2009 in British Television - Events

Events

Date Event
1 January Jonathan Creek returns with a special episode, the first episode of the series since 2004.
2 January Celebrity Big Brother returns to Channel 4 for the first time since 2007 following the racism controversy that dominated that year's show. Participants include La Toya Jackson, Verne Troyer and Ulrika Jonsson.
3 January The BBC announce that 26-year old Matt Smith is to replace David Tennant as The Doctor in sci-fi drama Doctor Who. Smith, who will take over in 2010, will be the youngest ever actor to play the title role.
12 January Jeff Stelling and Rachel Riley host Countdown for the first time.
14 January Launch of the BBC's Persian language news channel.
22 January The Disasters Emergency Committee launches its Gaza Crisis Appeal following the recent conflict in the region. The BBC causes controversy by saying it will not be broadcasting the appeal as it would compromise its impartiality.
23 January Friday Night with Jonathan Ross returns after host Jonathan Ross finishes his 12-week suspension following his role in the Russell Brand Show prank telephone calls row.
26 January UKTV Documentary is rebranded as "Eden".
31 January Singer Jade Ewen is selected as the United Kingdom's entrant to the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest in the final episode of the BBC's selection programme Eurovision: Your Country Needs You. Ewen will sing 'My Time', by Andrew Lloyd Webber, a song written specially for the contest.
2 February A day of extreme snow in parts of Britain, the biggest in 18 years, causes many TV programmes to broadcast with limited presenters and live audience shortages as people are unable to reach the studios. In ratings terms, news coverage gets very high ratings with over seven million watching BBC News programmes.
7 February BBC Two screens the first part of Iran and the West, a landmark three part documentary marking the 30th anniversary of the Iranian Revolution.
9 February ITV plc merges the ITV Thames Valley and ITV Meridian regions.
12 February ITV plc merges the ITV Anglia regions.
16 February Five US is rebranded as Five USA. Also on this day, ITV plc merges the ITV West and ITV Westcountry regions.
17 February UKTV People is rebranded as "Blighty".
19 February ITV plc merges the ITV Yorkshire regions.
23 February ITV plc merges the ITV Central regions.
25 February ITV plc merges the ITV Border and ITV Tyne Tees regions.
2 March UKTV History is rebranded as "Yesterday".
Corpus Christi College, Oxford are disqualified as champions of the 2009 series of University Challenge after one of their contestants, Sam Kay, was found to no longer be a student. The runners-up, the University of Manchester, are declared champions in their place.
4 March ITV announces it is cutting 600 jobs after it reported a loss of £2.6 billion for 2008. The jobs will go from the company's Yorkshire studios in Leeds and from their headquarters in London.
9 March From this week, ITV's News at Ten programme returns to being aired five nights a week (having previously aired Monday to Thursday only since its return, with an 11 pm bulletin on Fridays).
13 March Comic Relief 2009 raises a record total in excess of £57 million at the climax of their telethon, surpassing the amount raised during the 2007 telethon by over £17 million
25 March ITV announces that it will postpone the broadcast of the 2009 National Television Awards until January 2010, and will axe the National Movie Awards.
25 March Fern Britton announces she is to quit This Morning after 10 years.
April Six TV is defunct in Oxfordshire and Southampton after only 10 years of localised airing.
1 April Trouble closes down after over 12 years of broadcasting and is replaced by Living +2. and Channel 4 airs the 1,000th edition of Deal or No Deal.
3 April The BBC is fined £150,000 because of the Russell Brand Show prank telephone calls row. It is the biggest financial penalty ever imposed on the corporation for a single broadcast.
4 April The BBC receives 1,477 complaints following a remark made by sports presenter Clare Balding to the winning jockey at the 2009 Grand National. Referring to Liam Treadwell's teeth she suggested that he could "get them done" with his prize fund. Balding and the BBC later issued an apology.
5 April BBC One moves its Countryfile programme to a 7 pm slot on Sunday evenings. The Sunday morning slot previously occupied by the show is taken over by a new outdoors activity show called Country Tracks.
