BBC 2W closes as part of plans to achieve 3% savings at BBC Cymru Wales. Consequently, the digital version becomes a simulcast of BBC Two on analogue with fewer Wales opt-outs.
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.[3]
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.[6]Sky News join the BBC in deciding not to air the appeal, but it is screened by ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 on 26 January.[7]
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.[12]
4 February
Carol Thatcher is axed from The One Show after she referred to a tennis player as a "golliwog" during a backstage conversation while filming for the programme.[13]
5 February
To coincide with the 20th anniversary of Sky's launch, at 6am Sunrise begins presenting from a new "multi-purpose" area of the Sky News Centre, formally known as the "shoebox".
George McGhee announces he is stepping down as BBC Controller of Programme Acquisition after six years, and will take a career break. His role will be temporarily filled by Sue Deeks, the current Programme Acquisition Head of Series.[15]
ITV airs an hour-long episode of Emmerdale showing the funeral of long-standing character Jack Sugden, who was killed off-screen due to the death of Clive Hornby, the actor who played him, the year before. The episode sees Sheila Mercier reprise her role as Jack's mother, Annie Sugden, who returns to the village of Emmerdale to attend his funeral, while the episode is dedicated to Hornby's memory.[16]
Sky is criticised by Ofcom for allowing Domino's Pizza to sponsor The Simpsons because the deal breached the watchdog's rules banning the advertising of junk food while children's programmes are on air.[17]
An episode of EastEnders is screened consisting entirely of black actors, the first time an episode of the soap has featured an entirely black cast in its 23-year history.[18]
ITV makes major cutbacks to its regional broadcasts in England. The separate sub-regional news programmes are merged into a pan-regional programme although more localised news continues to be broadcast as a brief opt-out during the early evening programme, and with the exception of a monthly political programme, all non-news regional programming in the English regions ends.
February
UTV's mid-morning weekday and lunchtime weekend UTV Live bulletins are axed when the station is permitted to reduce their weekly news output from five hours and twenty minutes to four hours.[20]
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.[22]
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).[24]
13 March
Highlights of Comic Relief 2009 include a spoof of Mamma Mia, and a re-imagining of The Office as an opera.[25] The telethon 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.[26]
16 March
Missing was broadcast as the first British Daytime serial on the BBC since Doctors since 2000.
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.[36] 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.[37]
The BBC apologises after a link was accidentally posted on The Apprentice website revealing the identity of the candidate who would be fired in the evening's edition of the show.[40]
8 April – 9 September
Analogue services are switched off in the Westcountry region.
10 April
Channel 5 broadcasts Australian live action children's series Hi-5 on their Milkshake! block for the final time after 6 years due to losing rights and constant presenter changes.
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.
UTV launches a 30-minute late evening news and current affairs programme, UTV Live Tonight, which follows the News at Ten on weekday nights from Monday to Thursday. The programme incorporates the station's late news bulletin alongside extended political and business coverage.
After five Gurkha veterans who had applied for UK residency receive letters telling them their appeals have been rejected, the actress Joanna Lumley, who is the face of the Gurkha Justice Campaign, confronted the Minister for ImmigrationPhil Woolas at the BBC Westminster studios about the issue. After she pursues him around the studio, the pair hold an impromptu press conference in which she pressures him into agreeing to further talks over the issue.[44][45]
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.[47]
12 May
BBC News Channel presenter Carrie Gracie discloses details of her annual salary during a heated debate on the MPs expenses row with Lord Faulks. The revelation breaks with the BBC's protocol of not divulging how much individual members of staff are paid.[48]
The 2009 Eurovision Song Contest is held in Moscow, Russia, and sees Graham Norton taking on the role of presenter of the BBC's coverage following Terry Wogan's decision to step down in 2008. The contest is the first to have the result decided by a combination of panels of experts and televoting in order to reduce instances of countries voting for their neighbours.[50][51] It is won by Norway's Alexander Rybak with "Fairytale".
17 May
Actress Leslie Ash is to join the cast of Holby City as executive Vanessa Lytton, it is announced. The role sees her return to television five years after she contracted a hospital bug that left her partially paralysed. She will begin shooting her scenes in June and be seen on screen from October.[52][53]
18 May
Portland TV is fined £27,500 by Ofcom for a programme broadcast by adult channel Television X2 in September 2008 that the watchdog deemed showed material equivalent to BBFC R18 content.[54]
Having originally planned to leave the series at the end of the year, Gray O'Brien, who plays Tony Gordon in Coronation Street has extended his contract. He will take a break to appear in pantomime before returning to film a dramatic exit storyline.[55]
Ben Bradshaw is appointed as Culture Secretary following a Cabinet reshuffle, while Sir Alan Sugar is to sit in the House of Lords as the Government's Enterprise Tsar. The appointment leads to conflict of interest concerns because of Sugar's role on The Apprentice, with Bradshaw's shadow, Jeremy Hunt raising the matter in the House of Commons on 8 June. Bradshaw does not believe there will be a problem as Sugar's BBC role is a non-political one.[61]
It is announced that Peter Sissons, who is thought to be Britain's longest serving newsreader, will retire in the summer after 45 years.[63]
15 June
ITV announces that it has axed the science fiction drama Primeval to concentrate on producing post-watershed drama.[64] However, plans for two more series were revealed in September after ITV agreed a deal with UKTV.[65]
Analogue services in the Caldbeck, Cumbria, Dumfries & Galloway and the Isle of Man are switched off.
