards' Way on BBC1.[29]
2 September – A regional news bulletin is broadcast after the Nine O'Clock News for the first time.[30]
3 September – BBC1's EastEnders moves from 7.00 pm to 7.30 pm to avoid clashing with ITV's Emmerdale Farm, which airs in the 7.00 pm timeslot on Tuesdays and Thursdays in many ITV regions.
7 September – The American sci-fi adventure series Otherworld makes its British television debut in the HTV region. The series is aired by the Anglia, Border, Central, Grampian and Granada regions from 2 November 1985, with most other companies starting to screen it in 1986 (the exception being Thames/LWT which never aired it).
8 September – BBC1 'closes down' (albeit since 1983 with broadcasts of Pages from Ceefax) on Sunday mornings for the final time 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.
22 September – Channel 4 celebrates 30 years of ITV with an evening of classic ITV programmes.[3]
27 September – EastEnders begins airing on TVNZ in New Zealand, making New Zealand the first country outside the UK to air the series.
28 September – After 20 years ITV's Saturday afternoon sports programme World of Sport is aired for the last time.
October[]
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.[32]
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.[33]
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."[34]
5 October – The first weekend horse racing is shown on Channel 4.
28 October – A documentary in ITV's World in Action series casts doubt on evidence used to convict the Birmingham Six of the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings.[35]
29–30 October – Thames broadcasts its second Telethon.
November[]
11 November – The 1,000th 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.[36]
December[]
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.[37]
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 is broadcast 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.
25 December –
Christmas Day highlights on BBC1 include the premiere of Jim Henson's Muppet Babies, and a Wogan special in which Terry Wogan travels to Denver to meet the actors who portray members of the Carrington family from US soap Dynasty.[38]Roland Rat also appears in the Christmas Day schedule with Roland's Yuletide Binge, a general entertainment programme featuring guests including Russell Grant, Frankie Howerd, Jan Leeming, Ian McCaskill, Beryl Reid, and Valerie Singleton.[39]
Minder on the Orient Express, a feature-length episode of the television series Minder, receives its UK television debut as the highlight of ITV's Christmas Day schedule.[40]
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.[41]
Boxing Day highlights on ITV include the British television premiere of the 1982 political thriller Who Dares Wins, starring Lewis Collins, Judy Davis, Edward Woodward, and Richard Widmark.
29 December – BBC1 airs the British television premiere of Richard Attenborough's 8 time Oscar-winning biopic Gandhi starring Ben Kingsley
30 December – Channel 4 celebrates Granada Television's 30th birthday with an evening of programmes from the 1960s, including Bootsie and Snudge and a compilation of From the North.[3]
31 December – New Year's Eve highlights on BBC1 include Gone with the Wind, The Magnificent Seven, and a version of Terence Ratigan's The Browning Version with Ian Holm, while Terry Wogan welcomes in 1986 from BBC Television Centre.[42]
Unknown[]
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 re-branded as Swindon Cable and its news programme is renamed as part of this move and becomes . The channel increased the programme's frequency from twice a week to three times a week.
Debuts[]
BBC1[]
2 January –
3 January – Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds (1981–1982)
^"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.