Play for Today Season 8 Episodes

Episode 1

Stronger Than the Sun

Sat, Mar 11, 197895 mins

Kate works in the nuclear industry. She is concerned about the way things are being run. So she smuggles out some Plutonium to prove how easy it is. She tries to pass it on to protest groups, but nobody is interested as they have their own agendas.

Episode 2

Come the Revolution

72 mins

Mike and his commune have a performance of their musical theatre "Diver" at the local pub, and ITV's Beth Bailey is coming along to see it. But will Beth's visions for the play as an incitement to revolution please everyone?

Episode 3

Abigail's Party

102 mins

Beverly has invited her new neighbours, Angela and Tony, over for drinks. She has also asked her divorced neighbour, Sue, because Sue's fifteen year-old daughter, Abigail, was holding a party in their house. Beverly's husband, Lawrence comes home late from work, just before the guests arrive. The gathering starts off in a stiff insensitive British middle class way with people who do not know each other, until Beverly and Lawrence start sniping at each other.

Episode 4

Oy Vay Maria

67 mins

Jewish boy loves Catholic girl - will love triumph over family objections?

Episode 5

Nipper

77 mins

Teenager Jimmy's life begins to unravel after the death of his father. With his mother promiscuous and his new stepfather and stepbrother difficult to get along with, he begins to fall into a cycle of petty crime and self harm.

Episode 6

One Day at a Time

73 mins

"People coming to their first AA meeting, prosperous people, sometimes, accustomed to the best. They look round the places where we meet, and you can see them thinking: what am I doing here? I owe my life to these rooms!"

Episode 7

The Mayor's Charity

83 mins

Olive Major is determined that her year of office as Mayor will be a happy and successful one. But her appointment of Ex-Warrant Officer Higham as Attendant and Mace-bearer causes the storm-clouds to gather over Medburgh Town Hall.

Episode 8

Catchpenny Twist

Roy and Martyn want to write the next Irish winner for the Eurovision Song Contest. So who thinks they are working for British Army Intelligence? Why has someone sent them two bullets through the post?

Episode 9

Charades

54 mins

"We've just got to get it right. It'll be our little secret. When all the other servants have gone out, we'll play this little game to amuse ourselves. A sort of private charade."

Episode 10

The Thin End of the Wedge

"Five days of darkness then. Unless you get it together we will have five days of darkness. And on the sixth day you will say, let there be light, and no doubt it'll be such an effort that on the seventh day you'll have to rest!"

Episode 11

Scully's New Year's Eve

71 mins

Bernadette Scully is determined to celebrate New Year's Eve with her family, even though none of them want to be there. As the party unfolds, it reveals a series of catastrophes and bitter resentments.

Episode 12

Licking Hitler

61 mins

1941 and Anna Seaton (Kate Nelligan) is hired as part of a radio propaganda project, creating disinformation about the Nazi war effort. But tensions between her and writer Archie MacLean (Bill Paterson) threaten to undermine the work.

Episode 13

Red Shift

84 mins

Three men at three different times in history come to Mow Cop Hill in search of sanctuary from their troubles: a Roman soldier, an English Civil War rebel and a 1970s teenager. Somehow they seem to be linked through an energy within the hill and an axe. Is history doomed to repeat itself or can loving another person free them?

Episode 14

The Spongers

104 mins

Set against the backdrop of the Silver Jubilee of Elizabeth II, the play depicts a single mother's struggles in this highly polemical and unremittingly bleak diatribe against government welfare cuts from the poor and disabled.

Episode 15

Destiny

110 mins

A play concerning the rise of British fascism in the '60s and '70s Although it begins in India during the final moments of the Raj, it mainly deals with events around a picket by Asian factory workers in the fictional West Midlands borough of Taddley. In India bluff-but-agreeable Colonel Chandler, and the rather more hard-nosed Major Rolfe and Sergeant Turner - berate, to varying degrees, manservant Khera. Moving forward through the '60s to the present day, we see the various fortunes of these men on their return to England - the Colonel becomes Tory MP for Taddley, and on his death his nephew Peter Crosby is to stand for election in the same seat, his politics very much of the Heathite, progressive conservative school. Rolfe, meanwhile, his defeated rival for Tory candidacy, is far more to the right in his views, and feels both socialism and wet Toryism have betrayed the lower-middle classes. Both have dealings with mysterious banker Frank Kershaw. Turner, for his part, sets up a small antiques shop, which has to close when a (Jewish) businessman informs him a large conglomerate has bought up the entire street, to make way for a precinct. News of Enoch Powell's 'rivers of blood' speech filter through and the businessman sees the way clear for this cult to hide its symbolic trappings and come out of hiding. Finally, we see Khera, now a shop steward at the Baron Castings foundry, seeking an overtime ban for his predominantly Asian union members, and the first stirrings of industrial rebellion. Turner, bitter from his bad fortune, becomes chairman of local pressure group the Taddley Patriotic League. At a town hall meeting, he introduces Maxwell, now general secretary of the distinctly NF-like Nation Forward movement, who, after hearing the race-based grievances from middle class housewives and factory workers alike, makes a rousing 'whites unite' speech, and proposes Turner as a Nation Forward candidate for the bye-election. Crosby wins the bye-election by a thousand votes, with Turner coming a close third. In the closing scene, Turner and Cleaver woo merchant bankers for further funding - Kershaw, and Rolfe, whose company Turner suddenly recognises as the people who forced him out of business in the first place. Far from representing the voice of the dispossessed petit-bourgeois, Nation Forward is climbing into bed with the very corporations that are truly the cause of the "little man's" alienation. Turner seems shell-shocked, dispossessed as the play ends. A complex play with many things to say about the causes of and contradictions within organised fascism. A great cast is headed by Colin Jeavons, Nigel Hawthorne, Iain Cuthbertson and Saeed Jaffrey. What a shame this kind of TV drama gets shied away from these days.

Episode 16

Our Day Out

70 mins

When a teacher takes a group of troubled school children on a school trip to Conwy in Wales, the children understand life outside of Liverpool.

Episode 17

The After Dinner Joke

60 mins

A satire on charity and politics that plays deliberate games with naturalistic presentation. Paula Wilcox stars as a charity worker who travels the world via bluescreen.

Episode 18

The Legion Hall Bombing

85 mins

The story of the trial of Willie Gallagher, convicted of bombing the Strabane (Northern Ireland) British Legion Hall in 1976.