John Glenister

Wycliffe is a British television series, based on W. J. Burley's novels about Detective Superintendent Charles Wycliffe. It was produced by HTV and broadcast on the ITV Network, following a pilot episode on 7 August 1993, between 24 July 1994 and 5 July 1998. The series was filmed in Cornwall, with a production office in Truro. Music for the series was composed by Nigel Hess and was awarded the Royal Television Society award for the best television theme. Wycliffe is played by Jack Shepherd, assisted by DI Doug Kersey and DI Lucy Lane. Each episode deals with a murder investigation. In the early series, the stories are adapted from Burley's books and are in classic whodunit style, often with quirky characters and plot elements. In later seasons, the tone becomes more naturalistic and there is more emphasis on internal politics within the police.

7.1/10

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.

7.1/10

On the death of her mother, a young woman in northern England learns that her father is actually her step-father. She embarks on a search for her birth father, finds him running a jazz club in London, and learns a lot of happy and sad things about her family that she didn't know before. The title of the film is the classic jazz piece, "Misterioso," by Thelonious Monk, which features prominently in it.

Adaptation of Noel Coward's stage play sequence.

'Nobody's going to force you to swim.' Neil's beach holiday with the Middleton family turns sour over his refusal to bathe. The situation is resolved by an old woman and a cat.

Drama about a small-time gangster Thomas Gynn (Dennis Waterman) from London who discovers a new life up north in Yorkshire. Helping widowed, self-sufficient businesswoman Sally Hardcastle (Jan Francis) when her car breaks down on the motorway, Thomas reluctantly accepts an offer of a lift to Leeds. Over the coming months, the two become involved in a series of misadventures that soon find them being drawn closer together.

7.6/10

The story of Anthony Blunt, the "fourth man" in a notorious 1951 spy scandal.

6/10

Biopic of Arthur Lucan, who portrayed Old Mother Riley for over twenty years on stage and screen.

8.2/10

The daily lives of the men and women at Sun Hill Police Station as they fight crime on the streets of London. From bomb threats to armed robbery and drug raids to the routine demands of policing this ground-breaking series focuses as much on crime as it does on the personal lives of its characters.

6.5/10

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.

9/10

1999: A perma-redundant father takes his family on a strange ‘working holiday’, scrubbing floors in an undersea missile base.

Play for Tomorrow is a British television anthology science fiction series, produced by the BBC and transmitted on BBC1 in 1982. It spun off from the anthology drama series Play for Today after the success of The Flipside of Dominick Hide on that strand. Each of the six episodes paints a vision of life in a future year, near the end of the 20th Century or at the beginning of the 21st.

7.5/10

Adaptation of the play by Bernard Shaw.

7.9/10

A bored Rumpole, living in Florida retirement, uses an inquiry from Phyllida as a pretext to re-establish himself back in chambers.

8.1/10

Tales of the Unexpected is a British television series which aired between 1979 and 1988. Each episode told a story, often with sinister and wryly comedic undertones, with an unexpected twist ending. Early episodes were based on short stories by Roald Dahl collected in the books Tales of the Unexpected, Kiss Kiss and Someone Like You. The series was made by Anglia Television for ITV with interior scenes recorded at their Norwich studios whilst location filming mainly occurred across East Anglia. The theme music for the series was written by composer Ron Grainer. Although similar in theme and title, the show is not related to the American anthology television series, Quinn Martin's Tales of the Unexpected, which ran for one season in 1977.

7.7/10

BBC mini-series with Jane Lapotaire in the title role. The programme chronicles the work of scientific pioneer Marie Curie as she conducts her research into radioactivity, makes the famous discovery of Radium and wins Nobel Prizes for both Physics and Chemistry. The programme also looks at key events that affected the soon-to-be famous revolutionary including the devastating death of her husband (Nigel Hawthorne) and her subsequent controversial affairs.

8.2/10

When an inexplicable photograph arrives in the post, Michael Otway’s world is turned upside down. John Stride and Stephanie Turner star in what the Daily Mail called ‘grand guignol in the British manner’.

A man's life is turned upside down when he receives a mysterious photograph in the post.

7.8/10

Champagne dialogue alleviates nervousness of sleeping together.

The path of righteousness is a stony one. And Lo! for Daniel it is stonier than most.

Emma presides over the small provincial world of Highbury with enthusiasm, but she will find that it is all too easy to confuse good intentions with self-gratification. The often insensitive, well-meaning, incorrigible Emma Woodhouse having engineered the marriage of governess, companion and friend Miss Taylor, now turns her attention towards making a match for Mr Elton, the local vicar, and her new protégée Harriet Smith. Her one voice of reason and restraint is Mr Knightley, who has known her since she was a child and who watches her behaviour with wry amusement and sometimes with real anger.

6.7/10

Adaptation of the play by Strindberg.

7/10

The Italian adventurer and libertine Giovanni Jacopo Casanova lived from 1725 to 1798, but in this six-part series Dennis Potter attempted to find a contemporary relevance through his central themes of sex and religion. He commented that Casanova "was concerned with religious and sexual freedom, and these are the things we have to address ourselves to now." Casanova was imprisoned in Venice in 1755, and Potter used that event as a central device, constantly inter-cutting to contrast Casanova's amorous escapades, radiant, joyful and brightly lit, with his oppressive solitary confinement in the gloom of a half-darkened cell.

7.7/10

Billy is his own boss. But Darkly has plans for him ...

Zigger Zagger is a 1967 play by Peter Terson which was the first work to be commissioned by the National Youth Theatre who revived it at Wilton's Music Hall in 2017 for its 50th anniversary. Described as a "football opera" in which the cast sing and chant like a Greek chorus, the play was an instant success. The production was directed by Michael Croft while the Musical Director was Colin Farrell. Adopted later by non-league giant killers, Altrincham FC.

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.

7.2/10

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

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

The life and career of Michael Jordan contrasts with that of Joe Hirsch. One is born into a comfortable middle class family; the other a poorer refugee. Their stories cross and parallel over 25-years from the end of the Second World War, taking in British social change as they go.

5.9/10

1983 play. A British woman falls for a German prisoner of war, despite the fact that her fiancée was killed by Germans during the Second World War.