New Year's Day highlights on BBC1 include the first network television showing of Michael Jackson's 1987 film Moonwalker.[1]
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]
7 January –
Channel 4 debuts its brand new show GamesMaster, presented by Dominik Diamond and Patrick Moore.
Debut of Cold Blood – The Massacre of East Timor, an edition of the documentary strand First Tuesday concerning the Santa Cruz massacre.[5]
Children's stop motion puppet series Joshua Jones made and produced by Bumper Films the company behind Fireman Sam screens on BBC1.[6]
13 January – The Parliamentary Channel, operated by United Artists Cable and funded by a consortium of British cable operators,[7] is launched.[8]
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 launches, a satellite-delivered subscription service featuring cable versions of adult movies and top quality erotic programmes which broadcasts four hours a day commencing from midnight to 4.00 am.
February[]
8 February – Channel 4 launches TV Heaven, a series of 13 themed Saturday evenings celebrating the best of archive British television. The programme is hosted by Frank Muir with each edition focusing (with one exception) on a particular year. The first week's episode takes a look at 1967, featuring classic episodes of Coronation Street, At Last the 1948 Show, Armchair Theatre and The Frost Programme.
8–22 February – The BBC provides live and recorded coverage of the 1992 Winter Olympic Games.
15 February – ITV airs the network television premiere of Leonard Nimoy's 1987 comedy film Three Men and a Baby, starring Tom Selleck, Steve Guttenberg and Ted Danson.
19 February - To outcry and scandal, Channel Four airs an episode of Dispatches entitled 'Beyond Belief', claiming to reveal video footage of Satanic ritual abuse. The footage was quickly revealed to be a performance art piece by Psychick TV called 'First Transmission'.
25 February – Children's television series Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends is revived on ITV with Michael Angelis taking over as storyteller, replacing Ringo Starr just after two series.
27 February – BBC1 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.
March[]
2 March – The News at 5.40 is renamed ITN Early Evening News.
4 March – Sky One begins airing the Australian "adult soap" Chances on Wednesdays and Thursdays at 9.00 pm. However, after proving unpopular with viewers, it drops to one episode a week and is shown on Thursdays at 10.00 pm, 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 19 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.
9 March – The Learning Channel, based on the American network of the same name, launches on cable.
26 March – Television entertainer Roy Castle (59), who currently presents Record Breakers, announces that he is suffering from lung cancer.
27 March – During the 1992 General Election campaign, Conservative MP Edwina Currie famously pours a glass of orange juice over Labour's Peter Snape shortly after an edition of the Midlands based debate show Central Weekend has finished airing.[10] Speaking about the incident later, Currie said "I just looked at my orange juice and looked at this man from which this stream of abuse was emanating and thought 'I know how to shut you up.' ".[10]
28 March – Amanda Normansell wins the third series of Stars in Their Eyes, performing as Patsy Cline.
April[]
4 April – The final edition of Saturday morning show Motormouth is broadcast.[11][12] The programme ends following the announcement that TVS will lose its ITV franchise at the end of 1992.[13]
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 9.00 pm watershed, some episodes are heavily edited for their UK transmission.
6 April – Ahead of the election, Sue Lawley presents an edition of The Granada 500 in which a studio audience are given the opportunity to question the three main party leaders; John Major (Conservative), Neil Kinnock (Labour) and Paddy Ashdown (Liberal Democrats).
9–10 April – Coverage of the results of the 1992 general election are broadcast on BBC1, ITV and for the first time on Sky News.
10 April – ITV airs the first episode of Heartbeat, a long running police drama set in North Yorkshire during the 1960s.
20 April – The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert for AIDS Awareness, an open-air concert in tribute to the late Freddie Mercury is held at London's Wembley Stadium. The concert is broadcast on BBC2 in the UK and televised worldwide.[15][16]
25 April –
Interactive music video channel The Box launches in the UK. It is initially carried by four operators UA, Telewest in London and Bristol, Nynex in the south of England, and Videotron, which is also based in London and over the next few years, The Box is rolled out on a regional basis across all of the United Kingdom's cable system.
Parallel 9 replaces The 8.15 from Manchester as BBC1's Saturday morning summer magazine programme.
May[]
2 May – TV Heaven draws to a close after thirteen weeks, with a selection of programmes from 1968: an episode of Please Sir!, "The Cats Eyes Man", an edition of The World of Whicker, an edition of Do Not Adjust Your Set, and "The Girl Who Was Death", an episode of The Prisoner.
8 May – Liberal Democrat MP, and subsequent leader, Charles Kennedy makes his debut appearance as a panellist on the BBC satirical news quiz Have I Got News for You.
9 May – Ireland's Linda Martin wins the 1992 Eurovision Song Contest with "Why Me?".
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 supply live coverage of football's new Premier League. It will show two live matches a week, on Sunday afternoon and Monday evening. Sky outbid ITV Sport for the rights. The highlights contract is 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.[17]
25 May – BBC1 shows the British network television premiere of Psycho III.[18]
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.[19][20] The scenes were shown uncut in repeats aired by UK Gold in 1998.[21][22][23]
10-26 June – The BBC and ITV show live coverage of Euro 92.
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 American 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 because of financial strain brought on by the amount each paid to keep their ITV franchises.[25] The merger begins a process that will see the consolidation of ITV over the next decade.
