Philip Saville

Journey into "Hamlet"-the play and the man-through the experiences of some of the major actors and directors who have brought Shakespeare's great tragedy to life. Christopher Plummer, David Tennant, John Nettles, John Simm, Sir Trevor Nunn, Franco Zeffirelli, Philip Saville, and others explore the enduring appeal of the Prince of Denmark more than 400 years after his stage debut.

A personal take on working with Harold Pinter via intimate conversations with actors, directors and writers who share their experiences of the man and his work.

The only child in a wretchedly poor family in the Danish village of Odense, Hans Christian Andersen lives in a fantasy world. His hand carved dolls and puppets, his father's bedtime stories, and his own natural flair for fantastic tales brings the child temporary escape. It takes him all the way to Copenhagen where, he's been told, dreams can really come true.

Drama based on the true story of Deacon Brodie one of Scotland's most notorious criminals. In 1788 Deacon Brodie a master cabinet maker and town councillor is a rogue and a hedonist. He steals money but gives it back. He attempts to steal a fortune from the city's Customs and Excise office but the attempt fails and he is caught. There is a widely-publicised trial and he is sentenced to death to be hanged on the gallows he designed.

After ten years absence Toni, Chris's best friend, suddenly reappears in London to bring chaos and doubt into Chris's calm, tranquil, slightly boring, predictable life. Chris starts to remember his carefree youth as a photographer in Paris when he lived with and enjoyed a torrid affair with Annick. It was also in Paris that he first met and fell in love with Marion. The temptations and pressure exerted on Chris by Toni to return to their former carefree life of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll soon starts to have an impact on Chris's marriage. He starts to question his values, his lifestyle choices and his relationship with Marion and even suspects her of starting an affair with Toni whom she dislikes! Eventually circumstances come to a head and Chris is forced to decide whether to follow Toni back to the hedonistic, irresponsible life of his youth or face the harsh realities of the present and stay with Marion.

Nina Eberlin comes home to visit her now-divorced parents and while looking through a collection of pictures taken by her father and herself, she reflects on how the pictures illustrate the nature of families. She begins to tell the story of how her parents discovered their son Randall was autistic and how each reacted to that. Her mother had three more kids, all daughters, "the perfect children." The controversy over that and Randall's treatment pulls the parents apart. It also forces Nina and her older brother Mack to re-evaluate their relationship with each other and each parent.

Joanna once was married to Carl May, a very rich and powerful nuclear energy magnate. They love each other, but had to divorce after Joanna was caught on an incidental love affair. Since then Carl has made Joanna's life impossible. 10 years later she's fed up with the situation and decides to visit him, only to find that once he made three copies of her

Three guardian angels help three souls evaluate their past lives.

Based on the fact-based novel by Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal based on his 1962 prosecution of the head of a German factory whom he learns was a murderous labour camp commandant. To be able to take him to justice, he must find witnesses who can help him. This leads him to Max Rosenberg, a still tormented individual who lost his wife, Helen, in the camps. Initially Max refuses to cooperate, but gradually his story unfolds beginning before the Holocaust.

Diane and Greg Halstead were once happily married, even deciding to try and have a baby in later years, despite the fact that she had already suffered two miscarriages. She has no luck in becoming pregnant and this leads to an estrangement from her husband. On his latest flight, Greg, a professional pilot, finds out about a bomb threat. The person carrying the bomb supposedly wants to kill another passenger, a politician with an outspoken opinion on abortion. Unknown to the killer, however, the politician has already left the plane because it had an hour and a half delay. Greg decides to make an emergency landing in Dayton, Ohio, but during the heavy weather, the plane crashes, killing almost everyone on board.

First Born is a British television serial produced by the BBC in 1988. Charles Dance starred as genetic researcher Edward Forester, whose work leads him to create a man-gorilla hybrid, using sperm from an unknown sperm donor and cells taken from a female gorilla.

Nelson Mandela becomes South Africa's first Black President, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his leadership in negotiating a bloodless revolution in that country.

Girls growing up in 1960-61 London develop a passion for Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, the first British team in the 20th century to win the English league and FA Cup "double". Twenty years later, one of the girls tracks down players of the '60-'61 Spurs for a documentary.

An Irishwoman married to a German in pre-First World War Liverpool, prepares to meet her brother-in-law - a young man named Adolf Hitler. Years later she is interviewed on television about her life. Part of the BBC2 Playhouse strand.

Design for Living presents a trio of neurotic but intensely artistic characters: Gilda, Otto and Leo. Set in Paris, Otto and Leo both fall in love with Gilda. She cannot make up her mind which man she loves, so the three decide to live together in a platonic friendship. Among Coward's trademark sparkling wit, the play explores deeper themes including infidelity, the pressures of fame on an unstable mind, and morality (or immorality) of a menage a trois.

Two extraordinary days in the life of young Beatles-fan Kevin - as he drifts in space between yesterday and today.

Count Dracula is a British television adaptation of the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker. It first aired 22 December 1977. It is among the more faithful of the many adaptations of the original book. Louis Jourdan played the title role.

Sam likes his children to be grown-up chaps. So nine-year-old Harry is at a disadvantage in the battle of wits that develops...

Livingston, a psychic investigator, is asked to attend a seance. Can it be that he has finally discovered a genuine supernatural phenomenon!?

Birmingham is a melting pot of races and every community has a stake in the city's underworld. When former SAS officer John Kline is released from prison after serving a sentence for murder, he becomes the unwilling catalyst in a gang war. Movie screened as part of Play of Today.

