1984

15 January 1974 - 12 July 1984	USA [television]	The situation comedy Happy Days, about family life in the 1950s, premiers on US television and runs for 11 seasons.
1982–1984	UK [television]	The Young Ones, a comedy series about four students in a shared house, is shown on British television. It stars Rik Mayall, Nigel Planer, Adrian Edmondson, and Christopher Ryan, and guest stars Alexei Sayle.
1982–1984	Ethiopia [famines]	Civil war and drought cause a major famine in Ethiopia; at least 800,000 people die and 1.5 million flee the country before foreign grain is received the following year.
1983–1989	UK [television]	The comedy Blackadder is shown on British television.Written by Richard Curtis and Ben Elton, it consists of four main series set in different historical periods – the Middle Ages, the Elizabethan Age, the Regency Period, and the First World War – and stars Rowan Atkinson as Edmund Blackadder.
1984–1994	UK [television]	Spitting Image, a programme satirizing contemporary politics using puppets created by Peter Fluck and Roger Law, is shown on British television.
1984	USA [technology]	US physicist Dennis Matthews builds the first X-ray laser.
1984	UK [television]	Edgar Reitz's Heimat, an epic lasting almost 16 hours, is shown on British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) television in Britain.
1984	UK, Africa [songs]	The Band Aid single ‘Do They Know It's Christmas?’, written by Bob Geldof of the Boomtown Rats and Midge Ure of Ultravox and recorded by an all-star group of British singers, raises £8 million for famine relief in Africa. It is the best-selling record ever in Britain.
1984	USA [statistics and demography]	The US Census Bureau estimates the population of the USA at 236,158,000.
1984	UK [newspapers]	The News of the World is relaunched in Britain as a tabloid Sunday paper.
1984	USA, UK [popular culture]	The Yuppie Handbook confirms ‘Yuppie’ (standing for ‘young urban (or upwardly mobile) professional’) as a label for the attitudes and lifestyle of an affluent social group with an aspirational lifestyle, and as an icon of the 1980s in Britain and the USA.
1984	USA, world [popular music]	Rap, a music style developed by inner-city black and Latino teenagers in the 1970s in New York City, becomes popular worldwide. Breakdancing, a highly energetic and athletic form of dancing often done on the street, develops from the rap scene.
1984	world [consumer products]	The Filofax, a portable looseleaf filing system, emerges as the indispensable yuppie accessory.
1984	USA [clothing and fashion]	Stonewashed denim jeans appear on the market in the USA.
1984	USA [clothing and fashion]	Oversized men's clothing is popular in women's fashion in the USA, and used clothing stores experience a boom in sales.
1984	France [fiction]	The French writer Marguerite Duras publishes her novel L'Amant/The Lover.
1984	USA [health and medicine]	The Reagan administration in the USA withdraws funds to worldwide family-planning programs that perform or offer information about abortions; 67 nations are unable to offer help without this funding, and 200,000 women die of botched abortions as a result.
c. 1984	world [computing]	Computer ‘viruses’ such as ‘Friday 13th’, ‘Trojan Horse’, ‘Holland Girl’, and ‘Christmas Tree’ begin to appear.
1984	Germany [architecture]	The Neue Staatsgalerie (an art gallery) in Stuttgart, West Germany, designed by the English architect James Stirling, is completed. It is one of the leading works of postmodernism.
1984	Netherlands, Japan [information technology]	The Dutch company Philips and Japanese firm Sony introduce the CD-ROM, a laser-read, read-only disk.
1 January 1984	Brunei [decolonization]	The sultanate of Brunei becomes independent after 95 years as a British protectorate.
16 January 1984	UK [television]	The Sky Channel, the first pay satellite television in Britain, begins broadcasting to 10,000 subscribers on Thorn-EMI's existing cable network.
17 January 1984	USA [media and communication]	Home video-taping is ruled legal by the US Supreme Court.
11 February 1984	Middle East [Iran–Iraq War (1980–88)]	Iraq commences the bombing of non-military targets in Iran in a new escalation of the war between the two countries.
