Events
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 1 January | Celebrity Big Brother 5 launched on Channel 4, with celebrities such as Jermaine Jackson, Dirk Benedict and Leo Sayer. |
| 2 January | This Life returns for a ten-year reunion special. |
| Des O'Connor takes over from Des Lynam as co-presenter (with Carol Vorderman) of Channel 4's long-running quiz show Countdown. | |
| 7 January | Laura Pearce, a 24-year-old civilian employee of Gloucestershire Constabulary, becomes the first contestant to win the £250,000 on the British version of Deal or No Deal. |
| 8 January | Michael Grade takes over as chief executive of ITV plc. |
| 17 January | Protests in India and the UK against the British series of Celebrity Big Brother after Jade Goody, Danielle Lloyd and Jo O'Meara are alleged to be racially abusive to Bollywood star, Shilpa Shetty. |
| 22 January | BBC News 24 re-branded with new titles and on-screen graphics. |
| 27 January | The final edition of Grandstand, the flagship BBC sports programme, is aired after nearly 50 years on television screens. |
| 2 February | Plans by Channel 4 to air a series of documentaries about masturbation in March are postponed after the event attracted controversy and criticism from senior television figures. The programmes would be shown separately at a later date and not as part of a season. |
| 9 February | Paul Merton presents his last edition of Room 101. |
| 14 February | Samuel Preston walks off live on an episode of Never Mind the Buzzcocks after insults about his wife Chantelle Houghton. Team captain Bill Bailey replaced him with a member of the audience, Ed Seymour. |
| 18 February | BBC Two launches 14 new idents designed by Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO and produced by Red Bee Media, with the "2" becoming a "Windows of the World" a portal through which the world is seen differently. |
| Richard & Judy is scrutinised when it is claimed that the winners were already chosen for its premium-rate phone-in quiz, "You Say, We Pay". This results in the start of the phone-in scandal. | |
| 1 March | A channel agreement between Virgin Media and BSkyB for Virgin to broadcast non-premium Sky channels ends at midnight. Virgin Media and Sky had failed to reach agreement on the issue and subsequently Sky One, Sky Two, Sky Travel, Sky Travel Extra, Sky Sports News and Sky News were removed from the Virgin line-up. |
| 2 March | The Attorney General for England and Wales, Lord Goldsmith, obtains an injunction from the High Court preventing the BBC from broadcasting an item about investigations into the alleged cash for honours political scandal. |
| 5 March | ITV's quiz channel ITV Play comes under attack from the scandal. As a result, ITV allow independent auditor Deloitte to review programmes with phone-ins that generate revenue such as Dancing on Ice and The X Factor. |
| 7 March | The BBC's correspondent in the Gaza Strip, Alan Johnston, who is the only foreign reporter from a major media organisation based in Gaza, is kidnapped, All the main Palestinian militant groups called for his release. |
| Five's game show BrainTeaser is axed after 5 years. | |
| 13 March | ITV Play is shut down permanently to be rebranded as ITV Bingo due to the phone-in scandal. |
| 14 March | BBC children's programme Blue Peter is now involved with the phone-in scandal, after it is discovered they used a girl who was visiting the studio to pose as a caller live on the show. |
| 16 March | During Comic Relief night, the last ever episode of The Vicar of Dibley was broadcast. |
| 20 March | Dancing on Ice reveals they lost 11,500 phone calls, as they were not delivered to Vodafone until next Monday morning (26 March) |
| 27 March | The teleshopping channel iBuy closes after just under two years on air. |
| 30 March | ITV announces that Dermot O'Leary will replace Kate Thornton as host of The X Factor after Thornton was sacked from the programme after presenting three series. |
| 31 March | The Teletubbies celebrate their 10th anniversary for a TV comeback after 6 years of absence. |
| 13 April | Have I Got News for You starts to produce a video podcast featuring unbroadcast material. |
| 23 April | A BBC Panorama disclosed that callers to GMTV's phone-in competitions may have been defrauded out of millions of pounds, because the telephone system operator, Opera Interactive Technology, had determined the winners before the phone lines had closed. GMTV responded by suspending the phone-in quizzes, but claimed that "it was confident it had not breached regulators' codes". Opera Interactive also denied any wrongdoing. |
| 30 April | Channel 4 airs the Cutting Edge documentary Blind Young Things, a programme about students at the Royal National College for the Blind in Hereford. The film won a Royal Television Society award for Channel 4 and the Cutting Edge team in 2008. |
| 14 May | BBC One broadcasts "Scientology and Me" a Panorama investigation into Scientology by journalist John Sweeney. A clip from the programme of Sweeney losing his temper and shouting at a disruptive scientologist representative is widely released on the internet and by DVD by scientologists prior to airing. |
| 16 May | Launch of Freesat, a free-to-air digital satellite television joint venture between the BBC and ITV plc. |
| 31 May | The BBC Trust approves plans for several BBC departments, including BBC Sport, to be moved to a new development in Salford. |