TV play by Bernard Kops. Moss is a miser who only love is his grandson. Then tragedy strikes and Moss is "reborn".

A play that looks at the lives of F. Scott Fitzgerald, his wife Zelda, and Ernest Hemmingway in 1925 Paris. This dramatization brings to life the personalities of Scott and Zelda as well as the time period that produced “The Great Gatsby.”

A winter's day out is a treat for all, but it isnt' quite what Uncle Alec wanted.

A married man forms a liaison with a woman he meets on a train, and is divorced by his wife who allows him access to their daughters on Sundays, which they usually spend at the zoo.

Play set in the Caribbean showing how life is hard and a struggle, with problems of unemployment and lack of money.

After a suicide attempt, John Rainbird is in a coma. Whilst in this state his mind experiences fantasies involving nightmare creatures and his relatives.

The wife of a public school head becomes gradually aware that her husband has been physically abusing his pupils, causing the death of one and brain damage and double vision in another (recreated by simply sticking mirrors beside the camera lens).Written by the master of late-middle-age morality plays, William Trevor.

A woman's unfulfilling marriage leads her into a passionate affair with a wealthy extramarital lover.

An odd ménage à trois results when a woman and her lover are visited by her long-lost husband.

The first in a series of new plays. Arthur and Gwen, a cosy middle-aged couple, remember with nostalgia the pre-Motorway Britain of their youth. When Tom, an old friend, returns from voyaging the world their life takes a strange new turn.

The first Play for Today

This classic Greek tale tells how a noble youth accidentally marries his own mother, kills his own father and ends up paying a terrible price for invoking the wrath of the Gods.

The Anthony Newley/Leslie Bricusse London and Broadway musical hit Stop the World, I Want to Get Off is given literal treatment in this filmization. Newley stars as Littlechap, whose allegorical rise to success is countered by the instability of his private life. Like the play, the film is staged impressionistically, with Newley decked out in mime makeup and periodically stopping the action to address the audience, and with all the women in his life -- German, American and "Typically English" -- played by a single actress (Millicent Martin, taking over from the stage version's Anna Quayle). In Wizard of Oz fashion, the play itself is lensed in color, while the brief prologue, showing the actors preparing for their performance, is in black-and-white. The production includes such standards (and perennial audition pieces) as What Kind of Fool Am I? and Gonna Build a Mountain.

A frank dialogue on sexual likes and dislikes that place between a man and his mistress in bed together.

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.

Christopher Plummer is joined by an all-star cast including Michael Caine, Robert Shaw, Roy Kinnear and Donald Sutherland in this historic production of Hamlet filmed on location at Elsinore, Denmark, the actual location where the play is set.

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.

A 1964 BBC adaptation of Sartre's "No Exit."

A renowned artist of the old school has his whole world turned upside down when his son, a young radical, and his associates bring modern interpretations of art into his life.

A man mysteriously locks himself in a room in a boarding house leaving only a note saying he has decided to "retire from the world". His worried sister and the other boarders then try to discover why.

A troubled actress has conversations with a range of different people.

An agent invites his young starlet to a party, to meet all the right people. A chance to move on from the commercials she has been doing, to bigger roles and maybe stardom. However while she is there, she realizes there is a price to pay...

Mother's boy Albert finally rebels, and goes to a works party. But things start to go wrong when he is accused of molesting a female colleague.

A modern boardroom take on Julius Caesar.

Interpol detective Caesar Smith tracks robbers of the Royal Mint van. He travels to Rio de Janeiro, Rome and Paris and establishes the guilt of a London coffee importer.

Three men arrive in a small town to pull the local bank heist.

Fourteen years after he was blinded in a WWII concentration camp, a Canadian perfume executive travels to London on business and recognizes the voice of the traitor who betrayed him and his fellow prisoners to the Germans.

Based on a short gothic horror story “Markheim” by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Two small boys are playing in a wood. The younger boy has a revolver and, not understanding that the gun differs from his toy pistol, plays 'highwayman' on the road and holds up a cyclist; the gun goes off, killing the cyclist. Both boys are unaware of the tragic consequences of their game. The body and the gun are found by Bob Carter, who had recently quarreled with the victim in the presence of their workmates, and both men had uttered threats. The evidence is strong, and Bob is arrested for murder...

A newly married man is convicted of murdering a former lover in his apartment, and sentenced to hang. With a payout on his life worth 20,000 pounds, the insurance company sends an investigator to find out the truth.

Justice, the poets have it, is a blind goddess. Eric Portman stars as the lawyer defending a lord, Hugh Williams, accused by his secretary Michael Dennison of having diverted public funds for his own use.

Four people with very different backgrounds meet by chance at an English pub and gradually become carried away in a bout of thrill-seeking. When their spree gets out of hand, each person faces a moral choice with lasting consequences.

Set in the austere post–World War II British world of rationing, Cyril dreams up an ode to an imaginary character named Merlin Mound who can provide anything one can wish. Merlin becomes real and grants his host's wishes; not by conjuring the items out of thin air, but depriving them from other people's ownership, which leads to trouble.

Dramatisation of the events leading to Andrew Morton writing his biography of Princess Diana.

A corpse is fished out of a north London canal with stab wounds through the eyes. The victim was a prominent member of the Hasidic Jewish community, and the cause of death one reserved by the Hasidim to punish "moysers" or informers.