13 February 1984	USSR [political parties]	Konstantin Chernenko is named first secretary of the Soviet Communist Party following the death of Yuri Andropov.
8 March 1984	UK [industrial relations]	The leaders of the British National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) support planned strikes in Yorkshire and Scotland over proposed pit closures.
31 March 1984	India [law and government]	The Indian government agrees to amend the Punjabi constitution to acknowledge Sikhism as a religion distinct from Hinduism.
4 April 1984	UK [political events]	Bailiffs are brought in to clear the women's peace camp at Greenham Common, England, the site of a NATO base for cruise missiles.
24 May 1984	Middle East [Iran–Iraq War (1980–88)]	Iranian war planes attack oil tankers off the coast of Saudi Arabia, in an apparent effort to widen the Iran–Iraq war. On 27 May, the USA sends Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to Saudi Arabia in case of Iranian attack.
July 1984	UK [Christianity]	The appointment of Rev Professor David Jenkins as bishop of Durham in England arouses controversy because of his views on Christian doctrine.For some, his views that such beliefs as the Resurrection should be seen as symbolically rather than literally true amount to a denial of basic Christian tenets.
13 July 1984	UK [newspapers]	Czech-born British media and publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell buys the Mirror group of newspapers in Britain.
19 July 1984	Europe [political events]	French finance minister Jacques Delors is named president of the European Commission from January 1985, in succession to Gaston Thorn.
28 July 1984	USA [Olympic Games]	The 23rd Olympic Games open in Los Angeles, California, and are boycotted by the Soviet bloc, with the exception of Romania, and by Iran and Libya, in retaliation for the US boycott of the Moscow Olympics in 1980. The People's Republic of China, however, competes for the first time.
3 August 1984	Upper Volta [law and government]	The Upper Volta head of state, Captain Thomas Sankara, renames his country Burkina Faso (‘land of incorruptible people’).
14 September 1984	South Africa [law and government]	The South African prime minister, P W Botha, is sworn in as the country's first executive president. On 17 September, the first 19-member multiracial cabinet is sworn in.
20 September 1984	[television]	The Cosby Show, a situation comedy about a middle-class black family, begins on US television. It is the top-rated US television show during the 1980s.
26 September 1984	Hong Kong [diplomacy]	A draft agreement for the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997 is signed by British and Chinese representatives at a ceremony in Beijing.
October 1984	USA [surgery]	Ethical questions are raised when surgeons at Loma Linda University Medical Center in California, USA, transplant the heart of a baboon into a two-week-old girl, ‘Baby Fae’. The patient survives for 20 days.
12 October 1984	UK [terrorism]	An Irish Republican Army (IRA) bomb explodes at the Grand Hotel, in Brighton, England, during the Conservative Party conference, killing 4, injuring 32, and narrowly missing the British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. A fifth victim dies on 13 November.
31 October 1984	India [terrorism]	Indira Gandhi, prime minister of India 1966–77 and 1980–84 is assassinated in New Delhi, India (66). She is killed by extremist Sikhs among her bodyguards, apparently in response to the storming of the Sikh Golden Temple at Amritsar by Indian government troops.
31 October 1984	India [political events]	Rajiv Gandhi is sworn in as prime minister of India amid communal violence between Sikhs and Hindus after the assasination of his mother Indira by her Sikh bodyguards.
20 November 1984	UK [law and government]	The British government sells shares in British Telecom, for the first time using techniques of mass marketing with the intention of creating a nation of small shareholders. The share offer is four times oversubscribed.
15 December 1984	USSR, UK [diplomacy]	The Soviet Politburo member Mikhail Gorbachev visits London, England, and states that the USSR is willing to negotiate large reductions in nuclear weapons. The British prime minister Margaret Thatcher declares ‘I like Mr Gorbachev. We can do business together.’
31 December 1984	USA [political events]	The USA withdraws from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), alleging that it is too critical of US policy. It had announced its intention 29 December 1983, saying that the organization ‘exhibited hostility towards the basic installations of a free society’.