2,317 shows

May 15, 1946

Muffin the Mule is a puppet character in British television programmes for children. The original programmes featuring the character were presented by Annette Mills, sister of John Mills, and broadcast live by the BBC from their studios at Alexandra Palace from 1946 to 1952. Mills and the puppet continued with programmes that were broadcast until 1955, when Mills died. The series then transferred to ITV in 1956 and 1957. A modern animated version of Muffin appeared on the BBC in 2005.

The original mule puppet was created in 1933 by Punch and Judy puppet maker Fred Tickner for husband-and-wife puppeteers Jan Bussell and Ann Hogarth to form part of a puppet circus for the Hogarth Puppet Theatre. The act was soon put away, and the puppet was not taken out again until 1946, when Bussell and Hogarth were working with presenter Annette Mills. Shes named the puppet mule "Muffin", and it first appeared on television in an edition of For The Children broadcast on 20 October 1946.

September 6, 1947

Explore the breadth of music celebrated at the Proms via this weekly curated television show. The BBC Proms, or The Henry Wood Promenade Concerts presented by the BBC, is an eight-week summer season of daily orchestral classical music concerts and other events held annually, predominantly in the Royal Albert Hall in London.

January 1, 1950

Sunday Night Theatre was a long-running series of televised live television plays screened by BBC Television from early 1950 until 1959.

The productions for the first five years or so of the run were re-staged live the following Thursday, partly because of technical limitations in this era, and the theatrical basis of early television drama. Some of the earliest collaborations between Rudolph Cartier and Nigel Neale were produced for this series, including Arrow to the Heart and Nineteen Eighty-Four. The Sunday night drama slot was subsequently renamed The Sunday-Night Play which ran for four seasons between 1960 and 1963. ITV transmitted its own unrelated run of Sunday Night Theatre between 1971 and 1974.

July 30, 1952

A serial play about a young married couple.

November 11, 1953

Current affairs programme, featuring interviews and investigative reports on a wide variety of subjects.

November 13, 1954

Interesting fifteen episode miniseries broadcast weekly by BBC in 1954-1955. It covers different aspects of the air war during World War II. It also briefly contextualises the development of aircraft immediately before and after the war.

November 13, 1954

Fabian of the Yard is a British police procedural television series based on the real-life memoirs of Scotland Yard detective Robert Fabian, made by the BBC and broadcast between November 1954 and February 1956. It is considered the earliest plice procedural to be made for British TV, sharing many points of commonality with the U.S. series Dragnet which had gone on air in 1951.

There were 36 episodes in total, of 30 minutes each. The first 30 were broadcast consecutively on Saturday evenings between 13 November 1954 and 22 June 1955, with the exceptions of Christmas Day and New Year's Day which happened to fall on a Saturday. For unknown reasons, the final six episodes were held back, and were later broadcast intermittently between November 1955 and February 1956. The series was later broadcast in the U.S. under the name Fabian of Scotland Yard.

December 21, 1954

Documentary series starring David Attenborough who follows zoo keepers on a quest to find different animals to be added to the zoo. David Attenborough and a team from London Zoo travel in search of exotic animals. Their aim is to capture them and bring them back to the UK for exhibit in the zoo.

December 23, 1954

A solo chorister sings Once in Royal David's City to begin the traditional celebration of Christmas from the candlelit chapel of King's College, Cambridge. The world-famous choir sings carols old and new. Filmed amidst the beauty of historic King's College Chapel and first televised in 1954, and annually since 1963.

January 16, 1955

The Sooty Show is a British children's Puppet series which aired on the BBC from 1955 to 1967 and ITV from 1968 to 1992. It follows the adventures and comedic day to day life of puppets Sooty, Sweep and Soo with their owner Harry Corbett, and in later years, his son Matthew.

April 24, 1955

Orson Welles' Sketch Book is a series of six short television commentaries by Orson Welles for the BBC in 1955. Written and directed by Welles, the 15-minute episodes present the filmmaker's commentaries on a range of subjects. Welles frequently draws from his own experiences and often illustrates the episodes with his own sketches.

