BBC television dramas have been produced and broadcast since even before the public service company had an officially established television broadcasting network in the United Kingdom. As with any major broadcast network, drama forms an important part of its schedule, with many of the BBC's top-rated programmes being from this genre.

From the 1950s through to the 1980s the BBC received much acclaim for the range and scope of its drama productions, producing series, serials and plays across a range of genres, from soap opera to science-fiction to costume drama, with the 1970s in particular being regarded as a critical and cultural high point in terms of the quality of dramas being produced. In the 1990s, a time of change in the British television industry, the department went through much internal confusion and external criticism, but since the beginning of the 21st century has begun to return to form with a run of critical and popular successes, despite continual accusations of the drama output and the BBC in general dumbing down.

Many BBC productions have also been exported to and screened in other countries, particularly in the United States on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) Masterpiece Theatre strand and latterly on the BBC's own BBC America cable channel. Other major purchasers of BBC dramas include the BBC's equivalents in other Commonwealth nations, such as Australia's ABC, Canada's CBC and Gibraltar's Gibraltar Broadcasting Corporation (GBC).

Already an established national radio broadcaster, the BBC began test transmissions with the new technology of television in 1929, working with John Logie Baird and using his primitive early apparatus. The following year, as part of one of these test transmissions, the BBC screened their first television drama production, an adaptation of the Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello's short play The Man With the Flower in His Mouth.

Broadcast live at 3.30pm on 14 July 1930, the play was produced from a small studio in the Baird Company headquarters at 133 Long Acre, London. The play was chosen because of its confined setting, small cast and short length, and was directed by Val Gielgud, who was at the time the BBC's senior producer of radio drama. Because of the primitive 30-line camera technology, only one figure could be shown on screen at a time and the field of vision of the cameras was extremely restricted. The Prime Minister of the day, Ramsay MacDonald, watched the play with his family on the Baird Televisor Baird had previously installed at their 10 Downing Street home. The reviewer for The Times newspaper commented that: "This afternoon on the roof of 133, Long Acre will prove to be a memorable one... The time for interest and curiosity is come, but the time for serious criticism of television plays, as plays, is not yet."

The BBC's test broadcasts continued throughout the early part of the decade as the quality of the medium improved. In 1936 the BBC launched the world's first "high-definition"—then defined as at least 240-lines — television channel, the BBC Television Service, from studios in a specially converted wing of Alexandra Palace in London. At the time of the channel's debut on 2 November 1936 there were only five television producers responsible for the entire output. The producer selected to oversee drama was George More O'Ferrall, who had some experience with working in a visual medium as he was a former assistant director of films. This was unlike most of his colleagues, who came across from the BBC's radio services.

The first drama production to be mounted as a part of the new, regular service was a twenty-five-minute selection of scenes from the West End play Marigold by L. Allen Harker and F. R. Pryor, produced by O'Ferrall with the original London Royalty Theatre cast. This was broadcast live from the Alexandra Palace studios on the evening of Friday 6 November 1936. Later BBC Television Head of Drama Shaun Sutton wrote about the production for The Times in 1972. "It was probably little more than a photographed version of the stage production, with the camera lying well back to preserve the picture-frame convention of the theatre." Most initial drama efforts were of a similar scale; productions of selected dramatised 'scenes' or excerpts from popular novels and adaptations of stage plays, and a programme entitled Theatre Parade would regularly use original London theatre casts for re-enacting selected scenes.

An increasing number of full-length dramatised productions began to take place in the Alexandra Palace studios during 1937, with Journey's End in November 1937 being a notable full-scale adaptation of a play. When television transmissions on Sundays began in March 1938, one Sunday per month would see the broadcast of a full-length Shakespeare play by actors from the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. Productions also become more technically advanced, with the use of film inserts on telecine and more ambitious shooting, cutting and mixing, as opposed to televising the equivalent of a standard theatrical performance with unmoving cameras. Outside broadcast cameras were used to show thirty Territorial Army troops with two howitzers in the Alexandra Palace grounds for added effect in The White Chateau (1938), and boats on the Palace lake in scenes depicting the Zeebrugge Raid in a World War I play.