6 April Paramount Comedy 1 and Paramount Comedy 2 are rebranded to Comedy Central and Comedy Central Extra.
7 April BBC Two suffers its second worse peaktime viewing audience since 2001, with a share of 5.3%.
8 April – 9 September Analogue services are switched off in the Westcountry region.
10–12 April To celebrate its 21st birthday, three new episodes of the sci-fi sitcom Red Dwarf are broadcast on Dave. Entitled Red Dwarf: Back to Earth, they are the first new episodes of the show since 1999.
23 April ITV chief executive Michael Grade announces he will step down by the end of 2009 and will become non-executive chairman.
25 April Simon Amstell announces that he is to quit as host of Never Mind the Buzzcocks after acting as host since 2006.
30 April UKTV Style is rebranded as "Home".
6 May ITV announces that The South Bank Show is to end in 2010 after 32 years following Melvyn Bragg's retirement.
8 May It is announced that Richard and Judy's series on Watch, Richard and Judy's New Position, will end early due to poor ratings. The show launched in October 2008 with 100,000 viewers, but audiences have dropped as low as 8,000. The last episode will air on 3 July.
19 May UKTV Gardens is replaced by Really.
25 May The Coach Trip returns to Channel 4 after 3 years of absence.
12 June It is announced that Peter Sissons, who is thought to be Britain's longest serving newsreader, will retire in the summer after 45 years.
15 June ITV announces that it has axed the science fiction drama Primeval to concentrate on producing post-watershed drama. However, plans for two more series were revealed in September after ITV agreed a deal with UKTV.
16 June The long-awaited Digital Britain report is published. It makes a number of recommendations with regard to Broadband access, Internet use and Public Service Broadcasting.
18 June Analogue services in the Caldbeck, Cumbria, Dumfries & Galloway and the Isle of Man are switched off.
19 June After nearly 27 years, Countdown is filmed at The Leeds Studios for the last time. Subsequent series were filmed at Granada Studios in Manchester until 2013 when it switched to filming in MediaCityUK in Salford.
22 June UKTV Food is rebranded as "Good Food". This was the last of the UKTV rebrands.
23 June Setanta Sports ceases broadcasting in the UK after going into administration.
25 June The BBC publishes the expenses of some of its top executives. Among the information to be revealed is that the corporation's Director General Mark Thompson claimed over £2,000 after cutting short his holiday in October 2008 to deal with the row over the Russell Brand Show phone calls controversy.
7 July A memorial service for the singer Michael Jackson, who died on 25 June, is broadcast live around the world, with an estimated audience of one billion.
9 July It is announced that Alesha Dixon will replace Arlene Phillips as one of the judges when Strictly Come Dancing returns for its seventh series later in the year.
10 July It is reported that West Country Tonight co-host Lisa Aziz has been suspended from her job by ITV after allegedly fiddling her expenses.
14 July BBC Trust chairman Sir Michael Lyons announces that bonuses for the 10 most senior BBC executives will be suspended indefinitely.
16 July ITV repeats Martin Bashir's 2003 documentary Living with Michael Jackson. The programme draws 3.64m viewers (a 15.4% share of the audience).
ITV announces that its news and information Teletext service will be discontinued within the next six months as a result of mounting losses and the inability to find a viable business model to continue.
17 July Fern Britton presents her last edition of This Morning after 10 years.
22 July The Caldbeck group of transmitters have their final analogue signals turned off, completing the digital switchover of the Border Television region.
23 July ITV moves Coronation Street from its long-standing Wednesday evening slot to Thursday at 8:30. There is also a second episode of Emmerdale replacing the Tuesday hour long episode, which reverts to 30 minutes. The Bill is also moved to a post-9pm slot to allow for more hard-hitting storylines. The changes are part of an overhaul of ITV's scheduling to make way for football coverage on Wednesdays.
