Alan Plater
Newcastle, 1939. Shipyard worker Joe feels emasculated and past his prime; too old to serve in the war, and he’s shocked when his wife leaves him for a younger naval officer. Needing a new challenge, Joe and his friend Harry reluctantly volunteer to join the Home Guard.
Jess (Brenda Blethyn) and town handyman Jacob (Kevin Whately) have been happily married 20 years, recently taking in a trio of Jacob's elderly relatives, including his mother (Rosemary Harris). Though the relations are demanding, kindhearted Jess -- who selflessly quit her job -- enjoys looking after them. But when Jacob disappears one day, Jess' life falls apart, and she must learn to cope with things on her own in this touching drama.
Gordon Comstock is a copywriter at an ad agency, and his girlfriend Rosemary is a designer. Gordon believes he is a genius, a marvelous poet and quits the ad agency, trying to live on his poems, but poverty soon comes to him.
British crime drama based on the "Dalziel and Pascoe" series of books by Reginald Hill, set in the fictional Yorkshire town of Wetherton. The unlikely duo of politically incorrect elephant-in-a-china-shop-copper Detective Superintendent Andrew Dalziel (pronounced Dee-ell) and his more sensitive and university educated sidekick Detective Sargent, later Detective Inspector, Peter Pascoe is always on hand to solve the classic murder mystery, while maintaining a down to earth wit and humour.
The past catches up with an ageing American jazz pianist when he returns to the clubs of Lancashire and Yorkshire that he last visited 10 years previously.
Frank Stubbs (Timothy Spall) is a down-at-heel ticket tout with grand ideas. He has an ambition to become a 'high class' promoter of famous and talented performers. In reality, his ambitions tend to outstrip his capabilities.
Campion is a television show made by the BBC, adapting the Albert Campion mystery novels written by Margery Allingham. Two series were made, in 1989 and 1990, starring Peter Davison as Campion, Brian Glover as his manservant Magersfontein Lugg and Andrew Burt as his policeman friend Stanislaus Oates. A total of eight novels were adapted, four in each series, each of which was originally broadcast as two separate hour-long episodes. Peter Davison sang the title music for the first series himself; in the second series, it was replaced with an instrumental version.
Fortunes of War is a 1987 BBC television adaptation of Olivia Manning's cycle of novels Fortunes of War. It stars Kenneth Branagh as Guy Pringle, lecturer in English Literature in Bucharest during the early part of the Second World War, and Emma Thompson as his wife Harriet. Other cast members included Ronald Pickup, Robert Stephens, Alan Bennett, Philip Madoc and Rupert Graves. The series stays relatively faithful to the original novels, with no notable departures from their plot.
The Ruth Rendell mysteries is a British television series made by TVS and Meridian Television for ITV between 2 August 1987 and 11 October 2000.
While researching the work of author D.H. Lawrence (Kenneth Branagh), Kate (Alison Steadman) begins a romance with a fellow academic, and learns about Lawrence's love affair with the married aristocrat Frieda Von Richthofen (Helen Mirren) in this made-for-television drama. As Lawrence and Von Richthofen fall deeper into their forbidden relationship, Kate grows more familiar with Lawrence's work, such as the sensuous Lady Chatterly's Lover.
In 1981, after the successful test of a submarine tracker device developed by the Swedish scientist Paul Mandell and sponsored by the US government through his representative Miller, his industry is totally burned and the laser device is stolen. Stig Larsson from the Swedish Secret Agency suspects of an inside job and brings the Swedish Marine Thomas Kallin to investigate Paul undercover as his driver. The naive Kallin is double-crossed but continues his investigation while Larsson finds the truth about the heist.
The story is set in a small English coastal town, around the turn of the century. A young woman, thought by many in the village to be a witch, dies suddenly one day. Not long after she's buried, the villagers begin to see her walking around the area and especially along the shoreline. The village minister begins to look into her life and her death, hoping to lay the spirit to rest.
A remote farmhouse on an isolated island. Strangers with English accents. Quarrels and a lonely child. The year is 1946. The man is George Orwell. The book he has come to write is Nineteen Eighty-four.
Following the banning and burning of his novel, "The Rainbow," D.H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, move to the United States, and then to Mexico. When Lawrence contracts tuberculosis, they return to England for a short time, then to Italy, where Lawrence writes "Lady Chatterley's Lover."
Jess Oakroyd, discontented with his home, his work and his football team, tears up his Insurance Card and disappears into the night. He intends to go to Nuneaton, but instead finds himself on the ragged edges of show business. We share with him the trials and tribulations of the Good Companions as they tour seaside towns, industrial cities and rural backwaters in their search for success and stardom.
Alan Plater looks at the various adaptations of J.B. Priestley's 'The Good Companions', in the company of the author himself.
Cribb is a television police drama, Adapted from Peter Lovesey's Sergeant Cribb novels and set in Victorian London around the time of the Jack the Ripper murders in 1888, Alan Dobie starred as the tough Detective Sergeant who worked for the newly formed Criminal Investigation Department, determined to remove crime from the streets of London using the latest detection methods.
A bomber has planted 7 bombs on a transatlantic cruise ship. While a crack bomb squad team try to defuse the bombs the police attempt to track down the mad bomber.
Faced with the prospect of being sent to work abroad, Sally Brown returns home from London to Hull, to see if she still feels the same attachment for her home town - and for her old boyfriend Mike Thurlow. Will she decide to take the job abroad or return to live with Mike in Hull?
It was a time when England was a nation on the cusp of change, an evolving landscape tht lay between Victorian England and the First World War. 'The Edwardians' explores the lives of and events in the lives of many who helped define the era, the "Belle Epoque".
Film adaptation from the novel by D.H. Lawrence, discovered after the celebrated author's death in 1930, a romantic love story tells of a prim young English girl who is sexually attracted to a seductively virile gypsy. The climatic dam burst is linked with the consummation of her desire.
Softly, Softly is a British television drama series, produced by the BBC and screened on BBC 1 from January 1966. It centred around the work of regional crime squads, plain-clothes CID officers based in the fictional region of Wyvern, supposedly in the Bristol area of England.
A writer seeking seclusion takes rooms in a remote farmhouse. Soon his quiet is broken by sounds and then sightings of a small child...
The new owners of a Manor House discover a legend that whoever is carried across the threshold shall unleash unknown forces...