| 4 June | It is announced that Dannii Minogue will replace Louis Walsh as a judge on the forthcoming series of The X Factor, joining Simon Cowell and Sharon Osbourne. Walsh had intended to leave the show, but later decided to return after being invited back. |
| 2 July | Nick Ross presents his final episode of Crimewatch after 23 years at the helm. He had been on the programme since it began in 1984. |
| Launch of Press TV, an English-language global news channel owned by the Iranian state broadcaster IRIB. | |
| 18 July | Six BBC programmes, Children in Need, Comic Relief, Sport Relief, TMi and two radio programmes (The Liz Kershaw Show and White Label) have been discovered have been involved in the phone in scandals. |
| 26 July | The 2005 British Comedy Awards broadcast on ITV now become involved with the phone-in scandal, when it is discovered that people phoning in to vote for the People's Choice Award called when the programme was not being broadcast live, and last half hour of the show had been recorded when ITV showed a news broadcast. |
| 2 August | 2007 sees the BBC celebrating their 75-year service in television (85 years for radio). The first BBC Television Service began on 2 August 1932. |
| 3 September | CBBC identity relaunched, with its third marketing campaign since the launch of the CBBC channel. |
| 5 September | The BBC scraps plans for Planet Relief, a programme similar to Comic Relief and Sport Relief for fear of bias against critics of climate change and that people would prefer more factual programmes on the subject. |
| 9 September | In an advertising first, eBay begin showing live auction adverts between programmes, showing an auction with picture, current bid, time auction ends, and postage and packaging charges |
| The BBC One Sunday morning political programme Sunday AM is renamed The Andrew Marr Show when it returns after its summer break. | |
| 18 September | It is announced that E.ON is to end its sponsorship of ITV Weather after 16 years. The sponsorship deal was the longest on UK terrestrial TV to date, beginning on 22 September 1991 (when sponsorship of ITV programmes was first allowed). Until June 2007, ITV Weather was sponsored by the energy supplier Powergen, and since then by Powergen's parent company E.ON. |
| 21 September | ITV postpone broadcasting the 2007 British Comedy Awards due to the phone-in scandals. |
| 26 September | ABC1 ceases broadcasting. |
| The Bionic Woman returns after a break of nearly 30 years but is axed again 2 months later. | |
| 28 September | Trapped! appears as CBBC's first ever Halloween-themed game show. |
| 1 October | Virgin1 launches at 9pm, replacing Ftn. |
| 14 October | UKTV Bright Ideas ceases broadcasting to be replaced on Freeview by Dave. |
| 15 October | UKTV G2 is rebranded as Dave and becomes a free-to-air channel replacing newly defunct UKTV Bright Ideas. |
| 17 October - 14 November | The town of Whitehaven in Cumbria becomes the first place in the UK to lose their analogue television signals and start the digital switchover, starting with BBC Two. The other four channels were switched off on 14 November. |
| 20 October | The BBC Switch teenage block of shows is launched to cater for the underserved 12–16 year olds. |
| 29 October | Sky News issues an apology after an aside from presenter Julie Etchingham was accidentally broadcast during live coverage of a speech by Conservative Party leader David Cameron when Etchingham's microphone was accidentally left switched on. |
| 31 October | ITV confirms that Julie Etchingham will join the broadcaster to present a relaunched News at Ten alongside Sir Trevor McDonald from January 2008. |
| 21 November | Insurance firm esure is revealed as E.ON's successor as the sponsor of ITV's national weather bulletins. The two-year deal, rumoured to be worth £10 million, was negotiated by Carat Sponsorship and will take effect from 1 January 2008, with esure and Sheilas' Wheels as the sponsors, alternating between the two brands every two months. |
| 25 December | BBC One gets its highest rated Christmas Day schedule in years, with "Voyage of the Damned", the Christmas special of Doctor Who getting the shows' biggest audience since 1979 (13.31 million) and a special episode of EastEnders getting 14.38 million, that shows' biggest rating in three years and the highest rated show of 2007. Another success was a one-off special of To the Manor Born, returning after 26 years, with an audience of 10.25 million. |
| BBC iPlayer, an online service for watching previously aired shows, is launched. |
Read more about this topic: 2007 In British Television
Famous quotes containing the word events:
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—Denis Diderot (1713–1784)
“Turn where we may, within, around, the voice of great events is proclaiming to us, Reform, that you may preserve!”
—Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859)
“If I have renounced the search of truth, if I have come into the port of some pretending dogmatism, some new church, some Schelling or Cousin, I have died to all use of these new events that are born out of prolific time into multitude of life every hour. I am as bankrupt to whom brilliant opportunities offer in vain. He has just foreclosed his freedom, tied his hands, locked himself up and given the key to another to keep.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)