Here we look at some of the most memorable.

JANUARY

1: Fifty years today colour television licences were introduced in the UK. They cost £10 per year although black and white only cost £5.

4: Sixty years since Sputnik 1, the world’s first artificial satellite, re-entered Earth’s atmosphere and burned up after 92 days in orbit.

27: Tarzan Of The Apes – the first Tarzan film – was released in 1918. The silent movie, which starred Elmo Lincoln, is still considered to be the most faithful of the various film adaptations of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ original novel.

FEBRUARY

4: Eighty years ago the BBC broadcast the world’s first science fiction TV programme, an adaptation of the Karel Capek play RUR which coined the term “robot”.

6: Sixtieth anniversary of the Munich air disaster that killed eight members of the Manchester United football team known as the “Busby Babes” along with supporters and journalists. It took 10 years for the club to recover.

22: It is 10 years since the London Low Emission Zone began operating in the city. Next year the capital will introduce the world’s first Ultra-Low Emission Zone in a bid to reduce emissions by a further 20 per cent. 

MARCH

3: The worst civilian disaster of the Second World War happened 75 years ago when 173 people, including 62 children, died in a crush at Bethnal Green tube station in London’s East End as people rushed to enter the station after hearing air-raid sirens.

8: The adaptation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams was first broadcast on Radio 4, 40 years ago.

20: It is 25 years since an IRA bomb exploded in Warrington, killing two children including 12-year-old Tim Parry who had gone to buy a pair of Everton football shorts.

28: Ten years ago Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 5 opened. It was a chaotic occasion marked with the cancellation of 500 flights. 

APRIL

8: The former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher died following a stroke five years ago.

22: Twenty-five years ago 18-yearold student Stephen Lawrence was stabbed to death in a racially motivated attack while waiting for a bus in Eltham, south-east London. The case became a cause celebre that brought about cultural changes in the police force particularly in attitudes to racism.

29: A quarter of a century ago the Queen announced that Buckingham Palace would open to the public for the first time. In 2017 more than half a million visitors toured the 19 state rooms during the 24th summer season.

30: It is 75 years since Operation Mincemeat saw the submarine HMS Seraph deposit the body of a homeless man dressed as an officer of the Royal Marines off the coast of Spain. He had been planted with fake correspondence which suggested that the Allies planned to invade Greece and Sardinia. In fact they planned to invade Sicily. 

MAY

17: Wing Commander Guy Gibson led 617 Squadron of the Royal Air Force on the audacious Dambusters raid 75 years ago. Its mission was to breach dams in Germany’s industrial heartland using engineer Barnes Wallis’s famous bouncing bombs.

22: Five years ago Lee Rigby, an off-duty member of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, was attacked and killed near the Royal Artillery Barracks in Woolwich, south-east London, by two men carrying knives and a meat cleaver in a radical Islamist attack. Seven months later they were sentenced to life imprisonment.

JUNE

11: Thirty years ago more than 80,000 people attended a concert at Wembley Stadium in honour of Nelson Mandela, the South African anti-apartheid campaigner who had been in prison for 24 years. It would be another two years before his eventual release.

20: It is 25 years since the first journey of a high-speed train from France to England via the Channel Tunnel – this engineering miracle finally opened to the public amid a blaze of publicity the following year. 

JULY

18: On this day 30 years ago Paul “Gazza” Gascoigne became the first £2million footballer to be signed by a British club.

25: Forty years ago Louise Brown became the world’s first “test-tube baby”, heralding a new era of IVF treatment. She is now a mother of two children married to a nightclub doorman.

30: It is 200 years since Emily Bronte, the author of Wuthering Heights, was born in Yorkshire.

AUGUST

8: The 30th birthday of Princess Beatrice, the eldest daughter of the Duke and Duchess of York. It is also the 60th birthday of pop singer Madonna.

18: Seventy years ago saw the controversial publication of Lolita by Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov. He claimed there was no moral to his disturbing story of a middle-aged man defiling a girl who ages from 12 to 14 as the book progresses.

26: It is 250 years since Captain James Cook set sail from England on board the HMS Endeavour bound for the Pacific. His threeyear voyage of discovery sought evidence of Terra Australis Incognita or “unknown land”. Two years later he discovered Australia. 

SEPTEMBER

27: Fifty years ago stage musical Hair opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London where it played 1,998 performances.

28: Ninety years ago Sir Alexander Fleming noticed a bacteria-killing mould growing in his laboratory. It would later become known as penicillin and is believed to have saved up to 200 million lives since it went into production.

OCTOBER

18: It is a full decade since an episode of The Russell Brand Show sparked a media storm after it featured a series of lewd prank phone calls made by Brand and his guest star, presenter Jonathan Ross, to the elderly Fawlty Towers actor Andrew Sachs concerning his granddaughter. Both men were disciplined by the BBC.

27: Today is the 60th birthday of singer Simon Le Bon, who cofounded the band Duran Duran at the age of 20 and went on to have 14 UK Top 10 hits including Rio and Girls On Film. 

NOVEMBER

11: Ten years ago, after sailing the equivalent of 14 return trips to the moon, the QE2 set sail on her final voyage to Dubai where she was destined to become a luxury hotel. Renovation work has now been halted due to financial issues and her future is uncertain.

22: It was 55 years ago that CS Lewis, the creator of Narnia, died at the age of 65.

23: Twenty-five years ago artist Rachel Whiteread had the dubious privilege of winning both the £20,000 Turner Prize for best British modern artist and the £40,000 K Foundation art award for worst artist of the year for her work House – a concrete cast of a terraced house from the East End.

DECEMBER

3: It is 30 years since the then health minister Edwina Currie caused outrage when she stated that most of Britain’s egg production was infected with the salmonella bacterium. Sales collapsed.

19: MFI ceased trading 10 years ago and closed all 111 of its stores leaving 1,400 workers redundant. The previous day Woolworths had announced that it planned to close all 807 of its UK stores with the loss of 27,000 jobs.

21: Thirty years ago a bomb exploded on board Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Dumfriesshire, killing 270 people.