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27 Episodes 1980 - 1981
Episode 1
Colin Pasmore tests his strength against his family ties but finds them stronger than he ever imagined.
Episode 2
68 mins
"In heaven there is no drama - drama depends on failure and conflict. My trade is a scrutiny of hell. For any proud dramatist his style is his prejudice."
Episode 3
67 mins
Writer-director John McGrath deliberately shies away from naturalism in an experiment that mixes blue screen, songs, and characters realising they're acting within a play. This first of two parts sees Frank travel to a hostile London.
Episode 4
79 mins
Episode 5
76 mins
Kay Gilbert goes into hospital for a minor operation which goes badly wrong. This play tells the story of her fight for compensation.
Episode 6
71 mins
What could Steve Jackson's documentary film expose that must be concealed from the African leaders meeting in Brussels? Steve Jackson is on the run and the wrong decision could prove fatal.
Episode 7
61 mins
Twelve-year-old Jude has never met Dick, his father. One Sunday afternoon Dick impulsively engineers a meeting, which has distressing consequences.
Episode 8
90 mins
Dominick Hide, a time traveller from the year 2130, is studying the London transport system of 1980. Time travellers are supposed to be observers, and are strictly forbidden to land their flying saucers. One time traveller who broke this rule accidentally killed a dog, changing history and causing many future people to disappear. Inspired by his Great Aunt Mavis, Dominick decides to find his great great grandfather. He begins to land in 1980, where his strange clothes and speech make him seem an eccentric oddball. His quest brings him into contact with beautiful boutique owner Jane, and they fall in love. As Dominick's visits become more frequent and more prolonged, he increasingly risks his indiscretion being discovered by his boss, Caleb Line, and every moment he spends in the past increases the danger that he will catastrophically change the future.
Episode 9
75 mins
Clive admits himself to a psychiatric hospital after undergoing a breakdown. His wife wants him back home, but in order for Clive to be released, he has to want to be cured.
Episode 10
89 mins
A woman starts work as a nanny to a mute boy in a Victorian household. The boy's growing attachment to her, however, causes far more problems than his original detachment from his family.
Episode 11
99 mins
The story of Jewish immigrants in London's East End in the early 20th century.
Episode 12
Danny Duggan's rough-house business methods and lifestyle owe more to early influences than the CBI. But with the bottom falling out of the building game playing at gangster is only fun on the winning side.
Episode 13
68 mins
"They're nice affable gobblers and we're in the nice affable gobbling business." Tom and Gwen soon find that their gastronomical retreat from the rat race is anything but an escape when the Porters come to dine.
Episode 14
80 mins
"They say that in the wood you get what nearly everybody here is longing for - a second chance." J. M. Barrie's fantasy play, depicting alternative realities for its characters and their eventual return to real life.
Episode 15
69 mins
A confused industrial dispute at a London hospital triggers off in trade unionist George Harley's mind memories of his days fighting in the Spanish Civil War, when the issues seemed so much clearer.
Episode 16
69 mins
A corporation decides to outsource one of their contracts to the U.S.S.R. during the Cold War. As they work with politicians on both sides of the table to keep the story out of the press, they also try to keep the contract.
Episode 17
69 mins
On August the 15th, 1945, after the official surrender of the Empire of Japan, Admiral Matome Ugaki led the last Special Attack Force pilots across the Pacific, to crash into American ships. Thirty-five years later, the men who serviced the aeroplanes are still meeting up for their annual dinner. Now settled into civilian jobs - dentist, baker, taxi-driver, insurance salesman - and with children and grandchildren, they bemoan the decay of traditional Japanese values. Hard liquor is imbibed, toasts raised to the memory of the heroic dead, and old rivalries resurface. The survivors' dissatisfaction with post-war life comes to a head when, in a moment of drunken inspiration, Tokkotai the airline pilot decides on a symbolic gesture to show that the kamikaze spirit lives on.
Episode 18
69 mins
You know the nuts and bolts of our policy? To penetrate the unions. To use all sorts of stratagems, manoeuvres, illegal measures, evasions, subterfuges, to carry on Communist activities inside them at all cost.
Episode 19
96 mins
Two very different women share an office, a common enemy, and a sense of humour.
Episode 20
90 mins
When her 17-year-old son Roy falls in love with a Muslim girl, and a Bangladeshi butcher seeks help from her husband Raji, Leela realizes that the tears and romance of Indian cinema are closer to her own life than she has ever imagined.
Episode 21
74 mins
Six lifers living in an experimental self-rehabilitation unit attached to an ordinary prison participate in a group therapy session. All of them have spent many years in prison and have little chance of ever getting out.
Episode 22
63 mins
"A hundred years from now they're gonna be looking up at this old master and they're gonna try and imagine what it was like to be alive in the same century Monet painted this."
Episode 23
79 mins
When the dynamic young head-master of St Peter's Primary School decides to liven up a parents' fund-raising social by hiring a Bavarian band, he little suspects the hidden passions that are about to be unleashed.
Episode 24
74 mins
Nancy and Ella are two bored housewives starved of affection when their husbands are away on the oil rigs. The rules are simple: have some fun, just make sure nobody finds out, and you don't get emotionally involved.
Episode 25
65 mins
It's such a simple, natural thing to have a baby, thinks Mary. But she and husband Paul are preoccupied with their careers. Can their young neighbour Tessa help - or are the emotions around a new baby more complex than anyone had expected?
Episode 26
64 mins
Simon Simpson runs an entertainment agency in Liverpool. At one of his regular auditions in The Bootle Railway Club he sees an aggressive young man fresh from the dole queue who dreams of becoming a professional comedian.
Episode 27
73 mins
Psy-Warriors explores the military use of psychological operations as writer David Leland poses in his article "the moral dilemma of how far we can torture and degrade prisoners in the name of democracy and freedom". It unflinchingly depicts the physical and mental treatment of terrorist suspects, drawing from official reports and research. Images of the practices of humiliation and interrogation are troubling - The Listener's columnist David Wheeler called it a "sado-masochist's special" - but so are the concepts behind those practices, which are explored in provocative yet witty dialogue. Apart from a few filmed inserts, Psy-Warriors was shot on video in the studio and, in director Alan Clarke's characteristically passionate and precise handling, the dramatic spaces of television reinforce the play's ideas.