New Year's Day highlights on BBC1 include the network television premiere of the 1985 romantic drama Out of Africa, starring Robert Redford and Meryl Streep, as well as the 1982 musical sequel Grease 2.[1]
Debut of the iconic sitcom Mr. Bean on ITV, starring Rowan Atkinson as the titular character.
2 January
Granada's flagship nightly news programme Granada Reports is rebranded as Granada Tonight.
The first episode of the sixth T-Bag series airs in which Georgina Hale debuts as Tabatha Bag, the second T-Bag.
The 30-minute weekday 6am Ceefax slot returns to BBC1, but rather than the special pages used for Ceefax AM, the content is the same as for all other Ceefax broadcasts.[2]
3 January – The US animated series Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles makes its debut on BBC1.[3] The show's original US title, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, is changed for the UK because of controversy surrounding ninjas and related weapons such as nunchaku.[4] The intro sequence is heavily edited because of this, replacing the word ninja with hero or fighting, using a digitally faded logo instead of the animated blob and removing any scenes in which the character Michelangelo wields his nunchaku.[5] Scenes of Michelangelo using his nunchaku are likewise edited out of the episodes themselves, leading the American producers to drop the weapons from the series entirely, in order to make the show more appropriate for the international market.
The US action drama series Baywatch, starring David Hasselhoff and Pamela Anderson, makes its UK debut on ITV. Made by NBC, the series proves popular with British viewers with audience figures regularly reaching 13 million. When NBC cancels the series after its first season, ITV teams up with an international consortium of broadcasters to sponsor the show for further seasons.[7] The series comes to an end in 2001, following an eleven-year run.[8]
8 January – The popular classic children's song Nellie the Elephant has been spawned into a five-minute animated cartoon series on ITV, featuring the voices of singer Lulu and Tony Robinson. The first episode is called Nellie and the Ghost and was shown every Monday until 9 April with the episode Nellie Rescues Mrs Maple's Moggy. The series will return on 5 September with Nellie Goes Ballooning and will be shifted onto a Wednesday timeslot. The last three episodes will be broadcast in January 1991 with the final one being shown on 21 January.
9 January – The Secret Cabaret, an innovative and shocking magic-based programme hosted by magician Simon Drake, makes its debut on Channel 4.
14 January – The Observer reports that TVS have started searching for a buyer for a 49% stake in US production company MTM Enterprises which it bought in 1988.[9]
24 January–3 February – The BBC broadcasts the 1990 Commonwealth Games. BBC1 stays on the air all night to provide live coverage. This is the first time that BBC1 has provided full live coverage of an overseas Commonwealth Games with around 12 hours of live action broadcast each day.
27 January – The final episode of Bob's Full House is broadcast on BBC1.
For the first time, Emmerdale is networked across almost all of ITV, airing at 7pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Chrysalis Television takes over the contract to produce LWT News.[11]
February
2 February – The BBC Schools gay-themed television film Two of Us is given its first daytime showing on BBC2. It is shown in two parts, on consecutive Friday lunchtimes.[12] The channel had previously shown the film late at night in March 1988.[13]
5 February – Sky Movies is fully encrypted and becomes Sky's first pay channel.
11 February
Live coverage is aired of the African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela's release from Victor Verster Prison, near Cape Town, South Africa.
Sky Movies broadcasts its first special event, the boxing fight between Mike Tyson and Buster Douglas.
4 March – The Observer newspaper reports that it has formed a partnership with Central to create Central Observer, making environmental themed films for British Satellite Broadcasting and other terrestrial channels with funding from the charity Television Trust for the Environment.[15]
12 March
Ahead of the first free legislative election in the German Democratic Republic, BBC1 airs an edition of Panorama in which Fred Emery reports from the GDR and West Germany on the opportunities and strains facing the Germans.[16]
The final episode of Blankety Blank presented by Les Dawson is broadcast on BBC1, although it would return in 1997 with Lily Savage as its host.
25 March – British Satellite Broadcasting launches on cable in the as a rival to Sky Television which launched the previous year.
26 March
The science-fiction soap Jupiter Moon makes its debut on the Galaxy channel. 150 episodes are commissioned, but only 108 are aired before the series is cancelled in December.
