John McGrath
Steven Soderbergh mashes up the three films in the Harry Palmer trilogy: The Ipcress File (1965), Funeral In Berlin (1966), and Billion Dollar Brain (1967). Michael Caine stars as British Intelligence officer Harry Palmer in the cold war thrillers, here remixed into a feature-length music video designed to be "visual wallpaper", as a new narrative plays out in split screens and mirrored action.
A dramatized account of the Scott Inquiry about the sales of arms to Iraq.
Painter Dora Carrington develops an intimate but extremely complex bond with writer Lytton Strachey. Though Lytton is a homosexual, he is enchanted by the mysterious Dora and they begin a lifelong friendship that has strangely romantic undertones. Eventually, Lytton and Dora decide to live together, despite the fact that the latter has fallen in love with military man Ralph Partridge, whom she plans to marry.
An elderly woman learns that she is dying of cancer. She and her husband leave their small farm on the Isle of Skye to visit their children to inform them of the news. During the journey, the couple rediscover their love for each other.
The Swashbuckling legend of Robin Hood unfolds in the 12th century when the mighty Normans ruled England with an iron fist.
In England during World War II, a repressed dressmaker and her sister struggle looking after their 17-year-old niece, who is having a delusional affair with an American soldier.
A woman looks back on her life as a political activist in Scotland from the 1950s to the 1970s.
Frank, a young lad from Sheffield, leaves home to seek his fortune in London; he finds the big city not all what he had expected
In his further adventures Frank finds success and unhappiness.
The "ceilidh play", as writer John McGrath styled it, is presented in the BBC's 1974 "Play for Today" production to a live audience intercut with filmed reconstructions of the Highland Clearances and the Victorian obsession with hunting stags. Restored in high definition from the original film masters held in the BBC Archives.
A young couple have a baby boy. However, the new father doesn't take to his new position quite as well as expected.
Michael Marler, a successful business man in London, is about to make his way to the top. The death of his father brings him - after 37 years - back to his hometown Liverpool, where he is confronted with his lost Irish roots. He finds out that his father died because of a fight with some anglo-saxon teddy boys. It becomes "a matter of honour" for him, to take his revenge without involving the British police
The core of the plot is the romantic triangle formed by the protagonist, a conscripted soldier named Private Brigg; a worldly professional soldier named Sergeant Driscoll, and Phillipa Raskin, the daughter of the Regimental Sergeant Major. The location is a British army base in Singapore during the Malayan Emergency.
In the first part, an insane man boards a quiet railway coach and starts to annoy a patient man trying to read a paper with incessant small talk in an increasingly menacing manner until he finally pulls out a gun and screaming class hatred bile, humiliates the man until his stop is reached. In part two he breaks into a lonely house and proceeds to terrorise a spinster woman who lives there.
A national service NCO (David Warner) comes face to face with an embittered Irish Gunner (Nicol Williamson) who is determined to humiliate him.
A former British spy stumbles into in a plot to overthrow Communism with the help of a supercomputer. But who is working for whom?
Ken Russell's silent film treatment of the 19th century comic novel by the Brothers Grossmith - George and Weedon. Starring Bryan Pringle, Avril Elgar and Murray Melvin. Adapted by Ken Russell and John McGrath. First shown on BBC2 at 10.10pm on Saturday 12th December 1964 - as part of the 'Six' strand.