28 July TV presenter Esther Rantzen confirms that she will run for Parliament in the Luton South constituency at the next general election.
5 August Channel 4 announces that it will axe its lunchtime news bulletin as part of a cost cutting exercise as from December. The 8:00 pm More4 bulletin will also be scrapped.
6 August ITV sells its stake in the Friends Reunited website for £25m, having paid £125m for it in 2005. The sale occurs as the company announces losses of £105m in the first half of 2009 and a record decline in advertising revenue.
12 August Analogue services are switched off in the HTV Wales region.
26 August Channel 4 announces that Big Brother will end in 2010 after series 11.
27 August Mass production of televisions in the UK comes to an end after the last set rolls off the production line at Toshiba's plant in Plymouth.
28 August At the Edinburgh International Television Festival News Corporation Chairman James Murdoch delivers the MacTaggart Memorial Lecture in which he launches an attack on the BBC and UK media regulator Ofcom.
9 September Westcountry Television completes the digital switchover process with the turning off of all analogue signals from the Caradon Hill transmitter
20 September Jimmy Mulville, the head of Hat Trick Productions, announced that a pilot for an American version of the long-running satirical panel game Have I Got News for You was to be made.
22 September ITV plc launches legal proceedings against STV (its Channel 3 counterpart in Scotland) for a quoted unpaid debt of £38 million from network programming contributions, following STV's practice of dropping a number of network programmes on the STV franchise. At the same time, STV claims it is also following procedures against ITV plc, for up to £40 million owed to STV under its advertising sales agreements.
29 September ITV has announced that it's stuck a deal between Watch, Impossible Pictures, German broadcaster Pro7 and BBC Worldwide to produce two new series of Primeval for transmission in 2011.
30 September The Freeview service is upgraded requiring 18 million households to retune their television sets. The changes lead to several hundred complaints from people who have lost channels as a result of retuning their equipment.
1 October London mayor Boris Johnson makes a cameo appearance in BBC One soap EastEnders. The episode is watched by 8 million viewers.
2 October Mock the Week announces that two new series are being made, but Frankie Boyle will no longer appear on the show.
2 October Channel TV is fined £80,000 by Ofcom over their part in the television phone-in scandal involving the British Comedy Awards.
10 October It is confirmed that Red Dwarf will be commissioned a full series following the success of Red Dwarf: Back to Earth. It will be recorded in 2010 for Dave.
11 October It is announced that there are plans to adapt the Douglas Adams Dirk Gently novels for television.
14 October Andrew Newman, head of entertainment and comedy at Channel 4 leaves his job to go to work for Objective Productions after working for the TV channel for over 10 years.
22 October British National Party leader Nick Griffin makes a controversial first appearance on Question Time after being invited onto the show by the BBC. The edition attracts eight million viewers, twice the programme's usual audience. The programme also results in a large number of complaints to the BBC, while Griffin himself makea a formal complaint to the Corporation for the way he believes he was treated on the show.
ITV announces plans to drop the "bongs" of Big Ben from the opening credits of News at Ten. Also confirmed are plans to relaunch the Tonight programme in January 2010 with Julie Etchingham as its new presenter.
28 October It is announced by the BBC that Barbara Windsor is to leave EastEnders in 2010 after 16 years.
4 November Analogue BBC2 switched off in the Granada Television region.
18 November Former Asda chief executive Archie Norman is appointed as chairman of ITV from January 2010.
26 November ITV takes full ownership of the breakfast TV service GMTV after purchasing Disney's 25% share in the channel.
2 December The Winter Hill transmitter has its remaining analogue signals turned off, completing the digital switchover process in the Granada Television region. Freeview HD begins transmission marking the worldwide operational debut of the DVB-T2 standard.
16 December ITV closes its news and information service on Teletext, leaving the ITV channel(s) without such a service for the first time in 35 years.
23 December Singer Boy George loses a High Court battle to overturn a ruling by the Probation Service that he could not appear on the final series of Celebrity Big Brother.

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