In 1974, history was made when the first lesbian kiss on British TV was broadcast on BBC Two.

In an episode of drama anthology series Second City Firsts, two former lovers kiss for the last time as one of them is about to be thrown out of the Army.

Fifty years later – and 30 years after a famous lesbian kiss on Channel 4 soap Brookside – BBC dating reality series I Kissed a Girl recently aired its finale episode.

Now, here’s how representations of lesbian love on TV have changed over the decades.

The kiss: February 1974. Jackie (Alison Steadman) is a young woman in the Army who has had a doomed affair with her superior officer, Harvey (Myra Frances). After a night discussing what went wrong, they say goodbye with a kiss.

Internal memos from the BBC archive reveal discussions over whether the kiss should have been kept until after 23:00. And before the broadcast, viewers were given a warning about the drama’s content.

A BBC audience research report commissioned at the time saw viewers complain that the show had been “distasteful” and “deliberately set out to shock”.

The kiss: February 1989. Out on Tuesday, Channel 4’s LGBT magazine show, featured a segment where an advertising agency was asked to make a series of posters “promoting” homosexuality. One of these showed two women kissing.

Out on Tuesday tackled issues relevant to the LGBT community, with segments on topics such as lesbian mothers and gay men in Nazi Germany.

Caroline Spry, who started working as a commissioner at the channel in 1985, says: “We tried to get a lot of experienced lesbian and gay programme makers involved in the series, as well as bringing in lots of new ones. It was difficult to find them sometimes – not everyone was happy to put their heads above the parapet.”

Caroline was responsible for commissioning many of Channel 4’s LGBT shows in the 1980s – and she remembers MPs and other prominent figures, such as activist Mary Whitehouse, protesting against such content.

Mary Whitehouse, founder of the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, was a campaigner who used her platform to protest against sex and violence on TV. She saw any depictions of homosexuality as normal or natural as obscene. “She had an absurd amount of power,” says Caroline. “But the press loved her.”

The kiss: January 1994. On Channel 4 soap Brookside, Margaret (Nicola Stephenson) finds solace in the arms of her friend Beth (Anna Friel) – and thinks she may have romantic feelings for her.

This TV moment between actors Anna Friel and Nicola Stephenson was the first time a romantic kiss between two women had been shown outside the 21:00 watershed.

Caroline says some in Channel 4 were advocating to push the episode to a later time. “People were tearing their hair out in meetings,” she adds.

But Nicola Stephenson says she was “really excited” about the storyline “because there just weren’t any gay characters on TV”. To this day, lesbians approach her to discuss how powerful this scene was, she says.

But not everyone at the time felt the same – and she remembers the father of one of her friends telling her: “You’re going to make people be gay doing things like that, it shouldn’t be on television.”

Nevertheless, the kiss was shown in a montage of great British TV moments at the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics in London.

The kiss: February 2001. On Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Tara (Amber Benson) and Willow (Alyson Hannigan) console each other after the death of their friend’s mother.

In the United States, the first lesbian kiss on primetime TV came in February 1991 during an episode of L.A. Law.

A ratings hit, the episode led to the “lesbian kiss episode” becoming a TV trope, with shows like Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Sex and the City and Friends following suit.

The New York Times, external called these kisses “gimmicky”, included in shows to bring in viewers during so-called “sweeps” – a time when viewing figures are used to determine advertiser rates. “Sweeps lesbians typically vanish or go straight when the week’s over,” wrote cultural critic Virginia Heffernan, external.

The kiss: July 2017. On the BBC series Doctor Who, after Bill (Pearl Mackie) has been converted into a Cyberman, Heather (Stephanie Hyam) saves her with a kiss.

In 2017, BBC series Doctor Who introduced lesbian companion Bill Potts (Pearl Mackie), who viewers saw kiss another woman in her first episode.

Actor Pearl remembers her co-star Matt Lucas calling the moment “quite a big deal”.

It was only later when she learned the impact of the kiss. “I remember being at Comic Con in Berlin,” says Pearl, getting emotional. “And a young girl said to me: ‘I’m happy to have met you, because without you I wouldn’t have been able to come out to my family.'”

Pearl also remembers getting criticism online that she was “forcing her agenda down people’s throats,” but brushed it off. “We need representation,” she says. “The benefits are literally tangible.”

The kiss: May 2024. I Kissed a Girl begins with 10 women split up into couples, each starting their relationship with a kiss before they have even spoken.

Abbie Cole and Lisha Paige met on the BBC series I Kissed a Girl – and have been dating ever since.

Abbie remembers seeing her first lesbian kiss on TV when she was a teenager – on the American lesbian drama The L Word. “I would be up until 5 or 6am just constantly watching it,” she says.

Media organisation GLAAD reported that in the 2023-2024 TV season, there were 118 lesbian characters on screen – an increase from the 30 they counted ten years earlier.

Lisha thinks she would have been “more comfortable” with her sexuality if she’d seen a show like I Kissed a Girl when she was younger.

After appearing on the dating reality show, Abbie adds: “People have said how we’ve made them feel more positive in their own skin.”

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