7 January – Granada Television first broadcasts World in Action, its influential investigative current affairs series which will run for 57 years.
13 January – The play Madhouse on Castle Street is broadcast in the BBC Sunday-Night Play strand. Little-known young American folk music singer Bob Dylan had originally been cast as the lead but proved unsatisfactory as an actor and the play has been restructured to give him a singing role; he gives one of the earliest public performances of "Blowin' in the Wind" over the credits.[1]
20 January – ITV launches a new Sunday daytime educational strand called The Sunday Session.
February
18 February – The Strabane transmitter opens, bringing coverage to the west of Northern Ireland for the first time.
3 July – ITV Northern debuts the Hanna Barbara family cartoon seriesThe Jetsons ahead of other ITV regions.
8 July – The English comedy sketch Dinner for One with Freddie Frinton, having been shown live on Peter Frankenfeld's show GutenAbend in 1962, is recorded in English by Norddeutscher Rundfunk before an audience at the Theater am Besenbinderhof, Hamburg, West Germany. Regularly repeated on New Year's Eve in Germany and elsewhere, it is not seen in its entirety on British television until 2018.[3]
20 July – BBC Grandstand features live coverage from the first day of the 3rd women's Test between England and Australia at The Oval.[4] This is the earliest known live television broadcast of women's Test cricket.
30 September – BBC TV begins using a globe as their symbol. They will continue to use it in varying forms until 2002.
November
22 November – This evening's television reports the assassination of John F. Kennedy. However, the BBC's decision to screen the scheduled episodes of sitcom Here's Harry (starring Harry Worth) and medical drama Dr. Finlay's Casebook leads to the broadcaster receiving several thousand complaints.[5] Called from a party to appear on a special edition of Associated-Rediffusion's This Week, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party George Brown has a drunken brawl with US actor Eli Wallach in the green room and when he goes on air millions of viewers see him interpret a fair question as an accusation of his having overstated his closeness to Kennedy, then give a morose and slurred tribute from which it is apparent he is intoxicated;[6] he has to issue a public apology.
23 November
William Hartnell stars as the First Doctor in the very first episode of science fiction series Doctor Who.[7] (first of the 4-part serial An Unearthly Child). So many people complain of having missed it, because of the disruption to schedules caused by the assassination of John F. Kennedy, that the following Saturday episode 1 is repeated before the broadcast of episode 2. Doctor Who runs until 1989 with a TV film shown in 1996 and is revived in 2005.
21 December – First episode of the seven-part serial The Daleks broadcast in the Doctor Who series, introducing the titular aliens (revealed fully in the following week's episode).
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