Middlemarch

The sometimes-comic, sometimes-dramatic exploits of the Bradford family, father Tom (a columnist for a Sacramento, California newspaper), mother Joan and their eight children: Mary, David, Joanie, Nancy, Elizabeth, Susan, Tommy, and Nicholas. After Joan's death, Tom met teacher Abby, and they were married to make the family feel complete again. The kids all had friends and relationships as well, turning the Bradford Bunch into a free-for-all of loved ones and family members.

Frontierswoman Sayward Luckett's struggles in Ohio during the late-18th and early-19th centuries.

Re-working material from his first novel, "Hide and Seek" (1973), and folding this into a prismatic blend of autobiographical details, popular music and 1940s film noir, Writer Dennis Potter delivered a drama now regarded as a twentieth century masterwork. Detective novelist Philip Marlow (Sir Michael Gambon) suffers from the crippling disease of psoriatic arthritis. Confined to a hospital bed, Marlow mentally re-writes his early Chandleresque thriller, "The Singing Detective", with him in the title role, drifting into a surreal 1945 fantasy of spies and criminals, along with vivid memories of a childhood in the Forest of Dean. As past events and 1940s songs surface in his subconscious, Marlow's voyage of self-discovery provides a key to conquering his illness, while his noir-styled hallucinations evoke the Philip Marlowe of Chandler's Murder, My Sweet (1944), starring Dick Powell, who later became a "singing detective" on radio's "Richard Diamond, Private Detective" (1949), crooning to girlfriend Helen Asher at the end of each episode.

A weekly examination of the arts and literature, on Sunday mornings when there was more likely to be an audience interested in such matters and there was less competition for ratings.

Each of the four separate episodes -rather independent chapters- presents some of the findings of Egyptology, largely in the form of realistically presented docudrama, a splendid spectacle by peplum-standards, yet unusually true and hence surprising for non-specialist viewers in various details. Remarkable is the revealed contrast between the image-building clichés presented by the official, mostly monumental sources, glorifying deified pharaohs' glorious reign and triumphs and 'celestial' deities, and the more mundane reality, deduced largely from other archaeological findings, showing more human vices, misery, crime...

Short-lived Saturday morning live-action series about the daily struggles of an extended family of Neanderthals in prehistoric Europe. Crisp narration by veteran actor Burgess Meredith lent a "documentarian" feel, suggesting that the show was a dramatic re-creation of how life might have been 72,000 years ago.