Play for Today
This show was a British television anthology drama series. It was produced by the BBC, and it was transmitted on BBC1 between 1970 and 1984. During this period, more than three hundred different episodes, featuring original television plays, and adaptations of stage plays and novels, were broadcast. Each episode was between fifty minutes and one hour and forty minutes in duration. Some of these plays, for example, Rumpole of the Bailey, subsequently became a television series.
- 1970-1984
- 14 seasons
- Comedy, Drama, Horror, Suspense
This show was a British television anthology drama series. It was produced by the BBC, and it was transmitted on BBC1 between 1970 and 1984. During this period, more than three hundred different episodes, featuring original television plays, and adaptations of stage plays and novels, were broadcast. Each episode was between fifty minutes and one hour and forty minutes in duration. Some of these plays, for example, Rumpole of the Bailey, subsequently became a television series.
Season 14 Episode Guide
15 Episodes 1984
Episode 1
Young Shoulders
80 mins
A cynical teenage boy re-evaluates his attitude to life and his parents after his sister is killed in a plane crash.
Episode 2
A Coming to Terms for Billy
82 mins
Norman comes storming into the family home with his new lady friend. But has she managed to achieve the impossible by mellowing the big man?
Episode 3
Z for Zachariah
117 mins
Based on a book of the same name, depicting events in a Welsh valley after a nuclear holocaust, in which almost everyone has dies, leaving just two families. Eventually just one girl and one man are left, and the majority of the film is about how they cope with the situation and each other.
Episode 4
Moving on the Edge
64 mins
A woman in a state of personal crisis finds it hard to communicate with her husband and family.
Episode 5
Desert of Lies
75 mins
Jake and Sue's expedition to the Kalahari Desert in 1983 follows in the footsteps of an earlier trek in 1848 by two missionaries. The two pairs of travellers, in the past and the present, meet with disaster.
Episode 6
Hard Feelings
82 mins
A group of house-sharing ex-college friends begin to find their existence disintegrating amid a backdrop of London riots and their own selfishly hedonistic lifestyle.
Episode 7
Under the Hammer
70 mins
A previously unknown painting by Vincent Van Gogh, said to have come from Russia, comes up for sale at a London auction of impressionist paintings. The good order of the sale house is disturbed when someone challenges the picture's authenticity.
Episode 8
King
80 mins
A man who has had a good life in England wants to retire to Jamaica, but the celebration with his daughters doesn't go as expected.
Episode 9
Rainy Day Women
84 mins
A film about the cruelty of war. Charles Dance plays an officer who is sent out to investigate a rumour about German spies during the chaotic days of 1940. At the same time three land girls are arriving at a sleepy little village. These three together with a German refugee family and the local doctor falls victims to war hysteria and is killed by a local mob - while Charles Dance is trying to rescue them.
Episode 10
Dog Ends
72 mins
A middle-aged man is feeling the strain of looking after his elderly grandfather, who is demanding and needs a lot of medical treatment. Then a neighbour suggests a painless way to be rid of him - This black comedy is set in the future, where euthanasia is lawful and increasingly common but it should still, ideally, be voluntary.
Episode 11
The Groundling and the Kite
Peter is a songwriter, while his old friend Jimmy is an A and R (Artists and Repertoire) man. But when Jimmy tries to sell one of Peter's songs, Peter is furious. Can the friendship survive?
Episode 12
The Cry
54 mins
In Ulster in 1959, a journalist witnesses the beating of a youth.
Episode 13
It Could Happen to Anybody
54 mins
A long-suffering Glasgow housewife puts up with years of her husband's violence and drunkenness - and then something happens which makes her snap and fight back.
Episode 14
Only Children
61 mins
A young woman's comfortable life is turned upside down when she has a baby.
Episode 15
The Amazing Miss Stella Estelle
46 mins
Miss Stella Estelle is a cabaret singer in working men's clubs, and she sings songs from the 1960s to support a large and difficult family. But how long can it go on? The backdrop is a family in decay: husband out of work, wife working and still doing the domestics, daughter the singer and hopeful star, son her "manager" but in reality going nowhere. Stella plays a crummy club circuit, singing songs for oldies for £50 a night - She's never going to be a star because of her parents' short-sighted greed.