New Year's Day highlights on BBC1 include the network television premieres of the science fiction drama SpaceCamp and the 1987 cult vampire film The Lost Boys.[1]
The puppet Gordon the Gopher returns to television with a 13-episode series on BBC1.
7 January – BBC1 launches the local news programme, BBC East Midlands Today for the East Midlands region. News coverage for the area had previously been provided by a seven-minute opt out from the Birmingham-based Midlands Today.[2]
17 January–2 March – Regular programming is suspended to bring live coverage of the Gulf War after Allied Forces launch Operation Desert Storm against Iraq. Over the coming weeks, there is extended coverage of events in the Persian Gulf. On BBC1, in addition to extended and additional news bulletins, a special daytime news analysis programme War in the Gulf, presented by David Dimbleby, is broadcast, although as the war progresses the length of each programme and frequency of broadcast is scaled back. ITV also broadcasts additional news and discussion programmes about the war, including all-night coverage during the early stages of the conflict and Channel 4 broadcasts a two-hour special programme at midnight as well as Saturday editions of The Channel 4 Daily. Some coverage, particularly in the earlier part of the war, comes from CNN. Sky News presents round-the-clock coverage and UK viewers are also able to watch rolling coverage on CNN.
18 January – BBC2 airs a special edition of Arena in which playwright Arthur Miller meets ANC leader Nelson Mandela. In the show, Mandela talks for the first time about his life and experiences from a personal standpoint.[5]
19 January
The 17 January edition of Top of the Pops is broadcast, having been postponed from that date due to extended news coverage of the Gulf War.[6]
Debut of the comedy talk show The Full Wax on BBC1, starring Ruby Wax.
28 January – Oliver Reed appears on an edition of the late-night Channel 4 discussion programme After Dark discussing militarism, masculine stereotypes and violence to women. Reed drinks alcohol during the broadcast, leading him to become drunk, aggressive and incoherent.[7] He refers to another member of the panel who has a moustache as a 'tache' and uses offensive language. After one hour, Reed returns from the toilet and getting more to drink, rolls on top of the noted feminist author Kate Millett. The show is briefly taken off the air following a hoax call to the station claiming that Channel 4 boss Michael Grade is furious.
12 February – A year after the release of Nelson Mandela from prison, BBC2 airs an edition of its Assignment documentary strand in which journalist Donald Woods returns to South Africa to give his personal assessment of that country's future.[8]
15 February – At the close of this day's programmes, the COW ident is seen for the final time on BBC1 after six years and the BBC2 'TWO' ident is also seen for the final time after five years.
16 February
Both BBC1 and BBC2 receive new idents, both generated from laserdisc and featuring the BBC corporate logo introduced in 1986. BBC1 features a numeral '1' encased in a globe and BBC2 features eleven idents based around a numeral '2'. Also on this day, new idents for Open University programmes come into use.
25 February – Debut of the children's series Radio Roo on BBC1, starring Wayne Jackman.[9]
26 February – Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein announces the withdrawal of Iraqi troops from Kuwait. As the war comes to its conclusion, television programming begins to return to normal.
1 March – The monopoly on listings magazines ends with the deregulation of TV listings. Before today, Radio Times published only BBC listings and TVTimes ITV only (and from 1982, Channel 4, including S4C in a pull-out supplement Sbec). However, from this day, they can carry listings for all channels. Newspapers are also allowed to publish 7-day listings for the first time, having previously been able to publish only the present day's (and two days on Saturdays). A raft of listings magazines and supplements starts up in the wake of the changes.[10]
3 March – Following the conclusion of the Gulf War, the ITN Early Morning News is halved in length and now goes on the air at 5:30am. From this point, the ITN World News is no longer broadcast as part of the bulletin.
9 March – While appearing as a guest on the ITV chat show Aspel & Company, singer Rod Stewart takes off his shoes and tosses them into the audience.
18 March – ITV broadcasts World in Action Special: The Birmingham Six – Their Own Story, a documentary that airs four days after the release of the wrongly convicted 'Birmingham Six'.[12] It is later nominated for a BAFTA award.[13]
30 March – Frederick Wiseman's six and a half-hour documentary Near Death, on life in a Boston intensive care unit, is broadcast in full by Channel 4.[14]
The final episode of the sitcom Brush Strokes is broadcast on BBC1.
8 April
The Power Station, one of the channels to have survived the BSB merger with Sky, closes down at 4am after it was decided that the American MTV would be used as the music channel on BSkyB's Astra satellite service.
