Play for Today officially ended with The Amazing Miss Stella Estelle. The single play continued to get an airing on BBC1 however, and the winter 1984/5 season took up the same evening slot and could be considered another ‘unofficial’ part of the canon. As it includes some well-remembered plays, we’ve listed it below.

Terra Nova
By Ted Tally/John Bruce. Sparse, unreal dramatisation of Scott’s doomed South Pole expedition, presenting a less than completely heroic portrait of the man (played by Michael N Harbour), and featuring weird interludes in which his rival Amundsen turns up and starts winding him up.

The Long March
By Anne Devlin. After ten years in England, Doreen Hepburn returns to her native Belfast at the height of the Maze prison ‘dirty protests’ to find her local councillor father (James Ellis) being hounded by the locals for not being seen to give the prisoners enough support in their demands for special status. Filming on location in the Falls Road area caused a great deal of tension with residents, especially the staging of a ‘bin banger’ (noisy protest march) outside councillor’s home.

Punters
By Stephen Wakeham. Mick Ward and Tim Davidson are two young men working a seemingly ‘fail safe’ gambling scheme at the races.

Stars of the Roller State Disco
By Michael Hastings. Odd, well-remembered but perhaps not brilliant near-future dystopian satire, positing a grim future where permanently unemployed youths are forcibly inducted into the graffiti-covered titular disco to learn basic skills from endless instructional videos in the increasingly forlorn hope of gaining employment, skating gormlessly round and round in the meantime. Perry Benson plays Carly, a Chippendale-obsessed apprentice carpenter proudly rejecting offers of work he considers beneath him (‘I’m a craftsman!’) to the consternation of girlfriend Cathy Murphy. Shot on good old videotape in three days by Alan Clarke, on a cavernous set part-designed by writer Hastings, the on-the-nose nature of the play’s overarching conceit is offset to an extent by its many quirks, notably the casting of the gawky, speccy Benson as something approaching a romantic hero.

Talk to Me
By William Humble. Depressed young couple Patrick Barlow and Philomena McDonagh find sessions with psychoanalyst Alan Howard to little to improve their relationship.

More Lives Than One
By John Peacock. Michael N Harbour is caught between marriage and his old life with his mates. With music by Tom Robinson.

The Last Evensong
By Trevor Baxter. Taking the series into 1985, Freddie Jones is a stalwart brigadier resisting modernisation at the local church. With Tony Robinson.

Bird Fancier
By Mal Middleton. Semi-comic intrigue amongst pigeon fanciers in Sheffield, as Michael Elphick’s unstoppable winning streak is plotted against by fellow fanciers George Baker and Bryan Pringle.

The Exercise
By Tim Rose Price. A routine escape and evasion exercise in the Welsh hills for four army cadets turns into something more sinister. With Ian Hart and Leslie Schofield.

Four Days in July
By Mike Leigh. Leigh (overseeing mainly improvised acting as ever) turns his attentions to Northern Ireland with a view of the Troubles as seen through the eyes of two young couples (one Protestant, one Catholic) meeting in a maternity ward, both expecting babies in the run-up to the traditionally fraught Battle of the Boyne anniversary on July 12th. A far more warm, human portrayal of people and life than is found in some of Leigh’s previous, more celebrated, work in the Play for Today strand.

Brigadista
By Terence Hodgkinson. Paul Rogers is a successful author plugging his Spanish Civil War memoirs in Glasgow, and bumping into two old comrades from the conflict, James Copeland and Phil McCall, who remember the events he depicts rather differently.

By Leslie Stewart. The tribulations of the titular working men’s club cabaret singer, who finds she has to support her entire family with nocturnal renditions of ’60s standards.

By Judy Forrest. Charlotte Cornwell’s perfect life in a communal family of close friends is shattered when she has a baby. Featuring Jenny Runacre.

By Hugh McManus. Glaswegian wife Ann Scott-Jones stoically puts up with continual bouts of drunken violence from husband Joseph Brady until an incident finally causes her patience to snap.

By Derek Mahon and Chris Menaul. A journalist in 1959 Ulster finds help reporting the nocturnal beating and abduction of a youth suspiciously hard to come by.

By Leonard Preston. Songwriter Leonard Preston and A+R man John Duttine find their friendship stretched to breaking point when Duttine tries to sell one of Preston’s songs. With Caroline Quentin.

By Richard Harris. Black comedy set in a near-future Britain where euthenasia is both legal and common. Leonard Rossiter is under emotional and financial pressure looking after his elderly grandad Charles Lamb, who requires much attention and frequent spare-part surgery to keep going, until neighbour Bryan Pringle suggests the big E. David Threlfall is Rossiter’s son.

By Harry Barton. Derek Halligan picks up hitchhiker Dilys Hamlett on the M2 out of Belfast. The two slowly realise they’re not strangers. Events lead back to the titular prison for paramilitaries.

By Shirley Gee. In a black country historical museum, an unusual relationship develops between a lacemaker and a cleaner. With Victoria Burton and Cindy ‘Howard’s Way’ Shelley.

By David Pirie. Charles Dance is an army captain in 1940, investigating civilian morale in a remote village, and finding suspicion, hate and general hysteria. With Lindsey Duncan, Gorden Kaye.