John McGrath
Writing
Biography
Born in Birkenhead from Irish Catholic stock, John McGrath was a British playwright, screenwriter. producer, director and socialist who took up the cause of Scottish independence and the principles of a radical, popular theatre with the creation of the 7:84 theatre company alongside his wife, Elizabeth MacLennan, and brother-in-law, David MacLennan. His most famous plays are arguably The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil which was brought to television in 1974 by John Mackenzie for the Play for Today strand, and Events While Guarding The Bofors Gun which was made into the film The Bofors Gun in 1968. He also wrote the screenplays for films such as Billion Dollar Brain, The Virgin Soldiers, The Reckoning, The Dressmaker and 1991's Robin Hood, and produced films such as Carrington and Aberdeen.
Known For
Play for Today is a British television anthology drama series, produced by the BBC and transmitted on BBC1 from 1970 to 1984. During the run, more than three hundred programmes, featuring original television plays, and adaptations of stage plays and novels, were transmitted. The individual episodes were between fifty and a hundred minutes in duration.
Play for Today
Z-Cars or Z Cars is a British television drama series centred on the work of mobile uniformed police in the fictional town of Newtown, based on Kirkby, Merseyside. Produced by the BBC, it debuted in January 1962 and ran until September 1978.
Z-Cars
Series of single made-for-television dramas.
Screen Two
No description available.
Six
Kaisa is a Scot, a successful London lawyer, who snorts coke and has one-night stands with strangers. Her mother calls from Aberdeen with some story begging her to fly to Norway and collect her alcoholic dad whom she hasn't seen in years.
Aberdeen
A former British spy stumbles into in a plot to overthrow Communism with the help of a supercomputer. But who is working for whom?
Billion Dollar Brain
The Swashbuckling legend of Robin Hood unfolds in the 12th century when the mighty Normans ruled England with an iron fist.
Robin Hood
Ludovic is waiting for a miracle. With six-year-old certainty, she believes she was meant to be a little girl -- and that the mistake will soon be corrected. But where she expects the miraculous, Ludo finds only rejection, isolation, and guilt -- as the intense reactions of family, friends, and neighbors strip away every innocent lace and bauble.
My Life in Pink
Painter Dora Carrington develops an intimate but extremely complex bond with writer Lytton Strachey. Though Lytton is a homosexual, he is enchanted by the mysterious Dora and they begin a lifelong friendship that has strangely romantic undertones. Eventually, Lytton and Dora decide to live together, despite the fact that the latter has fallen in love with military man Ralph Partridge, whom she plans to marry.
Carrington
The core of the plot is the romantic triangle formed by the protagonist, a conscripted soldier named Private Brigg, a worldly professional soldier named Sergeant Driscoll, and Phillipa Raskin, the daughter of the Regimental Sergeant Major. The location is a British army base in Singapore during the Malayan Emergency.
The Virgin Soldiers
In England during World War II, a repressed dressmaker and her sister struggle looking after their 17-year-old niece, who is having a delusional affair with an American soldier.
The Dressmaker
In their songs, comedy and exuberant music, a travelling theatre company give a fiercely polemic account of Scottish history, from the aftermath of Culloden to the oil boom. Their production before a live audience is intercut with filmed reconstructions of the Highland Clearances and the Victorian obsession with hunting stags.
The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil
Michael Marler, a successful businessman in London, is about to make his way to the top. After 37 years, the death of his father brings him back to his hometown of Liverpool, where he’s confronted with his lost Irish roots. He finds out that his father died in a fight with some Anglo-Saxon teddy boys. It becomes a matter of honour for him to take his revenge without involving the police.
The Reckoning
In the first part, The Compartment, an insane man boards a quiet railway coach and starts to annoy a patient man trying to read a paper with incessant small talk in an increasingly menacing manner until he finally pulls out a gun and screaming class hatred bile, humiliates the man until his stop is reached. In part two, Playmates, he breaks into a lonely house and proceeds to terrorise a spinster woman who lives there.
Double Bill
A three-episode mini-series chronicling the history of Scotland from ancient times through the union with England and culminating with the rise of Thatcherism and the introduction of the Poll Tax.
Border Warfare
Ken Russell's silent film treatment of the 19th century comic novel by the Brothers Grossmith - George and Weedon. Starring Bryan Pringle, Avril Elgar and Murray Melvin. Adapted by Ken Russell and John McGrath. First shown on BBC2 at 10.10pm on Saturday 12th December 1964 - as part of the 'Six' strand.
The Diary of a Nobody
An elderly woman learns that she is dying of cancer. She and her husband leave their small farm on the Isle of Skye to visit their children to inform them of the news. During the journey, the couple rediscover their love for each other.
The Long Roads
A national service NCO (David Warner) comes face to face with an embittered Irish Gunner (Nicol Williamson) who is determined to humiliate him.
The Bofors Gun
Frank, a young lad from Sheffield, leaves home to seek his fortune in London; he finds the big city not all what he had expected
The Adventures of Frank: Everybody's Fiddling Something
Three stories reflecting life in the Orkney Islands, two set in the past, and one in the present.