This is a list of British television related events from 1993.
Events January 1 January Carlton Television takes over the weekday ITV franchise in London at midnight, replacing Thames after 24 years on the air. Meridian takes over the South of England franchise from TVS, Westcountry takes over the South West England franchise from TSW, Good Morning Television, GMTV takes over the national breakfast television franchise from TV-am at 6am and Teletext Ltd takes over the teletext franchise from ORACLE. The first edition of GMTV is presented by Eamonn Holmes and Anne Davies. The Independent Television Commission removes the limit on the value of prizes which can be given away on ITV game shows, set at £6,000 per episode since 1981, paving the way for the big money game shows of the late 1990s and 2000s. Channel 4 becomes an independent statutory corporation. Under the terms of the Broadcasting Act 1990, the channel is now also allowed to sell its own airtime. Under the Act, ITV have agreed to fund Channel 4 if it falls below 14% of total TV advertising revenue. The channel also makes a payment of £38 million to ITV under terms of its funding formula. The London News Network, a joint venture between London's two franchise holders, Carlton and LWT, begins providing a seven-day news service for ITV viewers in London. Scottish Television launches new idents and presentation. HTV launches a new logo and idents. 2 January Debut of the Saturday morning children's show Saturday Disney on ITV. ITV airs a one-off special of Stars in Their Eyes dedicated to Elvis Presley. It is presented by Russ Abbot as regular presenter Leslie Crowther continues to recover from head injuries in a car crash the previous October. 3 January The final edition of LWT News is broadcast, presented by Anna Maria Ashe. Debut of the Sunday morning current affairs series Breakfast with Frost on BBC1, presented by David Frost. 4 January John Birt succeeds Sir Michael Checkland as Director-General of the BBC. At the start of its first full week of broadcasting, GMTV introduces regional news bulletins, something that its predecessor TV-am had never done. Scottish Television launches a 30-minute lunchtime edition of Scotland Today. Launch of the ITV regional news programme London Tonight which airs seven days a week on both Carlton and LWT. Ulster's news service is renamed UTV Live. The programme broadcasts for 60 minutes, instead of 30. The BBC launches Business Breakfast as a 60-minute stand-alone programme. It had previously been part of Breakfast News. Consequently, the BBC's weekday breakfast programmes start half an hour earlier, at 6am. Also on that day, BBC1 begins broadcasting on weekdays at 6am. A start-of-day Ceefax broadcast is retained although it now runs for 15 minutes rather than 30, beginning at 5:45am. The Central-produced children's series Tots TV makes its debut on ITV and starts airing in the US the following day. Its sponsor is Lego Duplo. 5 January – The children's series Wizadora makes its debut on ITV. 6 January The Times reports that IFE have revised and increased their offer to purchase former ITV franchise holder TVS.Evangelist to lift TVS offer. By our Deputy City Editor. The Times Saturday, 9 January 1993TVS dissidents try for a better offer. Martin Waller, The Times (London, England), Wednesday, 6 January 1993 The animated series The Animals of Farthing Wood, based on the books by Colin Dann, makes its debut on BBC1. Debut of the acclaimed series Fame in the 20th Century, an eight-part BBC1 programme in which Clive James examines the nature of 20th century fame using archive footage and commentary. The series concludes on 24 February. 8 January ITV begins re-airing series 3 of Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends. However, the first few episodes are trimmed to fit the timeslot. The children's comedy programme ZZZap! makes its debut on Children's ITV, starring the 'show you how its done gloves', known as the Handymen, Richard Waites as the trouble-causing Cuthbert Lilly and the sneaky villain Tricky Dicky and Neil Buchanan as the smartest artist Smart Arty. ITV introduces a third weekly episode of The Bill on Friday evenings. After a 14-year absence, the game show Celebrity Squares returns to ITV, with returning host Bob Monkhouse. 11 January – Debut of The Good Sex Guide, a ground-breaking late night documentary series on ITV presented by Margi Clarke. Aired at 10.35pm, the programme attracts audience of 13 million, something that is unprecedented for a show aired in a late night timeslot. 12 January – Series 7 of The Cook Report began with Roger Cook confronting the Wo Shing Wo Triad of Manchester's Chinatown. 14 January – Eurosport and Screensport propose a merger to provide a single channel as both are operating at a loss, hoping that a merged channel would become financially profitable."Satellite channels to merge". The Times 14 January 1993; p. 40 16 January – ITV airs Alan Parker's 1987 occult detective film Angel Heart, starring Mickey Rourke and Robert De Niro. 20 January – BBC2 airs live coverage of the inauguration of Bill Clinton as the 42nd President of the United States. 23 January – The Times reports that an offer by IFE to buy TVS for £56.5 million has been accepted.Robertson wins TVS. The Times Saturday, 23 January 1993; 24 January The satellite channels Lifestyle and Lifestyle Satellite Jukebox close. The network television premiere of James Cameron's 1989 Oscar-winning science fiction adventure The Abyss on Channel 4, starring Ed Harris, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and Michael Biehn.