Channel 4's three-week Banned season features a series of films and programmes which have previously been banned from British television or cinema.[16] The season includes the network television premieres of Scum, Monty Python's Life of Brian and Sebastiane. There is also a second broadcast of the controversial 1988 Thames documentary Death on the Rock which investigated the shooting of three members of the IRA by the SAS in Gibraltar. The season proves to be controversial and Channel 4 is investigated by the Obscene Publications Squad and referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions.[17]
9 April – Derek Nimmo makes a cameo appearance in Australian soap Neighbours as an eccentric English aristocrat, the episode having debuted in Australia on 26 February 1990.[18]
15 April — BSB's films channel The Movie Channel launches on the Astra 1B satellite.
16 April – The network television premiere of Monty Python's Life of Brian as part of Channel 4's Banned season.
20 April – The Sports Channel on BSB is rebranded as Sky Sports.
29 April – On an edition of Terry Wogan's evening chat show Wogan and amid howls of laughter from the studio audience, footballer-turned-public speaker David Icke claims that he is "the son of God" and that Britain will be devastated by tidal waves and earthquakes.[19] He later says that he had been misinterpreted and that he had used the term "the son of God" to mean an "aspect" of the Infinite consciousness.[20] The interview proves devastating for him. The BBC is later criticised for allowing the interview to go ahead, with Des Christy in The Guardian calling it a "media crucifixion."[21]
30 April – Debut of the long-running snooker-based game show Big Break on BBC1, presented by Jim Davidson.
3 May – The Girl from Tomorrow, a 12-part Australian children's series about a girl from the future who finds herself trapped in 1990 makes its UK debut on BBC1.[22]
5 May – BBC1 airs the final season of the US drama series Dallas, this time being shown on Sunday afternoons just two days after the final episode has been aired in the US.
The Movie Channel begins broadcasting 24 hours a day.[24] Previously the channel has been on air from early afternoon until the early hours of the next morning.
13 May – ITV airs an edition of World in Action making allegations of malpractice in the Irish beef processing industry. The programme leads to the establishment of the Beef Tribunal which is to become Ireland's longest public inquiry at this time.[25][26]
20 May – The final episode of ThunderCats is broadcast on BBC1.
22 May – Eurosport resumes broadcasting after TF1 Group steps in to replace BSkyB as their joint owners.
May – Midweek Sports Special ends after 13 years when all the English regions opt out for their own midweek sports shows. The programme continues in London as Thames Sports Special.
The murder of Harry Collinson, the planning officer for Derwentside District Council, takes place at Butsfield, County Durham while television news crews are filming for a news item about a planning dispute. At the time of the murder, the Derwentside District Council is involved in the dispute with Albert Dryden over the erection of a building by Dryden on green belt land without planning permission and as television crews are filming, Dryden aims a handgun, a .455 Webley Mk VI revolver at Collinson and shoots him dead. As the journalists and council staff flee, Dryden opens fire again, wounding television reporter Tony Belmont and Police Constable Stephen Campbell.[31][32][33][34] Dryden is convicted of Collinson's murder following a trial in April the following year. Additionally, he is also convicted of the attempted murder of council solicitor Michael Dunstan and the wounding of Campbell and Belmont. He is sentenced to life imprisonment.[35][36]
An edition of BBC2's The Late Show is the final programme to be broadcast from the BBC's Lime Grove Studios.
30 June – Channel 4 airs the first episode of Family Pride, the first British soap to feature a predominantly Asian cast. The series is produced by Central and is also shown on ITV in the Midlands region.
14–25 July – Sky Sports broadcasts full live coverage of the 1991 World Student Games which are held in the UK. This is the only time that Sky has broadcast a multi-sport event and it is the only time the event has been broadcast live.
22 July – BBC1 airs an extended edition of Wogan in which Terry Wogan meets and talks to the pop star Madonna.[37]
24 July – The final programme to be recorded at the BBC Television Theatre in Shepherd's Bush is broadcast, an edition of Wogan recorded on 18 July.
29 July–2 August – Tim Brooke-Taylor and Lisa Aziz present QD – The Master Game, a game that aired over five nights on Channel 4 and comprised mental and physical challenges.[14]
30 July – The Australian children's series Johnson and Friends makes its UK debut on BBC2.[38]
31 July
Pavarotti in the Park, a concert celebrating thirty years of Luciano Pavarotti's operatic career, is held in London's Hyde Park. The concert is attended by an audience of 125,000 who gather despite the wet weather and is broadcast to thirty countries. In the UK, the concert is aired by Sky.[39]
3 August – The network television premiere of the comedy thriller Spies, Lies & Naked Thighs on BBC1, starring Ed Begley Jr.[40]
9 August – Channel 4 debuts the hit HBO comedy series Dream On, one of the first US shows to feature uncensored profanity and nudity.
14 August – BBC1 airs Mozart in London, the first of a three-part series marking the bicentenary of his death and in which his earliest pieces are performed by children of about the same age as he was when he wrote them. It is the first time this has been done on British television.[41]
23 August–1 September – Eurosport airs the World Athletics Championships for the first time. The event is also shown on the BBC.