July 9, 1955

Created by Ted Willis. Dixon of Dock Green was a BBC television series following the activities of police officers at a fictional Metropolitan Police station in the East End of London from 1955 to 1976. Some episodes were later remade as a BBC radio series in 2005 and 2006.

July 29, 1955

This is Your Life is a British biographical television documentary, based on the 1952 American show of the same name. It was hosted by Eamonn Andrews from 1955 until 1964, and then from 1969 until his death in 1987 aged 64. Michael Aspel then took up the role of host until the show ended in 2003. It returned in 2007 as a one-off special presented by Trevor McDonald, which to date was its most recent airing.

In the show the host surprises a special guest, before taking them through their life with the assistance of the 'big red book'. Both celebrities and non-celebrities have been 'victims' of the show. The show was originally broadcast live, and over its run it has alternated between being broadcast on the BBC and on ITV.

October 22, 1955

The serial sees Professor Bernard Quatermass of the British Experimental Rocket Group being asked to examine strange meteorite showers. His investigations lead to his uncovering a conspiracy involving alien infiltration at the highest levels of the British Government. As even some of Quatermass's closest colleagues fall victim to the alien influence, he is forced to use his own unsafe rocket prototype, which recently caused a nuclear disaster at an Australian testing range, to prevent the aliens from taking over mankind.

The Eurovision Song Contest is an international song competition, organised annually by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and featuring participants representing primarily European countries. Each participating country submits an original song to be performed on live television and radio, transmitted to national broadcasters via the EBU's Eurovision and Euroradio networks, with competing countries then casting votes for the other countries' songs to determine the winner.

June 13, 1956

A radio, and later television, talent show originally hosted by Hughie Green, with a late-1980s revival hosted by Bob Monkhouse, and later by previous winner Les Dawson.

July 4, 1956

Abigail and Roger was a British sitcom that aired on the BBC Television Service in 1956. It was written by Kelvin Sheldon. The programme saw Julie Webb and David Drummond play Abigail and Roger, an engaged couple living in London bedsits.

July 6, 1956

Hancock's Half Hour is a BBC radio comedy, and later television comedy, series of the 1950s and 60s written by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. The series starred Tony Hancock, with Sid James; the radio version also co-starred, at various times, Moira Lister, Andrée Melly, Hattie Jacques, Bill Kerr and Kenneth Williams. The final television series, renamed simply Hancock, starred Hancock alone.

Comedian Tony Hancock starred in the show, playing an exaggerated and much poorer version of his own character and lifestyle, Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock, a down-at-heel comedian living at the dilapidated 23 Railway Cuttings in East Cheam.

The series was influential in the development of the situation comedy, with its move away from radio variety towards a focus on character development.

October 4, 1956

Whack-O! was a British sitcom TV series starring Jimmy Edwards, written by Frank Muir and Denis Norden, and broadcast from 1956 to 1960 and 1971 to 1972.

The series ran on the BBC from 1956 to 1960 and from 1971 to 1972. Edwards took the part of Professor James Edwards, M.A., the drunken, gambling, devious, cane-swishing headmaster who tyrannised staff and children at Chiselbury public school. The Edwards character bore more than a passing resemblance to Sergeant Bilko as he tried to swindle the children out of their pocket money to finance his many schemes.

The first six episodes were subtitled "Six of the Best". In 1959 a film was made based on the show, called Bottoms Up!. The series was revived in colour with updated scripts in 1971-1972, slightly retitled Whacko!. In all, it ran for a total of 60 episodes, with 47 of B&W and 13 colour, of 30 minutes each. There were three special shorts. There was also a radio version, on the Light Programme, 45 episodes of 30 minutes broadcast from May 1961 till July 1963, with Vera Lynn starring as herself in the second episode. Many of these radio episodes were recovered by a BBC archivist from a listener's collection of tapes in 2012.

February 16, 1957

The Six-Five Special is a British television programme launched in February 1957 when both television and rock and roll were in their infancy in Britain.

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