1937 in British television

This is a list of events related to British television in 1937.

Events

19 January – BBC Television broadcasts The Underground Murder Mystery by J. Bissell Thomas from its London station, the first play written for television.
21 January – BBC Television begins broadcasting Cook's Night Out with restaurateur Marcel Boulestin, probably the first television cookery series.

6 February – The BBC Television Service drops the Baird system in favour of the Marconi-EMI 405 lines system.

14 April – An exhibition snooker match between Horace Lindrum and Willie Smith is shown on the BBC. This is the first time that snooker is shown on television.

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 is 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.
14 May – The BBC Television Service broadcasts a thirty-minute excerpt of Twelfth Night, the first known instance of a Shakespeare play on television. Among the cast are Greer Garson and Peggy Ashcroft who appears in a 1939 telecast of the entire play.

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 first shown on the BBC Television Service.

16 September – Football is televised for the first time. It is a specially-arranged friendly match between Arsenal and Arsenal Reserves at Highbury.

11 November – BBC Television devotes the evening to a broadcast of Journey's End by R. C. Sherriff, the first full-length television adaptation of a stage play and the first time that a whole evening's programming has been given over to a single play. Reginald Tate plays the lead, Stanhope, a role he has performed extensively in the theatre.