27 March – BBC1 airs the first of two flashback episodes of EastEnders as part of a storyline in which Diane Butcher, played by Sophie Lawrence, ran away from home. The episodes show Frank Butcher (Mike Reid) going to meet his teenage daughter at King's Cross station after she contacted him following a three-month absence. Scenes showing Frank waiting for Diane and their subsequent reunion are interspersed with flashbacks to January showing her leaving home and living rough on the streets.[18] Sophie Lawrence did research among real homeless people for the storyline.[19]
28 March – ITV airs the Granada documentary drama Who Bombed Birmingham?. The programme, which looks at the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings and the conviction of the Birmingham Six, names several people believed to have actually been behind the bombings.[20]
3 April – ITV airs the First Tuesday documentary Sonia's Baby, the story of a woman's fight with the medical establishment to have a test tube baby using her late husband's sperm.[22]
6 April – The Australian children's science-fiction comedy Round the Twist makes its UK debut on BBC1.[23]
10 April – The UK's first Asian TV channel TV Asia launches and becomes Europe's first entertainment and information channel for the South Asian community from the Indian subcontinent. It initially broadcasts through the night during Sky One's downtime.
14 April – BBC2 begins showing the 91-part 1988 Indian serial Mahabharat, a dramatisation of the epic poem the Mahabharata. The programme is shown in Hindi with English subtitles and is repeated the following day in a late-night slot on BBC1.[24][25]
BBC1 airs Wogan on Ice, a special edition of Terry Wogan's chat show that gives viewers a rare chance to see ice dancers Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean performing together. The pair, who achieved success during the 1984 Winter Olympics, are appearing together in the UK for the first time since 1985.[27]
17 April – The Channel Four Daily is revamped in a bid to attract more viewers. Some of the segments are changed and the programme starts 30 minutes later, at 6:30am.
The BBC reverts to airing just one summer Saturday morning magazine show and replaces On the Waterfront and UP2U with a new show, The 8.15 from Manchester, named after its start time and broadcast location.[28]
6 May – Original airdate of the Everyman episode A Game of Soldiers, a documentary which concerns a group of soldiers exploring their feelings about being trained to kill.[29]
10 May – The Broadcasting Bill receives its third reading in the House of Commons and is passed with 259 votes to 180.[30]
22 May – ITV airs Trojan Horse, an episode of The Bill in which the character PC Ken Melvin, played by Mark Powley, is killed while trying to park a car when a bomb inside explodes.
2 June – Opportunity Knocks ends its run on BBC1 after four series with the 1990 final.[32]
8 June–8 July – The BBC and ITV provide television coverage of the 1990 FIFA World Cup.
15 June – The long-running children's arts and crafts series Art Attack makes its debut on Children's ITV, presented by Neil Buchanan.
16 June – Pages from Ceefax is shown after 10am for the final time and as from 19 June, BBC2 begins broadcasting programmes when Daytime on Two is not on the air at 10am rather than at lunchtime.
20 June – Archie Macpherson commentates his last football match for BBC Scotland with the Scotland v Brazil World Cup match in Italy which Brazil win 1–0 leaving Scotland eliminated from the finals. He is replaced by Jock Brown (who has commentated the same match on STV) as main commentator when Sportscene returns on 25 August. Brown is replaced by Gerry McNee for Scotsport which is shown the following day.
ITV airs Tom McGurk's film Dear Sarah, a play about Giuseppe Conlon's letters to his wife, Sarah, after he was convicted as one of the Maguire Seven for allegedly making IRA bombs.[35]
The Channel 4 game show Countdown celebrates its 1000th edition.[36]
6 July – Channel 4 introduces a third weekly episode of its soap Brookside, airing on a Friday evening. It now airs on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
7 July – In Rome, on the eve of the final of the 1990 FIFA World Cup, the Three Tenors sing together for the first time. The event is broadcast live on television and watched worldwide by millions of people. The main highlight is Luciano Pavarotti's performance of "Nessun Dorma" from Giacomo Puccini's opera Turandot.