The BBC confirms that Sir Alan Sugar will keep his role with The Apprentice as it feels his role as Enterprise Tsar will not compromise the broadcaster's impartiality.[67]
Channel 4 feigns a power failure during the broadcast of an episode of TNT, starring Jack Whitehall and Holly Walsh, after a joke is made at the expense of Michael Jackson. At the time of broadcast, reports of Jackson's death were beginning to come through, so there had been no time to re-scrutinize any of the programming. Due to the time delay employed by many broadcasters, Channel 4 were able to, perhaps quite literally, pull the plug before the now-tasteless joke went public.[71]
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.[78]
It is announced that Teletext games magazine GameCentral will cease broadcasting in December, along with all other Teletext editorial content.
22 July
The Caldbeck group of transmitters have their final analogue signals turned off, completing the digital switchover of the Border Television region.[79]
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.[80]
STV announces that it is withdrawing more ITV programmes from its schedules, such as The Bill, Doc Martin, Midsomer Murders, Poirot, Lewis, instead preferring to concentrate on programming made within Scotland.[82]
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.[83]
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.[84]
12 August
Analogue services are switched off in the HTV Wales region.
A week after Danniella Westbrook's return to EastEnders, a spokesman for the soap confirms she will be leaving the series again at the end of the year, her character, Sam Mitchell, having been brought back for a few months as part of a specific storyline.[92]
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.[93]
29 September
ITV announces that it has struck a deal between Watch, Impossible Pictures, German broadcaster Pro7 and BBC Worldwide to produce two new series of Primeval for transmission in 2011.[94]
30 September
The Freeview service is upgraded requiring 18 million households to retune their television sets.[95] The changes lead to several hundred complaints from people who have lost channels as a result of retuning their equipment.[96]
Teletext Ltd confirms that GameCentral will continue as a website and mobile service after it is dropped from the television service in December.[104]
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.[105]
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,[106] twice the programme's usual audience. The programme also results in a large number of complaints to the BBC, while Griffin himself makes a formal complaint to the corporation for the way he believes he was treated on the show.[106]
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.[108]
Graham Cole makes his final appearance as Tony Stamp in The Bill.
10 November
The BBC confirms that the next series of The Apprentice will be delayed from Spring 2010 to avoid clashing with the general election.[111]
18 November
Former Asda chief executive Archie Norman is appointed as chairman of ITV from January 2010.[112]
20 November
The Peter Kay's All Star Animated Band music video made its debut on that year's Children in Need, featuring over 50 children's TV characters past and present. It took 2 years to create the finished result.
21 November
Athlete Jade Johnson pulled out of Strictly Come Dancing due to a knee injury she suffered in the previous week's dress rehearsal where she was given a bye to that night and chose to withdraw.
24 November
Virgin Media enters into a strategic partnership with TiVo. Consequently, Virgin Media will be the exclusive distributor of TiVo services and technology in the United Kingdom.[113]
UK airdate of the Ugly Betty episode "In the Stars" which features a cameo appearance from English singer Adele. The episode airs on E4 first, before being shown on Channel 4 on 30 November.
26 November
ITV takes full ownership of the breakfast TV service GMTV after purchasing Disney's 25% share in the channel.[114]
The Winter Hill transmitter has its remaining analogue signals turned off, completing the digital switchover process in the Granada Television region.[110]Freeview HD begins transmission marking the worldwide operational debut of the DVB-T2 standard.
4 December
TV chef Gino D'Acampo wins the ninth series of I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here!.[115] It is later reported that D'Acampo and fellow contestant Stuart Manning will face criminal charges after they captured, killed and cooked a rat, while ITV apologises for the incident and says it will tighten up security on the show.[116] Charges against the pair, who turned to the rodent as a source of food to give themselves more protein after being put on reduced rations of rice and beans, are later dropped because production staff gave them permission to eat it. In February 2010, ITV are fined A$3,000 over the incident by a Court in New South Wales.[117]
8 December
Actor Mark Eden, who played Coronation Street villain Alan Bradley returns to Blackpool to unveil a plaque marking the 20th anniversary of the character's demise. Alan was killed off on 8 December 1989 in a storyline that saw him being hit by a Blackpool tram outside the town's The Strand Hotel.[118][119]
The Royle Family returns for another Christmas special, attracting an audience of 10.2 million. The most watched show of the day is EastEnders, which overnight figures suggest is seen by 10.9 million.[126]
^Orr, Deborah (5 January 2009). "The Weekend's Television". The Independent. London. Archived from the original on 18 February 2009. Retrieved 25 April 2009.