February 1 February IFE completes its deal to buy TVS. BSkyB introduces a new system of film ratings often used for various times, replacing the British Board of Film Classification certificates. 6 February – The Casualty episode "Family Matters", which airs today, sees an early appearance of the actress Kate Winslet. 7 February – Having completed its initial run of all 692 episodes of Prisoner: Cell Block H in December 1991, Central begins rerunning the series from the first episode. It is shown weekly, late on Sunday evenings until the end of 1994. 12–14 February – Channel 4 airs Love Weekend, a series of programmes with sexually explicit content coinciding with Valentine's Day weekend. It includes the network television premiere of Last Tango in Paris, starring Marlon Brando, which is aired uncut on 14 February, Valentine's Day itself. The makers of Tango pay £20,000 for a 30-second advert for the soft drink in the film's first ad break. 14–16 February – Sky One debuts Diana: Her True Story, a dramatisation of Andrew Morton's biography of Diana, Princess of Wales. The film features Serena Scott Thomas as the Princess. 15 February BBC2 airs Oprah Winfrey's interview with singer Michael Jackson. Children's ITV is officially retitled as CITV, though the logo retains the full name until autumn 1996. As part of a relaunch, the service drops its in-vision continuity in favour of pre-recorded voice-overs mostly done by actor Steve Ryde. 16 February – The final episode of Count Duckula is broadcast on ITV. 17 February – The original scheduled airdate for Mind the Baby, Mr. Bean, but it is postponed following the murder of Kirkby toddler James Bulger and is delayed for over a year until 25 April the following year. Instead, Mr. Bean in Room 426 is shown in its place. 20 February – Channel 4 show the network television premiere of Bruce Robinson's 1987 cult comedy film Withnail and I, starring Richard E. Grant and Paul McGann. 24 February John Nettles makes a cameo appearance as Jim Bergerac in an episode of the BBC1 comedy The Detectives set in Jersey. The network television premiere of Rocky IV on ITV, starring Sylvester Stallone, Talia Shire, Carl Weathers, Burt Young, Dolph Lundgren and Brigitte Nielsen. 27 February – Boiling Point, an episode of the BBC medical drama Casualty, is broadcast, but it is met with great controversy and outrage after it depicts rioting youths setting fire to a hospital's accident and emergency department. The BBC receives over 700 complaints about the violent nature of the episode, despite it airing after the 9pm watershed and warning viewers accordingly. However, the episode achieves viewing figures of 17.02 million, the highest for the show at this time. 28 February – BBC1 airs the first in a twelve-part adaptation of Peter Mayle's memoir A Year in Provence. The series, starring John Thaw and Lindsay Duncan, concludes on 16 May. Unlike the book, however, the miniseries is not well received by critics and, in 2006, it is placed at number ten on a Radio Times list of the worst television programmes ever made. The writer John Naughton describes it as a "smugathon ... which achieved the near impossible – creating a John Thaw vehicle nobody liked".
March 1 March Screensport and Eurosport merge and Screensport closes. They merge to try to turn two loss making channels into a single profitable channel. Games World makes its debut on Sky One. Comedy-drama September Song starring Russ Abbott and Michael Williams makes its debut on ITV. 5 March – ITV begins airing Doctor Finlay, a continuation series of the original Dr. Finlay's Casebook that aired during the 1960s. 6 March – An IRA bomb scare at BBC Television Centre means that the live Saturday night programme Noel's House Party cannot be broadcast. Instead, after a repeat of the previous year's Noel's Christmas Presents, host Noel Edmonds appears from the Children's BBC broom cupboard to apologise to viewers and introduce a Tom and Jerry cartoon in its place, The Zoot Cat. 7 March – The Movie Channel airs a special feature-length version of Star Trek: The Next Generation shown exclusively rather than as part of the main run of the show which features Leonard Nimoy as Spock from the original television series. 12 March – BBC1 airs Total Relief, the 1993 Comic Relief telethon. 23 March Channel 4 debuts the US horror/science fiction series Eerie, Indiana, starring Omri Katz. Sky One airs Episodes 170 and 171 of the Australian soap E Street which features a hard-hitting storyline involving extreme character Sonny Bennett (Richard Huggett) who kills three characters in a car bomb explosion. Because the episodes air in an early evening timeslot, they are preceded by a warning to viewers that they contain scenes that some may find upsetting. The 12:30pm repeat the following days, 24 and 25 March are dropped entirely and are replaced by episodes of The Simpsons. 26 March – ITV airs The Final Straw, an episode of The Bill in which Detective Constable Viv Martella, played by Nula Conwell, is killed off when she is shot by a man after approaching the van in which he is sitting. 27 March – The network television premiere on BBC1 of the 1989 American gangster comedy Harlem Nights, starring Eddie Murphy. 28 March – The Bluebells' 1984 single "Young at Heart" reaches number one in the UK Singles Chart following a re-release after being featured in a Volkswagen Golf advert. It tops the charts for four weeks. 29 March – Central becomes the first ITV region to begin showing the New Zealand medical soap opera Shortland Street.
April 2 April – Debut of the comedy-drama The Riff Raff Element on BBC1. 3 April – The 1993 Grand National, shown live on BBC1, is declared void after 30 of the 39 runners begin the race and carry on, despite there having been a false start. 4 April Children's BBC begin to repeat the school drama Grange Hill from its first series in 1978 on Sunday mornings on BBC2, as part of the show's 15th anniversary celebrations. These repeats end in 1999 with series 16. Prior to the repeats, the US animated series Rugrats also begins airing that day. The final episode of The Darling Buds of May airs on ITV.