Christopher Morahan

A young actor and an angst-ridden city worker fight over a girl watched over by a disturbed chum. The play is concerned with three young men, Len, Pete and Mark, and the scene of action shifts back and forth between Len's house and Mark's. Sometimes all three come together, sometimes only two, and often Len is on stage alone. There are conversations and soliloquies filled with the brilliant convolutions of thought, the sudden flashes of truth which distinguish Pinter's unique style, with the mood ranging from calm introspection to explosive outpouring. Much of what is said hints at deeper thoughts left unspoken, and the sense of horror and alienation which often emerges is a searing indictment of our life and times. We meet, we talk, we tear at each other, but our insularity is seldom penetrated. We are together but alone, as though life were a mirror which reflects only our own image.

Filmed in India, Rumer Godden’s story has been adapted and directed by the Jewel in the Crown team. Two English schoolgirls arrive in New Delhi, 1959. Their diplomat father has secured them a beautiful Eurasian governess. 15-year-old Una suspects an ulterior motive. But her father’s affairs take second place to her own when she has a secret affair with the Indian gardener.

7.6/10

Adaptation of the play by J B Priestley.

7.8/10

Based on a true story. In 1940, Britain's gold reserves were transferred for safety to Liverpool because of the threat of a German invasion. The top-secret operation was known only to a handful of security men and senior bank officials... and a group of Liverpool dockers who handle the move. Billy Mac, the dockers' leader, hatches an ingenious plan to steal some of the gold bars from under the noses of the guards.

7.4/10

The Common Pursuit is a play by Simon Gray which follows the lives of six characters who first meet as undergraduates at Cambridge University when they are involved in setting up a literary magazine called The Common Pursuit.

A lowly hospital orderly impersonates a recently deceased doctor and goes to work in the busy ER of a small hospital where he meets and befriends a nurse who slowly figures out his secret and helps him maintain his charade.

6.7/10

Daniel is an obeying and high-flying barrister with the good life on his side. Nathaniel Quass is a rich and bizarre recluse, generous, obsessed and sad. This reluctant pair are caught up in an alliance againstu an ingenious conspiracy which threatens both of their lives.

Real life husband and wife Judi Dench and Michael Williams star in this Screen One film as the parents of teenage boy diagnosed with schizophrenia

7.6/10

In World War II England, a woman is approached by a man claiming to work as an intelligence agent who has found out her lover is a spy. He promises to not arrest him if she'll have a relationship with him.

6.4/10

In 1919, Major Brendan Archer arrives in Ireland to reunite with his fiancée, Angela Spencer. Unfortunately, the family home, The Majestic Hotel, is a decaying shadow of its former self, as is Angela. Puzzled by the changes, Archer's attentions are soon drawn to her lively friend, Sarah Devlin, a passionate Irish Nationalist. They fall in love, but the Major soon discovers some disturbing aspects about their relationship, which threatens to explode into violence, destruction, and murder.

6.7/10

The quiet life of Oxford professor James Westgate is shattered when he is introduced to Penny, the wife of his crass new colleague.

8.2/10

An uncompromising British school headmaster finds himself beset by one thing going wrong after another.

6.6/10
8%

A Government Department with data on us all in its computers is not functioning quite as its ex-Head intended. Frank Strange sets out to clear his own name and finds he is investigating a murder.

The Jewel in the Crown, based upon the Raj Quartet novels by Paul Scott, is a British television serial about the final days of the British Raj in India during World War II. The story begins with an unjust arrest for rape. The consequences of this echo through the series. Questions of identity and personal responsibility are explored against a background of war and personal intrigue. The series was produced by Granada Television for the ITV network.

8.3/10

Kate and Deeley are married and live in the country. They are joined by Kate's friend, Anna, and talk of the past. Although it is a past they have shared, their memories of it are not always the same.

7/10

A man sits alone remembering his love affair with the girl his best friend won.

The most famous and beloved of Shaw's plays, Pygmalion is a witty exploration of class and gender, Professor Henry Higgins bets his friend that they can take a poor flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, and pass her off as a duchess. They teach her perfect English, mannes, and how to dress like a lady, but proves to more than a match for her tutors.

