Ronald Rubin

An anthology of 1920s set plays and musicals, transmissioned from 10 September to 10 December 1968 on BBC One.

A Russian countess stows away in the stateroom of a married U.S. diplomat bound for New York.

During a routine patrol, a reporter is given permission to interview a hardened cold-war warrior and captain of the American destroyer USS Bedford. The reporter gets more than he bargained for when the Bedford discovers a Soviet sub and the captain begins a relentless pursuit, pushing his crew to breaking point.

Heironymus Merkin is an internationally successful singer approaching middle age who retells his life story in a series of production numbers on a seashore in front of his two toddlers and aged mother. Merkin's promiscuous relationships with women are explored, particularly Polyester Poontang and the adolescent Mercy Humppe. Merkin is constantly surrounded by a Satan-like procurer, Goodtime Eddie Filth, and an angelic 'Presence' who interrupts Merkin's biography with cryptic Borscht Belt-level jokes to denote births and deaths in Merkin's life. Newley periodically steps out of character to complain about his 'Merkin' role with an unseen director, two screenwriters, the film's producers and a trio of blasé movie critics who are turned off by the story's eroticism and lack of plot.

The story of Leroy "Satchel" Paige, the legendary pitcher, from his barnstorming days in the 1920s, hoping to break into organized "negro" baseball, to his emergence at age 43 in the major leagues with the Cleveland Indians the year after Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color barrier.

Master Sgt. Albert Callan is a war hero and a no-nonsense leader who reforms his previously mismanaged military base. Although Callan seems collected, he struggles as a closeted homosexual. When the sergeant becomes obsessed with his handsome clerk, Tom Swanson, he even disrupts the young man's relationship with his French girlfriend, Solange. Since Swanson isn't receptive to Callan's advances, it creates major tension between the two men.

A physician frustrates his family in his fight to prove that an elderly man is not senile.

Facing his parent's impending divorce and emotional upheaval, a young boy runs away and joins a gang of London street urchins who live by their wits, begging, and thievery.

Mel and Jane Mermelstein are a true-life California couple, thrown into the spotlight of judicial history in the 1980s. Mel is a Hungarian-born Jew, sole-survivor of his family's extermination at Auschwitz, and Jane, a Southern Baptist from Tennessee. Their four children are good kids, typical Americans, with just enough orneriness to irritate each other, but enough love and class to pull together when it counts.

A young private with a pistol deals with the aftershock of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

A burned-out private detective in Las Vegas gets involved in blackmail and murder.