Play For Today

360

Just a Boy’s Game

'See me, right..?'

212

Billy

Harrowing story of the brutal treatment inflicted on a four-year-old boy, in a typically unflinching play from GF Newman, the creator of...

515

Instant Enlightenment Including VAT

By Andrew Carr. Post-Jonestown indictment of personality cults, with a sinister Simon Callow as ‘Maximillian Schreiber’, taking an assortment of gullibles under...

186

Hole in Babylon, A

By Jim Hawkins and Horace Ove. Account of the 1975 Spaghetti House Siege, when three black men held up a Knightsbridge Italian...

176

Slab-Boys, The

By John Byrne. First of a semi-autobiographical trilogy from the writer of Tutti Frutti, detailing the tribulations of a young man with...

218

1

Katie: The Year of a Child

By Ian Cullen and John Norton. Margaret Kelly plays a 14 year old child of a large Irish travelling family, who finds...

136

Network, The

By Stephen Fagan. A mutually beneficial upper middle class social circle begins to exert undue pressure on two of its members.

146

Chance of a Lifetime

By Robert Holman. School leaver Martyn Hesford joins the army.

233

2

Keep Smiling

By Paul Joyce. Stephen Moore and Morag Hood’s idyllic county picnic triggers off paranoid delusions in Moore of being bugged, followed and...

292

Dreams of Leaving

In 1971, eager, slightly gauche twentysomething journo William (Bill Nighy) leaves Nottingham for a tenure on a Fleet Street tabloid. After a...

184

Thicker Than Water

Raucous goings-on and underhand gamesmanship aplenty in Brian Glover’s tale of a victory-hungry English team at the Europen Black Pudding Festival in...

188

Murder Rap

By Michael Hastings. Elderly caretaker Arthur Lovegrove defends his house from ‘invasion’ by black and underprivileged council tenants. Featuring Liz Smith and...

152

No Defence

By Chris Kewbank. Judge Patrick Troughton presides over a complex rape case.

133

That Crazy Woman

By David Hopkins. Zena Walker stars as Dr Barbara Moore in a dramatised account of her famed Land’s End to John O’Groats...

187

Gift from Nessus, A

By William McIlvanney and Bill Craig. When a salesman terminates his long-term affair, the woman in question commits suicide. Turning to drink,...

166

Buses

By Geoffrey Case. The romance of running a private bus company in 1920s Yorkshire is compared to the romance of the fictional...

206

Shadows on Our Skin

By Derek Mahon and Jennifer Johnston. Harsh and unsentimental study of the Troubles through the eyes of an eleven year old boy...

188

Ladies

By Carol Bunyan. Female factory workers (including Patsy Rowlands and June Brown) celebrate one of their number’s wedding in a lunch break,...

248

Vanishing Army, The

By Robert Holles. Career army man Bill Patterson faces discharge in this examination of the harsh treatment of British NCOs. With Timothy...

255

Not for the Likes of Us

By Gilly Fraser. Pam St Clement chews the furniture as only she can, as the weary matriarch of a large working class...

229

Executioner, The

By Lionel Goldstein. Polish army officer Paul Rogers kills a Nazi in WWII, then finds himself on trail in present-day West Germany,...

740

Imitation Game, The

By Ian McEwan. In late 1940, 19-year-old Cathy Raine (Harriet Walter), lives a dull, stifling lower middle class existence in Frinton with...

236

Walk in the Forest, A

By Jeremy Paul. John Alderton is a writer who befriends a dissident from the USSR. With John Bird and Paul Freeman

262

Pasmore

Philip Jackson has an affair with Penelope Wilton, and undergoes a protracted nervous breakdown as wife Alison Steadman and dad Jimmy Jewel...

203

C2H5OH

By David Turner. Thinly-veiled autobiographical story of playwright David Purser’s alcohol-fuelled personal hell, with Dinsdale Landen.

