1937 in British television

This is a list of events related to British television in 1937.

Events

19 January â BBC Television broadcasts The Underground Murder Mystery by J. Bissell Thomas from its London station, the first play written for television.^[1]
21 January â BBC Television begins broadcasting Cook's Night Out with restaurateur Marcel Boulestin,^[2] probably the first television cookery series.

6 February â The BBC Television Service drops the Baird system in favour of the Marconi-EMI 405 lines system.

14 April â An exhibition snooker match between Horace Lindrum and Willie Smith is shown on the BBC. This is the first time that snooker is shown on television.^[3]

12 May â The BBC use their outside broadcast unit for the first time, to televise the coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. A fragment of this broadcast is one of the earliest surviving examples of British television, filmed off-screen at home by an engineer with an 8 mm cine camera. A short section of this footage is used in a programme during the week of the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and this latter programme survives in the BBC's archives.
14 May â The BBC Television Service broadcasts a thirty-minute excerpt of Twelfth Night, the first known instance of a Shakespeare play on television. Among the cast are Greer Garson and Peggy Ashcroft who appears in a 1939 telecast of the entire play.

18 June â Broadcast of the Agatha Christie play Wasp's Nest, the only instance of Christie adapting one of her works for television, a medium she later came to dislike.
21 June â Wimbledon Championships (tennis) first shown on the BBC Television Service.^[4]

16 September â Football is televised for the first time. It is a specially-arranged friendly match between Arsenal and Arsenal Reserves at Highbury.^[5]

11 November (Armistice Day) â BBC Television devotes the evening to a broadcast of Journey's End by R. C. Sherriff (1928, set on the Western Front (World War I) in 1918), the first full-length television adaptation of a stage play and the first time that a whole evening's programming has been given over to a single play. Reginald Tate plays the lead, Stanhope, a role he has performed extensively in the theatre.^[6]^[7]

1 January â Anne Aubrey, actress
7 January â Ian La Frenais, comedy scriptwriter
9 January â Michael Nicholson, journalist (died 2016)
30 January â Vanessa Redgrave, actress
7 February â Peter Jay, economist, broadcaster and diplomat (died 2024)
25 February â Tom Courtenay, actor
8 March â Justine Lord, actress
27 March â Alan Hawkshaw, theme tune composer (died 2021)
9 April â Valerie Singleton, presenter
11 April â Jill Gascoine, actress and novelist (died 2020)
26 April â Gareth Gwenlan, Welsh-born television comedy producer and executive (died 2016)
1 May â Una Stubbs, actress (died 2021)
12 May â Susan Hampshire, actress
19 May â Pat Roach, actor and wrestler (died 2004)
5 August â Carla Lane, comedy writer (died 2016)
6 August â Barbara Windsor, actress (died 2020)^[8]
18 August â Willie Rushton, comedian, actor and writer (died 1996)
20 August â Jim Bowen, comedian and host (died 2018)^[9]
2 September â Derek Fowlds, actor (died 2020)
5 September â Dick Clement, comedy scriptwriter
16 September â Bella Emberg, born Sybil Dyke, comedy actress (died 2018)^[10]
14 November â Alan J. W. Bell, director and producer (died 2023)
17 November â Peter Cook, comedian and writer (died 1995)
27 November â Rodney Bewes, actor (died 2017)
29 November â Ingrid Pitt, actress (died 2010)
20 December â Charles Denton, producer
29 December â Barbara Steele, actress
Brian Cooke, scriptwriter
Geoffrey Hinsliff, actor (died 2024)