July[]
1 July – The former BSB satellite Marcopolo 2 is sold to Norway's Telenor and renamed Thor 1.
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.[26]
After more than seven years on air, Terry Wogan's thrice-weekly chat show Wogan is broadcast for the final time.[27][28]
6 July – BBC1 launches the ill-fated Eldorado, a soap about a group of ex-pats living in Spain.[29] 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.[14]
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.[30]
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 live coverage is supplied 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. Eurosport also shows the event and devotes its entire output to the Games.
August[]
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.[31]
6 August – Lord Hope, the Lord President of the Court of Session, Scotland's most senior judge allows the televising of appeals in both criminal and civil cases, the first time that cameras have been allowed into courts in the United Kingdom.[32]
15 August –
Match of the Day returns to BBC1 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.
17 August – Monday Night Football makes its debut on Sky Sports. This is the first time that domestic football has been shown in the UK on Monday evenings.
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.
30 August – BBC1 airs the network television premiere of Dad, Gary David Goldberg's 1989 comedy drama starring Jack Lemmon and Ted Danson, and based on the novel of the same name by William Wharton.[33]
31 August – BBC2 spends the evening in TV Hell.[34]
September[]
1 September –
Sky Sports becomes a subscription channel.
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 been Sky's only encrypted channel and had been known as Sky Movies Plus until 1 September 1993 before the launch of the multichannels package.
4 September – London Weekend Television launches a new logo, sometimes dubbed the flying blocks logo.
5 September – The first edition of ITV's new Saturday morning show What's Up Doc? is broadcast. It alternates with Gimme 5 as ITV's Saturday morning children's show.
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.[35]
12 September –
Casualty returns to BBC1 for a seventh series,[36] moving from its previous Friday evening slot to Saturday evenings.
Channel 4 airs the first edition of its magazine programme Gazzetta Football Italia, presented by James Richardson.[35]
14 September – British television premiere of American animated series originally created for the Fox Children's Network, Peter Pan and the Pirates on BBC1.
17 September –
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.[37]
Children's stop-motion animated series Noddy's Toyland Adventures based on the original works by Enid Blyton debuts on BBC1.[38]
19 September – The Times reports that the US media company International Family Entertainment (IFE) has made an offer to buy TVS for £38.2m.[39]
23 September – Channel 4 begins a rerun of the cult 1960s science fiction series The Prisoner starring Patrick McGoohan as the series marks its 25th anniversary.
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.
October[]
1 October – Sky Movies Gold, a channel dedicated to classic movies, launches. It replaces The Comedy Channel.
3 October –
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.[40][41]
British television premiere of the James Bond filmThe Living Daylights on ITV.[42]
5 October – Sky One debuts Star Trek: The Next Generation, it was initially run to showing five nights a week from Monday to Friday at 5.00 pm, and the series all the way up to the penultimate episode of the sixth season (on 16 August a year later) but prior to that the first run rights in Britain had been on BBC2 to broadcast every episode from the first episode to a two-part special, with the exception of this banned episode until 2007.
8 October – BBC2 airs the first edition of Later... with Jools Holland. Artists and groups featuring on this edition are The Neville Brothers, The Christians, Nu Colours and D'Influence.[43]
10 October – Gladiators, a British adaptation of the American competition programme of the same name, premieres on ITV.
12 October – Anne Diamond and Nick Owen present a brand new daytime programme on BBC1 called Good Morning with Anne and Nick. A potential rival to ITV's This Morning, the programme reunites Diamond and Owen, who had previously presented together on Good Morning Britain during the 1980s.[44][45]
14 October – ITV airs the network television premiere of John McTiernan's 1988 action thriller film Die Hard, starring Bruce Willis, Alan Rickman, Bonnie Bedelia, Reginald VelJohnson and Paul Gleason.
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 programme 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.[46][47]
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 article 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.[48] TCW Capital subsequently goes on to make an offer to rival IFE,[49] but pulls out a few weeks later after reviewing the TVS accounts.[50]
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.
12 November – The first episode of Absolutely Fabulous, a sitcom written by and starring Jennifer Saunders, airs on BBC2. The series also features Joanna Lumley, Julia Sawalha, Jane Horrocks and June Whitfield.[51]
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 £45.3 million.[52]
28 November – BBC1 shows the network television premiere of Tremors, Ron Underwood's 1990 monster comedy starring Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward.[53]
29 November – Sky One airs an unseen third season's episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation for the first time, it was never shown on BBC2 until 29 September 2007 due to references to the reunification of Ireland being achieved through terrorism in Northern Ireland between the Provisional Irish Republican Army and the Troubles.
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.[55]
17 December – Ahead of the loss of its franchise, the final edition of the Thames Television-produced current affairs series This Week is broadcast.
18 December – After 30 years on air, Police 5 is broadcast on ITV for the final time. It was broadcast on TVS and ended ahead of TVS losing its broadcasting franchise and after negotiations with the next franchise holder, Meridian Broadcasting, it was decided to continue with the programme.[56]
As part of a theme night devoted to (rival) broadcaster Granada Television, BBC2 airs the first new edition of University Challenge in five years.[61] The programme returns for a full series two years later, presented by Jeremy Paxman.[62]
29 December – BBC1 airs the first network television showing of the Dian Fossey biopic Gorillas in the Mist.[63]
30 December – BBC2 airs Unplugged – Eric Clapton, in which Eric Clapton plays acoustic versions of some of his tracks.[64]
31 December –
After losing its broadcasting franchise, Thames Television goes off air after 24 years. Television South, Television South West, breakfast television station's TV-am and ITV and Channel 4teletext service ORACLE also go off air after losing their franchises.
Channel 4's testcard ETP-1 is shown for the final time.
Sky stops broadcasting via the Marcopolo 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.[14]