7.1/10

Ellis Cripper has lost his money and his memory; in different ways he tries to make sense of his situation.

The title character is a married provincial schoolmaster and a notorious philanderer. He is a russian Don Juan except that he himself doesn't seek to seduce; the women around him simply find him irresistibly attractive, and he is only too happy to go along. The play predates the realism of Chekhov's later works in its desjointedness, but many of its scenes show the seeds of brilliance that would eventually emerge.

6.3/10

Dennis Potter used his own background as a Russian language clerk in the War Office when writing this play for ITV's SATURDAY NIGHT THEATRE series. At the time of the 1956 Suez Crisis and the Russian invasion of Hungary, Private Bob Hawk reports to the London Intelligence Office where the strength of Soviet troops is under scrutiny.

8/10

Uncle Vanya is a tragic comedy of lost hopes, stifled passions and wasted lives. Vanya is a bitter, sarcastic man, obsessed with his wasted years and what might have been. He has spent his life toiling for the benefit of the scholar, Serabryakov, who has turned out to be a charlatan. To make matters worse, Vanya has fallen in love with Serabryakov's beautiful, young, new wife, ho does not return his ardor.

7/10

A family gather together for the funeral and cremation of the head of the family.

6.2/10

A small comedy drama about the life and sex adventures of an amorous window cleaner, in the hip and swingin' London of the '60s.

5.1/10

Four thieves try to steal the Imperial Jewels of Russia

5.4/10

A reluctant teenager accompanies his family on a day out to a local beauty spot.

Albert, a shy and repressed young man who lives with his mother, is persuaded to go for "a night out" with his workmates; it turns nightmarish.

Harold Pinter play televised on the BBC.

7/10

An adaptation Turgenev's play of the same name.

In Great Britain a reversal of African apartheid comes into place, and the country is governed by black people with whites as the subservients.

7.2/10

Early adaption of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four as part of the Theatre 625 series.

6.8/10

Thirty-Minute Theatre is an anthology drama series of short plays shown on BBC Television between 1965 and 1973, which was used in part at least as a training ground for new writers, on account of its short running length, and which therefore attracted many writers who later became well known. It was initially produced by Graeme MacDonald. Thirty-Minute Theatre followed on from a similarly named ITV series, beginning on BBC2 in 1965 with an adaptation of the black comedy Parsons Pleasure. Dennis Potter contributed Emergency – Ward 9, which he partially recycled in the much later The Singing Detective. In 1967 BBC2 launched the UK's first colour service, with the consequence that Thirty-Minute Theatre became the first drama series in the country to be shown in colour. As well as single plays, the series showed several linked collections of plays, including a group of four plays by John Mortimer named after areas of London in 1972, two three-part Inspector Waugh series starring Clive Swift in the title role, and a trilogy of plays by Jean Benedetti, broadcast in 1969, focusing on infamous historical figures such as Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.

7.4/10

The Wednesday Play is an anthology series of British television plays which ran on BBC1 from October 1964 to May 1970. The plays were usually written for television, although adaptations from other sources also featured. The series gained a reputation for presenting contemporary social dramas, and for bringing issues to the attention of a mass audience that would not otherwise have been discussed on screen.

7.4/10

Sergeant Cork is a British detective television series which first aired between 1963 and 1968 on ITV. It was a police procedural show that followed the efforts of two police officers and their battle against crime in Victorian London. In all 66 hour-long episodes were aired during the five-year run, although the last episode was not broadcast until January 1968, 16 months after the others. Journalist Tom Sutcliffe has credited it as a first example of the use of the Victorian-era policeman in a television crime series. A 1969 review in The Age opined that rather than suspense, the strengths of the series were its "excellent period settings and wonderfully thick pea-soupers" which "add up to splendid evocative stuff", as well as the performance of star John Barrie. At no time during the whole series is Sergeant Cork's first name given.

7.9/10

Z-Cars or Z Cars is a British television drama series centred on the work of mobile uniformed police in the fictional town of Newtown, based on Kirkby, Merseyside. Produced by the BBC, it debuted in January 1962 and ran until September 1978.

6.9/10

A woman has doubts about the intentions of her husband, even to the point where she thinks he might kill her.

6.5/10