Production
Anthology series of half hour plays produced in BBC's Television Centre's studios.
In 1972, disenchanted about the dreary conventions of English life, 25-year-old Julia heads for Morocco with her daughters, six-year-old Lucy and precocious eight-year-old Bea.
Madame Ranevsky and her daughter Anya return home from Paris to find their beloved family estate and cherry orchard are to be auctioned off to pay debts. Lopahin, a former serf on the estate who is now a wealthy landowner, proposes razing the home and cherry orchard and dividing the estate into plots that could be leased at great profit. The family, however, continues to hold out hope that their beloved home can somehow be saved from destruction.
A group of travellers find themselves stranded at a strange airport.
Bill is a man who's very bitter about his divorce and losing custody of his son. So, when one of his friends is being sued for divorce by his wife so that she can enter a lesbian relationship, Bill decides to help his friend gain custody of his son...in any way that they can devise, including using a sleazeball lawyer. But while Bill feels that feminism has robbed him of his family, he begins to be appalled at what he and Roger have done.
Annie, a single mother who is devoted to her son Charlie, starts a relationship with Mack. The problems start when Mack asks Annie and Charlie to move to New York with him.
When married British women Rose Arbuthnot and Lottie Wilkins decide to take a break from their respective spouses, they stay at a castle in Italy for a quiet holiday. Joining the ladies is Caroline Dester, a young socialite, and Mrs. Fisher, an older aristocrat. Liberated from their daily routines, the four women ease into life in rural Italy, and each finds herself transformed by the experience.
Playwright Christopher Hudson finds his medical problem hinders his writing. He employs secretary Sandra George and dictates his new play to her, but tensions soon develop between the two. As Hudson creates, scenes from his play are dramatized and interpolated. The play being created is Dennis Potter's Angels Are So Few, seen with a totally different cast from the 1970 BBC production.
Three-day weeks, strikes and the lights going out - the winter of 1973-4 finally spurs Hugh into political action. But is his new-found zeal going to be enough for the unexpected demands the new life makes of him?
In 1945, the Carlions assemble at an English country house for a family gathering. During the event, they must determine who is to take over the family brewing empire, since the present head of the business, Sir Frederick, is getting old. The results of the 1945 general election causes a major stir, and some angry farmers occupy a barn.
This neat, intense drama, labelled “a fable for television”, stars Tom Bell as the scruffy, childlike Michael Biddle, who is invited in from the cold of a suburban street by sexually frustrated, bored housewife Cynthia, played by Christine Hargreaves. He declares that he’s an angel, and Cynthia needs an angel, but in a way Michael fears...
Western journalists visit Moscow to interview Adrian Harris, a former controller in British intelligence who was also a double agent for the USSR. Harris believes in both Communism and Englishness, believing himself to have betrayed his class, but not his country. The press find these beliefs incompatible, and want to find out why he became a ‘traitor’. Harris is plagued by anxieties over both his actions and his upper-class childhood, and drinks to a state of collapse
Rose Hindmarsh finds herself at the centre of a controversy when she meets author Sarah Maloney as she investigates the life of Mary Swann, an obscure poet who was brutally murdered in a small town in rural Ontario.
As the UK begins its military engagement in the Falklands, a BBC news journalist attempts to climb up from his working-class roots, at any cost, lying to those around him to get what he wants, only to discover that he is the recipient of a deception far more clever than his own.
"The voice will make its effect. And it will, undoubtedly, be very touching. But, tell me: after his voice has broken, can you make anything of him then?" After the solo, after the chorus, after the applause?
Jack is obsessed with nuclear armageddon and takes his wife, Ellen, and their children into a fallout shelter in their garden to wait out the atomic bomb.
Pubs, pigeons, weight-lifting – that's Terry's life, and his wife Glenda feels neglected. But now Terry's best mate, Albert, is on leave from the Merchant Navy, and Albert knows how to treat a lady. 'Fireworks assured,' says the wrestling poster.
At a rural railway station in Victorian England, Jim is a spunky Jack Russell Terrier who escapes his mean master at the circus, and is soon befriended by station porter Bob and lonely orphan Henry. His performing feats soon become a local attraction, and before long he's in the middle of a battle to save the local orphanage.
A woman is attempting to cope with her son's tragic death when her mother arrives on an ill-timed visit with her own remedies.
Three teen girls in a Motown band embark on an emotional ride to hell and back.
