1939 in British television

This is a list of British television related events from 1939.

Events

• 4 March – The BBC Television Service broadcasts one of the first plays to be written especially for television, Condemned To Be Shot by R. E. J. Brooke. The production is notable for the use of a camera as the first-person perspective of the play's unseen central character.
• 27 March – The BBC Television Service broadcasts the entirety of Magyar Melody live from His Majesty's Theatre. The 175-minute broadcast is the first showing of a full-length musical on television.
• 31 August – 18,999 television sets are sold in England before manufacture stops during the Second World War.
• 1 September – The anticipated outbreak of war brings television broadcasting at the BBC Television Service to an end at 12:35 p.m. after the broadcast of a Mickey Mouse cartoon, Mickey's Gala Premiere and various sound and vision test signals. It is feared that the VHF waves of television would act as a perfect homing signal for guiding enemy bombers to central London: in any case, the engineers of the television service would be needed for the war effort, particularly for RADAR. The BBC Television Service would resume its broadcasting, with the same Mickey Mouse cartoon, after the war in 1946.

Television shows ending before the war

1920s

• BBC Wimbledon (1927–1939, 1946–2024)

1930s

• Picture Page (1936–1939, 1946–1952)
• The Disorderly Room (1937–1939)
• For the Children (1937–1939, 1946–1950)
• Telecrime (1938–1939, 1946)

Births

• 10 February – Peter Purves, actor and television presenter
• 7 April – David Frost, satirist, writer, journalist and television presenter (died 2013)
• 16 April – Donald MacCormick, Scottish-born broadcast journalist and television presenter (died 2009)
• 2 May – Peter Dean, actor
• 16 August – Trevor McDonald, Trinidadian-born newsreader and journalist
• 17 August – Anthony Valentine, actor (died 2015)
• 30 August – John Peel, disc jockey and radio and television presenter (died 2004)
• 26 September – Ricky Tomlinson, actor
• 7 October – Clive James, Australian-born writer, television presenter and talk show host
• 27 October – John Cleese, comic actor
• 31 October – Tom O'Connor, actor and comedian
• 8 November – Elizabeth Dawn, actress