TV Cream
Play For Today
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232After Dinner Game, The
Social and sexual intrigue from Malcolm Bradbury/Christopher Bigsby set at a dinner party for the manipulative vice-chancellor of a cash-strapped new university...
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174
Breath
By Elaine Feinstein. Angela Pleasance is a young mother isolated by her chronic asthma and descending into paranoia. Gareth Thomas is her...
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272
Death of a Young, Young Man, The
By Willy Russell. A delinquent suspended from an urban school gets a job on a farm, which he really enjoys until events...
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212
Sunset Across the Bay
Alan Bennett makes his first contribution to Play for Today with some autobiographical sketches of the fag end of family life. ‘Mam’...
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230
Funny Farm
By Roy Minton. A day in the life of mental health nurse Tim Preece, struggling with not only the demands of his...
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167
Goodbye
By Hugh Whitemore. An 18 year middle-class Maida Vale marriage is under threat when the wife walks out. With Peter Cellier, Paul...
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202
Just Another Saturday
Jon Morrison plays an eager young mace-twirling Orange Parade leader in Glasgow, gradually finding out the unpleasant, violent truth behind the symbolic...
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134
Child of Hope
Dramatisation by John Elliot and Joel Carlson of the trial of 37 black countrymen from South West Africa, prosecuted for terrorism by...
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302
Saturday Party, The
By Brian Clark. Stockbroker Peter Barkworth is made redundant but goes ahead with his planned Christmas party anyway, bringing a different air...
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183
Wednesday Love
By Arthur Hopcraft. Two women have romantic encounters on their afternoon off in an out-of-hours drinking club.
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201
Dandelion Clock, The
By Wilson John Haire. Examined the Belfast Troubles through the eyes of a young girl missing her AWOL father, and counting the...
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629
Brassneck
Brechtian distanciation which is all very well in the theatre but doesn't really work on the telly
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183
Floater, The
By Peter Prince. Comic study of a court case awaiting hearing, with Richard Beckinsale as a solicitor’s clerk acting for his sick...
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201
By Common Consent
Paul Thompson’s “bourgeois fantasy” about an imaginary fascist regime of the near future, and the tribulations of young dissidents in City Zone...
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236
Plaintiffs and Defendants
Peter (Alan Bates), a divorce lawyer in the thick of middle age, wakes up in the bed-sit of his graphic designer mistress...
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208
Two Sundays
A companion piece to the previous week’s Plaintiffs and Defendants. Peter (Dinsdale Landen) and Hilary (Georgina Hale) wake up, facing the prospect...
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189
Moss
By Bernard Kops. Warren Mitchell is a Jewish East End miser who changes his outlook when his only real love, son Sthephen...
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195
84 Charing Cross Road
By Hugh Whitemore and Helene Hanff. Frank Finlay owns the titular bookshop in this famous tale of a real bookshop proprietor’s long-term...
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301
Keep an Eye on Albert
PfT acting veteran Brian Glover’s first foray into writing for the strand. Weight-lifting pigeon fancier David Daker neglects wife Susan Tracy, so...
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190
Children of the Sun
By Michael O’Neill and Jeremy Seabrook. The passengers caught up in an airline hijack drama sweat it out, among them Georgina Hale...
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233
After the Solo
By John Challen. Bleak tale of an awkward young boy whose brief success as a chorister is scuppered by puberty. Leonard Rossiter...
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366
Through the Night
Harrowing and immensely popular look at NHS hospital life from the patient’s point of view, written by Trevor Griffiths after reading a...
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191
Passage to England, A
By Leon Griffiths. A superficially light-hearted tale of Asians attempting illegal immigration from Amsterdam to British shores on a fishing vessel. Starring...
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233
Rumpole of the Bailey
The original outing for John Mortimer's bellicose bailiff
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322
Evacuees, The
Jewish wartime misfittery.
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232
Other Woman, The
By Watson Gould. ‘Angry young lesbian artist’ Jane Lapotaire disrupts the lives of upper class lover Lynne Frederick and middle-aged alcoholic Michael...
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342
Nuts in May (aka The Plastic Tadpole)
A pair of lisping middle-class types getting back to nature
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231
Doran’s Box
Experimental codswallop.
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192
Packman’s Barn
By Alick Rowe. John Barrett returns to his remote hill farm after 20 years to deal with some unfinished business, and finds...
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220
Story to Frighten the Children, A
By John Hopkins. Jon Laurimore and Geoffrey Palmer are police investigating a brutal murder on a high-rise estate, but finding fear of...
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219
Happy Hunting Ground, The
By Tom Hadaway. Neil Phillips is a young trawlerman working his way up the fishing hierarchy in various encounters in a harbour.
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483
Jumping Bean Bag
Public school glam rock a-go-go!
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224
Clay, Smeddum and Greenden
Trilogy of one-act plays adapted by Bill Craig from short stories by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, all dealing with the way the Scottish...
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190
Love Letters on Blue Paper
Rare incursion into play for today from the Godfather of the original theatrical kitchen sink explosion, Arnold Wesker. Elizabeth Spriggs tries to...
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345
Willie Rough
By Bill Bryden. Story of the beginnings of revolutionary socialism, set amongst the shipyards of greenock during the first half of the...
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224
Tiptoe Through the Tulips
By Beryl Bainbridge. Two ‘singles’, Rosemary Leach and Michael Gambon, are ‘introduced’ to each other by well-meaning friends, but the encounter doesn’t...
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258
Peddler, The
By EA Whitehead. John Hurt plays a salesman of anti-depressants and other drugs, whose wife discovers his affair with a female doctor.
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266
Early Struggles
By Peter Prince. Pop Musician Paul Nicholas is left literally holding the baby when his wife walks out. With Tom Conti, Amanda...
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431
Double Dare
Dennis Potter on... Dennis Potter. And sex.
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176
House of Bernarda Alba, The
Adaptation of a short story by the famed Spanish poet and author Federico Garcia Lorca of the conflict between a young woman...
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494
Bar Mitzvah Boy
Coming of age? Schmoming of schmage. (Hmm, might need to rethink that.)
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188
Elephants’ Graveyard
Jon Morrison, supposedly gainfully employed as far as his family are concerned, instead takes off to the Scottish hillsides every day, and...
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200
Housewives’ Choice
By Roy Kendall. Trouble arises when Frances de la Tour hires Sharon Duce as a nanny. With Bernard Hill.
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206
Yer Man from Six Counties
By Colin Welland. Young boy Joseph Reynolds loses his dad in an IRA bomb blast and moves out to his uncle’s remote...
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267
Buffet
By Rhys Adrian. Tony Britton is a businessman hounded by the failing economy and his increasingly hazardous extra-marital affair, getting slowly drunk...
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488
Brimstone and Treacle
'Bit over the top, isn't it?' 'No idea, it's not actually on telly.'
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210
Love on a Gunboat
By Malcolm Bradbury. Brummie couple Stephen Moore and Barbara Flynn court during the Suez crisis. 20 years later, against the backdrop of...
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215
Kiss of Death, The
Shy and sarcastic teenage Oldham undertaker’s assistant Trevor (David Threlfall) knocks about with drinking pal Ronnie (John Wheatley) and his girlfriend Sandra...
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212
Our Flesh and Blood
By Mike Stott. Maternity comedy with Bernard Hill and Alison Steadman expecting their first baby, and opting for the then-modish ‘natural’ childbirth...
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221
Do as I Say
By Charles Wood. Angela Down is a rape victim whom no-one will take seriously.