12 May – 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 was 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.
18 June – 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 – Wimbledon Championships (tennis) first shown on the BBC Television Service.
11 November – The BBC Television Service broadcasts an adaptation of the World War I-set play Journey's End by R. C. Sherriff, starring Reginald Tate as Stanhope. Shown in commemoration of Armistice Day, it is the first time that a whole evening's programming has been given over to a single play.
31 December – 2,121 television sets have been sold in England.