Acting
Simon Templar is The Saint, a handsome, sophisticated, debonair, modern-day Robin Hood who recovers ill-gotten wealth and redistributes it to those in need.
Detective Sergeant Tommy Murphy is a maverick cop with a dark past. After failing a psychiatric assessment, he's given one last chance by his boss and given a dangerous undercover assignment. A loner with little to lose and dealing with everything on his own terms, this time around, however, Murphy has an ally in Detective Inspector Annie Guthrie.
Devised and written by Lynda La Plante as a follow-on from her successful television series Prime Suspect, this vast police procedural follows police detectives in England as they investigate crimes and the trials that come about as a result.
The Scales of Justice is a series of thirteen British cinema featurettes produced from 1962 to 1967 for Anglo-Amalgamated at Merton Park Studios in London. The first nine were made in black and white, and the last four in colour. The finale, Payment in Kind, was Merton Park's final production. Episodes were based on criminal cases, and each film was introduced by criminologist Edgar Lustgarten. The series derives its title from the symbolic scales held by the statue of Justice, situated above the dome of London's Central Criminal Court, The Old Bailey. The opening narration describes her as having "in her right hand, the Sword of Power and Retribution, and in her left – The Scales of Justice".
Gideon's Way is a British television crime series made by ITC Entertainment in 1964/65, based on the novels by John Creasey. The series was made at Elstree in twin production with The Saint TV series. It starred Liverpudlian John Gregson in the title role as Commander George Gideon of Scotland Yard, with Alexander Davion as his assistant, Detective Chief Inspector David Keen, Reginald Jessup as Det. Superintendent LeMaitre, Ian Rossiter as Detective Chief Superintendent Joe Bell and Basil Dignam as Commissioner Scott-Marle. The show did not acknowledge any help from Scotland Yard, any other police force or advisor. Daphne Anderson starred as his wife, Kate with Giles Watling as young son, Malcolm, Richard James as older son, Matthew who seemed to have a lot of new girlfriends and Andrea Allan as daughter, Pru. Unusually for police stories, Gideon was shown as a family man at home though urgent phone calls from his bosses tend to disrupt family plans too often. However, he did admit in "State Visit" that his wife had walked out on him for a while years ago when he put the job first and her second. They live in an expensive detached house in Chelsea.
A look at the real cases and personal demons of Sir Edward Marshall Hall, Edwardian London's most celebrated barrister. Presiding over trials that made headlines and drew large crowds to the public gallery, the Old Bailey defence counsel was Britain's first legal celebrity. A champion of justice for all, Marshall Hall earns a reputation as The Great Defender as he pleads the innocence of clients other lawyers refuse to represent.
British sitcom in which happy-go-lucky character Peter Barnes comically and haphazardly tries to deal with the daily frustrations his life throws at him.
Armchair Theatre is a British television drama anthology series of single plays that ran on the ITV network from 1956 to 1974. It was originally produced by Associated British Corporation, and later by Thames Television from mid-1968.
This show was a series of six plays in which the hero of one was the villain in another, thus illustrating the good and bad sides of the characters.
Adapted and directed by Peter Brook from the Royal Shakespeare Company’s ‘production-in-progress US’, this long-unseen agitprop drama-doc – shot in London in 1967 and released only briefly in the UK and New York at the height of the Vietnam War – remains both thought-provoking and disturbing. A theatrical and cinematic social comment on US intervention in Vietnam, Brook’s film also reveals a 1960s London where art, theatre and political protest actively collude and where a young Glenda Jackson and RSC icons such as Peggy Ashcroft and Paul Scofield feature prominently on the front line. Multi-layered scenarios staged by Brook combine with newsreel footage, demonstrations, satirical songs and skits to illustrate the intensity of anti-war opinion within London’s artistic and intellectual community.
In a seaside village, a group of local young men mingle among the seasonal tourists in search of sexual conquests. Near the end of one summer, the leader of the group, Tinker, a strolling photographer, aims to conquer a fashion model from a well-to-do family, but he finds himself unexpectedly falling in love. The tables thus turned, Tinker begins to see that maybe it's not the tourists who are being used in these sexual games.
What appears to be a cut-and-dried case of murder of an aging one time showgirl on Hampstead Heath by her lover is complicated by several factors, including a far more respectable paramour, and her insistence that a great inheritance was due her that nobody can verify.
The Committee, starring Paul Jones of Manfred Mann fame, is a unique document of Britain in the 1960s. After a very successful run in London’s West End in 1968, viewings of this controversial movie have been few and far between. Stunning black and white camera work by Ian Wilson brings to life this “chilling fable” by Max Steuer, a lecturer (now Reader Emeritus) at the London School of Economics. Avoiding easy answers, The Committee uses a surreal murder to explore the tension and conflict between bureaucracy on one side, and individual freedom on the other. Many films, such as Total Recall, Fahrenheit 451 and Camus’ The Stranger, see the state as ignorant and repressive, and pass over the inevitable weaknesses lying deep in individuals. Drawing on the ideas of R.D. Laing, a psychologically hip state faces an all too human protagonist.