26 August
BBC2 airs a day of programmes paying tribute to the Lime Grove Studios which closed the previous month and includes a remake of the 1950s soap opera The Grove Family featuring stars from the present day.
5 September – The actor Arthur Pentelow who died on 6 August, makes his final on-screen appearance as Henry Wilks in Emmerdale. The character dies off-screen on 3 October.
9 September – New idents launch on Children's BBC, featuring the BBC corporate logo.
11 September – ITV airs Thatcher: The Final Days, a dramatisation of the final days of Margaret Thatcher's premiership. The film stars Sylvia Syms as the former Prime Minister.
13 September – The documentary The Leader, His Driver and the Driver's Wife airs on Channel 4. It is set during the final days of the apartheid regime in South Africa, particularly centering on Eugène Terre'Blanche, founder and leader of the far-right, white supremacist political organisation AWB. A year later, Channel 4 faces its first libel case by Jani Allan, a South African journalist who objected to her representation in the documentary.[45]
14 September – Channel 4 airs "A Night in Japan", a night of programmes dedicated to all things Japanese, from 8pm to 6am.[14]
20 September – BBC2 begins a rerun of Gerry Anderson's classic 1960s series Thunderbirds.[47] The series proves to be popular, leading to a shortage of Tracy Island toys in stores during the run up to Christmas, something that prompts Blue Peter to show viewers and their parents how to make their own Tracy Island model.[48] An instruction sheet produced by the programme receives more than 100,000 requests.[49]
21 September – More than eight years after launching a weekday breakfast television service, the BBC launches a five-minute long weekend breakfast news bulletin.[50]
6 October – BBC1 airs Conundrum, the final episode of the original run of Dallas. The feature-length episode imagines a world in which the soap's central character, J. R. Ewing, had not existed.[53]
After a five-year absence, Pebble Mill returns to BBC1.
16 October – The ITV franchise auction results are announced and take effect starting midnight on 1 January 1993. It will see many notable names going off air after losing their franchises, including Thames, TVS, TSW, TV-am and ORACLE Teletext. Central is, however, unopposed in bidding to retain its franchise
19 October – The final edition of Channel Television's TV listings magazine, CTV Times is published. It had remained on sale long after the other ITV regions had replaced their listings magazine with the TVTimes in the South of England edition along with TVS as it had been feared that Channel Television might cease trading without the revenue from its own magazine.
15 November – BBC World Service Television begins broadcasting via satellite to Pearl River Delta, a subsidiary of STAR TV and owner of News Corporation, a conglomerate of Rupert Murdoch, a member of Hutchison Whampoa.
17 November – Debut of Biteback on BBC1, a monthly programme that gives viewers a right-to-reply on issues raised by BBC content, presented by Julian Pettifer.[56]
15–16 December – ITV airs Heroes II: The Return, a British-Australian miniseries about Operation Rimau during World War II.
16 December – ITV's Central airs the final episode of Prisoner: Cell Block H, making it the first ITV region to complete the series.
20 December – ITV airs Treasure Hunt, the final new episode of the long-running children's series Rainbow, produced by Thames Television. The show continues to air until 31 December, but with repeats of previous episodes.
BBC2 airs A Perfect Christmas, featuring the best of Christmas programming from the BBC archives. Shows include festive episodes of The Flower Pot Men, Dr. Finlay's Casebook and the 1986 Christmas Day episodes of EastEnders which were watched by over 30 million viewers.[58]
In an unusual move for a pre-recorded series, the Royal Christmas Message is integrated into the first of the day's episodes of Coronation Street on ITV. Character Alf Roberts sat down in front of his television, 'watched' the speech in its entirety and the episode resumed. Details of plans to include the Queen's Speech in the episode were leaked a few weeks prior to Christmas, raising concerns that the BBC may attempt to outdo their ITV rivals with their own Christmas Day surprise, but Granada Television decided to go ahead with the idea anyway.[62]
Postman Pat returns to BBC1 with two 10th anniversary special episodes, one on Christmas morning and the other in the New Year.
New Year's Eve highlights on BBC1 include the network television premiere of Back to School, starring Rodney Dangerfield and the year's end review programme Clive James on 1991.[66]
The network television premiere of the cult 1979 Australian thriller Mad Max on BBC2, starring Mel Gibson.[67]
^McKay, Neil (14 March 2009). "The day a good man died – and we all realised nobody is safe from the threat of violence". The Journal. Newcastle upon Tyne. p. 30.
^Wainwright, Martin (21 June 1991). "Planning chief killed in demolition row: Bitter dispute over ex-steel worker's illegal summerhouse spills over". The Guardian. London. p. 2.
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