TV Cream

Play For Today

Play for Tomorrow

Following the success of “Flipside…”, Play for Today went a bit sci-fi mad, and gave rise to a mini-season of six plays set in various extrapolated futures, formulated by holding a futurology seminar for the series authors, with scientists, economists, sociologists and the like. The result was a mixed bunch, to say the least…

Crimes

If you're caught up a step-latter when the bomb drops, put on your yellow waders...By Caryl Churchill
2002: In a paranoid UK, with the threat of nuclear war ever closer and prisons full to bursting, four convicts tell of the ‘crimes’ they have committed, some seemingly innocuous by today’s standards… at least, at first. Includes a parody of the then-prevalent Protect and Survive leaflets and broadcasts. With Sylvestra Le Touzel and TP McKenna as the prison psychiatrist.

Bright Eyes

By Peter Prince
1999: Examination of family life and political ideals in a war-ravaged future Europe, compared and contrasted with ’60s equivalents. Gavin Campbell features.

Cricket

By Michael Wilcox
1997: A village cricket team (complete with computerised Wisden Almanac with the voice of Brian Johnson) is suspected of moonlighting as a private guerilla arm, fighting the Forestry Commission.

The Nuclear Family

By Tom McGrath
1999: Perma-redundant dad Jimmy Logan takes his family on a strange ‘working holiday’, scrubbing floors in an undersea missile base. With Gavin Campbell again.

Shades

By Stephen Lowe
1999 again: A tower block contains youths ‘bought off’ by the government, in a climate of microchip-created endless leisure, who experience (often pornographic) virtual reality-style fantasies by donning the titular ‘shades’, until a 1980s theme party (they predicted that right, at least) leads to ideology and political thought seeping in under the dazed lifestyle. With Neil Pearson.

Easter 2016

By Graham Reid
2016: Ideological stand off in a Northern Ireland teacher training college on the centenary of the Easter Rising. With Bill Nighy, Colm Meaney and a young Kenneth Branagh.

2 Comments

2 Comments

  1. Glenn Aylett

    April 29, 2021 at 7:15 pm

    These plays came out when I was 14 and I particularly remember The Nuclear Family and Shades for reasons that only a teenage boy could, the son in The Nuclear Family being seduced by a topless Wren known as Able Bodied Andrews and the teenagers in Shades watching porn on headsets and discussing their sex lives( or lack of). Rather more fun than a Ken Loach play about unemployed miners.

  2. Richardpd

    April 29, 2021 at 11:01 pm

    It’s interesting that they didn’t try to get Nigel Kneale to write for this series, but I guess it would have felt like a backwards step for him.

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