1937 – The first play written for British television, The Underground Murder Mystery by J. Bissell Thomas, was broadcast by the BBC.

1937 – The 18 year old English ballet dancer Margot Fonteyn made her debut in ‘Giselle’ at Sadler’s Wells in London.

1955 – The popular board game Scrabble went on sale in the UK. The word-finding board game was created 17 years prior and initially only for sale in the US.

1973 – The Statesman, an unarmed ocean going tug, was sent to protect British trawlers from Icelandic patrol boats as the dispute over cod fishing rights intensified.

1988 – Christopher Nolan, a 22-year-old Irish writer, won the £20,000 Whitbread Book of the Year Award for his autobiography, Under the Eye of the Clock. Completely paralysed, Nolan used a ‘unicorn’ attachment on his forehead to write the novel at a painfully slow speed.

1990 – Police in Johannesburg, armed with batons and dogs, broke up a demonstration against English cricketers who had defied a ban on playing in segregated South Africa.

1988 – Disabled writer Christopher Nolan, who cannot move or speak, wins the Whitbread Book of the Year prize for his autobiography Under The Clock. On the same day, Bon Jovi and Mötley Crüe manager Doc McGhee pleads guilty to importing more than 40,000lb of marijuana into the US from Colombia via a shrimp boat.

2004 – Prime Minister Tony Blair said that he would survive his toughest week as he faced the university top-up fees vote and the Hutton enquiry into the death of David Kelly, former UN weapons inspector in Iraq and… he was right!

2013 – A piece of music that was composed by waiting for bird droppings to fall onto giant sheets of manuscript paper received its premiere at the Tate Liverpool art gallery. Artist Kerry Morrison said that the music represented the role that birds play in the environment.

2014 – The death of former British athlete Sir Chris Chataway, at the age of 82. Chataway, who broke the 5,000m world record in 1954, is also remembered as the man who helped pace Sir Roger Bannister to break the four-minute mile barrier in the same year. Chataway was named the first-ever BBC Sports Personality of the Year in 1954.

2015 – The death of Anne Kirkbride, known for her long-running role as Deirdre Barlow in the ITV soap Coronation Street, which she played for 42 years from 1972 to 2014.

2017 – Alanis Morissette’s former business manager, Jonathan Schwartz, admits stealing over £5.7m from the singer and other celebrities. On the same day, Adama Barrow is sworn in as President of Gambia. Also, Mexican drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán is extradited to the US to face trial for his leadership of the Sinaloa drug cartel.