185

Adventures of Frank, The

Highly experimental two-parter from The Cheviot… writer-director and head of the 7:84 theatre company John McGrath, partially adapted from his stage play...

172

Minor Complications

By Peter Ransley. A woman’s fight for compensation after a botched operation. With David ‘Science Workshop’ Hargreaves.

220

Number on End

By Gordon Flemyng. On the eve of a conference of African leaders in Brussels, documentary maker Nick ‘Space 1999’ Tate uncovers an...

285

Jude

By Lesley Brice. James Laurenson engineers an awkward afternoon reunion with his 12 year old son Dorian Ford.

677

2

Flipside of Dominick Hide, The

Curly-haired nut goes trainspotting

234

Name for the Day

By Colin Haydn Evans. Richard O’Callaghan suddenly decides to go mad – much to the consternation of wife Elizabeth Sladen. With Simon...

280

Jessie

By Bryan Forbes. Nanny Nanette Newman looks after the mute male child of a Victorian household. Written and directed by Forbes, and...

627

1

Black Stuff, The

In the late-’70s Liverpool of fast-rising unemployment, a gang of tar layers strike out in an old transit for a job laying...

221

Beyond the Pale

By Les Blair. Dramatisation of the British Brothers march into the East End Jewish quarter of Bethnal Green in 1902. Michael Maynard...

407

Muscle Market, The

First of Alan Bleasdale’s post-Black Stuff (qv) character studies. Pete Postlethwaite runs a failing building contractor’s, and resorts to sub-gangster thuggery to...

211

Brush with Mr Porter on the Road to Eldorado, A

By Don Haworth. A pleasant hotel restaurant is disrupted by “nice, affable gobblers” the Porters, who proceed to gorge themselves on everything...

179

Dear Brutus

Adaptation of the melancholc fantasy from author of Peter Pan JM Barrie, with a group of guests (including Frank Finlay and Stratford...

166

Cause, The

By Derek Lister. Trade union secretary Jimmy Jewel, caught up in an industrial dispute at a London hospital, has flashbacks to his...

185

Beloved Enemy

By Charles Levinson and David Leland. Dramatisation of a real-life business deal between Britain and the USSR in which the UK exchanged...

204

Kamikaze Gound Staff Reunion Dinner, The

Stewart Parker’s raucous, wry satire of the macho, infantile depths a gang of men can drag themselves down to, the fictional old...

306

Union, The

By Tony Perrin. Story of the 1961 ballot rigging by the Electrician’s union to get a communist candidate elected General President. Perrin...

145

Sorry

By Carol Bunyan. Cheeky office post boy Nicholas Ball invites co-worker Meg Davies round to his place during the lunch hour, but...

185

Garland, The

By HO Nazareth and Horace Ove. Patricia Garwood derides Bollywood romantic films as sentimental fluff until her life, including her 17 year...

191

Sin Bin, The

By Tony Parker. Gruelling tale of a group therapy session for six ostensibly hopeless men variously sentenced to life imprisonment, and the...

150

Before Water Lillies

By Robert Marshall. William ‘Porkins’ Hootkins is an American Academic obsessed with Monet. John ‘Boycie’ Challis also stars.

192

Bavarian Night

By Andrew Davies. An eponymous parent’s fund-raising social gathering after hours at a primary school brings out a few home truths for...

176

Good-Time Girls, The

By Alan Clews. The wives of absentee North Sea oil rig workers start playing away.

179

Baby Talk

By Nigel Williams. Pregnant career woman Susan Littler seeks advice from her neighbour Pauline Quirke.

198

Turn for the Worse, A

By John Bill. Bernard Hill plays a scouse talent scout who discovers unemployed alternative comedian Max Hafler in a working men’s club...

209

Psy-Warriors

By David Leland. Prisoners of war apparently being brutally tortured by terrorists in Northern Ireland are eventually revealed to be soldiers from...

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