7 January – Granada Television first broadcasts World in Action, its influential investigative current affairs series which will run for 35 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]
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.[2]
20 July - BBC Grandstand features live coverage from the first day of the 3rd women's Test between England and Australia at The Oval.[3] This is the earliest known live television broadcast of women's Test cricket.
William Hartnell stars as the First Doctor in the very first episode of science fiction series Doctor Who.[4] (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).