9 July – Anglia replaces its news programme About Anglia with Anglia News. It is a new dual news service with both editions broadcast from Norwich. Journalists are also based at seven regional newsrooms and a Westminster bureau.[38] They also begin providing separate news services for the East and West of the Anglia region from that day.[39][40]
13 July – The network television premiere of Michael Schultz's 1987 science-fiction adventure Timestalkers on BBC1, the film having been postponed from 25 June.[41]
19 July – MPs vote to make televised proceedings of the House of Commons a permanent feature.
21 July – Debut of Stars in Their Eyes on ITV, a series presented by Leslie Crowther in which members of the public impersonate their favourite singers.
The long-running US animated series The Simpsons is broadcast in the UK for the first time, making its debut on Sky One.[47]Call of the Simpsons is the first episode to be shown on Sky.
3 September – The children's series Rosie and Jim makes its debut on Children's ITV.
5 September – The new BBC building at White City opens.
Ahead of the UK broadcast of the 1,000th episode of Neighbours, BBC1 airs Neighbours 1,000th Episode Celebration, a TV special produced by Australia's Network Ten which brought together past and present cast members to mark the occasion.[49]
Debut of Unsolved Mysteries on Sky One. It uses a documentary format to profile real-life mysteries featuring re-enactments of unsolved crimes, conspiracy theories and unexplained paranormal phenomena.
9 September – As part of the Screen One series, BBC1 airs the groundbreaking comedy-drama Frankenstein's Baby which explores the subject of male pregnancy.[50][51]
10 September – ThunderCats returns to BBC1 with the second half of the first series. However, because of the concerns involving the use of weapons brought about by Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles, the next batch of episodes will have all scenes of Panthro with his nunchakus entirely cut out.
13 September – BBC1 airs the 1,000th episode of Neighbours which features a storyline in which the characters Des Clarke and Jane Harris, played by Paul Keane and Annie Jones, become engaged.[52]
15 September
Raymond Baxter introduces BBC1's live coverage of the fly-past and parade at Buckingham Palace as the Royal Air Force marks the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Britain.[53]
17 September – BBC1 airs a special edition of Blue Peter in which Yvette Fielding travels to Montserrat to report on efforts to rebuild the island which experienced widespread damage when it was struck by Hurricane Hugo on 17 September 1989.[55]
23 September – Debut of the Screen One drama Sweet Nothing which deals with the subject of homeless young people in London.[56]
24 September
Yorkshire Television launches a third sub-regional news opt-out for south Yorkshire and north Derbyshire called South and is broadcast from Sheffield while East (Hull) continues to air in east Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and north Norfolk and Calendar News is broadcast to the rest of the region, west and north Yorkshire.
Joan Bunting wins the 1990 series of MasterChef on BBC1.
25 September – The children's animated fantasy series The Dreamstone makes its debut on ITV.
30 September – The BSB channel Galaxy airs the pilot episode of Heil Honey I'm Home!, a controversial sitcom featuring a fictionalised Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun. The show attracts much criticism and is cancelled after one episode. Several other episodes were recorded, but none has ever been broadcast.
BBC1 launches a new weekday morning service called Daytime UK.[60] Linked live from Birmingham and running for four hours, from 8:50am until lunchtime, the new service includes hourly regional news summaries, broadcast after the on-the-hour news bulletins.
Fireman Sam returns to BBC1 for a new series with a new character named Penny Morris.
18 October – That day's edition of BBC1's Question Time from Edinburgh becomes the first edition of the programme to feature six panellists after delays require the last-minute substitution of two guests. Tony Benn, Margaret Ewing, Andrew Neil and Malcolm Rifkind were originally scheduled to appear, but Menzies Campbell and Magnus Linklater are drafted in when Benn and Neil are late. They then arrive 20 minutes into the programme and join the discussion.
23 October – David Lynch's critically acclaimed serial drama Twin Peaks makes its UK debut at 9pm on BBC2.[61]
30 October – Debut of The Sentence, an eight-part BBC2 documentary series looking at life inside Glen Parva Young Offenders Institute near Leicester, Europe's largest prison of its type. It is the first time a television crew has been given access to the prison.[63]
November
1 November – The Broadcasting Act 1990 receives Royal Assent. The Act paves the way for the deregulation of the British commercial broadcasting industry and will have many consequences for the ITV system.[64][65] The Act also sets out the terms of a license for a fifth UK television channel which would need to be a general entertainment channel with a remit for some public service broadcasting. Additionally, it is estimated that the channel's coverage would reach only 74% of the UK and a video retuning operation would need to be undertaken.[66]
2 November – BSB merges with Sky Television, becoming British Sky Broadcasting. Of BSB's five channels, only two, The Movie Channel and The Sports Channel, remain on the air long-term, though both are eventually renamed. Galaxy is closed with its transponders handed over to Sky One, Now is replaced in the most part with Sky News and The Power Station remains on the air until 8 April 1991 before being replaced with MTV.
9 November – The Word is moved from 6pm to a late-night timeslot on Channel 4.
11 November – At 10:40pm, ITV airs an ITN News special in which Trevor McDonald talks to Saddam Hussein. In his first interview with a British broadcaster since his country's invasion of Kuwait in August, the Iraqi President calls for talks and attempts to link the ongoing Gulf crisis with the Palestinian issue.[67]
12 November – The British/Swiss children's series Pingu makes its debut on BBC1.[68]
13 November – Geoffrey Howe makes a dramatic resignation speech in the House of Commons which will precipitate Margaret Thatcher's resignation as Prime Minister; this is the first significant speech to have been seen since television cameras were admitted to the House a year ago.
Broadcaster John Sergeant's famous encounter with Margaret Thatcher on the steps of the British embassy in Paris. He is waiting for Thatcher in the hope of hearing her reaction to the first ballot in the party leadership contest of 1990, only to be pushed aside by her press secretary, Sir Bernard Ingham, when Thatcher emerges from the building. Sergeant later wins the British Press Guild award for the most memorable broadcast of the year.
BBC1 airs The Maze – Enemies Within, an Inside Story special looking at life inside Northern Ireland's Maze Prison.[71]
On today's episode of Emmerdale, Malandra Burrows (as Kathy Merrick) sings "Just This Side of Love", a song that is released by Burrows as a single on 26 November. The song enters the UK Singles Chart at #44, before spending eight weeks in the top 60 and peaking at #11 on 22 December.
Original airdate of episode three of the ninth series of Spitting Image which concludes with a film showing footage of Britain's homeless crisis over which plays a parody of Dionne Warwick's 1964 song "Walk on By". The piece is introduced as one of the legacies of Margaret Thatcher's government and is rare for the series in that no puppets are used.[73]
December
1 December – With the media watching, the two ends of the service tunnel of the Channel Tunnel are joined together, linking Britain and France for the first time since the Ice Age. A handshake then takes place between Englishman Graham Fagg and Frenchman Phillippe Cozette, after which British and French workers board trains to complete the first journey between the two countries.[74][75]
Galaxy and Now are closed down and are replaced on the Marcopolo satellite by Sky One and Sky News, although arts programmes are shown for a short time as a weekend opt-out service from Sky News.
7 December – BBC2 airs Your Move, a pioneering interactive show in which the home audience are invited to play chess against grandmaster Jonathan Speelman using telephone voting to select each move.[76]
9 December
Cilla Black hosts Happy Birthday Coronation Street, an evening of entertainment on ITV to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the long–running soap.[citation needed]
The Greek language channel Hellenic TV, the UK's first foreign-language service to be given a broadcast licence by the Independent Television Commission goes on the air in London.
The first Wallace & Gromit film, A Grand Day Out, makes its debut on Channel 4. The film itself already had its premiere a year earlier at an animation festival in Bristol and features the voice of Peter Sallis as Wallace.
Channel 4 airs The Coronation Street Birthday Lecture, a talk delivered by Labour politician Roy Hattersley in which he discusses aspects of the soap in front of an invited audience which includes some Coronation Street cast members. The programme also includes some classic clips from the series.[80]
ITV airs a TV adaptation of R. D. Blackmore's historical romance Lorna Doone. The film, produced by Thames is noted for its choice of filming location, footage having been shot near Glasgow rather than in the novel's Exmoor setting.
27 December
BBC1 airs the first part of the Australian film Bushfire Moon.[83] The second part is shown the following day.[83]
^Barnes, Steve. "Anglia Television – News". TVARK: The Online Television Museum. Archived from the original on 1 April 2012. Retrieved 25 January 2012. Website contains video of original promotion of the new service.
^Brown, Maggie (23 July 2010). "Channel Five: a timeline". The Guardian. Guardian Media Group. Archived from the original on 22 November 2018. Retrieved 21 November 2018.