Richard Ireson
American couple Jake and Tina are living in an expensive London hotel above their means, incurring a sizeable debt. When they are asked to pay a lavish dinner bill and Jake's card is declined, he suggests they sell Tina's tiny, expensive Henry Moore sculpture to cover the debt. After they hatch a scheme to claim the sculpture was stolen in order to collect insurance on it, the sculpture mysteriously goes missing.
During World War II, an American serviceman in London decides to impress his English girlfriend by acting as an American gangster, which soon turns deadly.
Stephen Frears directs this biographical drama focusing on controversial British playwright Joe Orton, revealed in flashback after his murder by lover Kenneth Halliwell. Born in 1933 in Leicester, in the English Midlands, John 'Joe' Orton moves to London in 1951, to study at RADA, and enjoys an openly gay relationship with Halliwell in their famous Islington flat in the 1960s. However, when Orton achieves spectacular success with such plays as 'What the Butler Saw' and 'Loot', Halliwell begins to feel alienated and the pair's future looks increasingly uncertain.
Inspired by the true story of Mary Bell; Freedom fascinates and frightens Jackie, encountering the real world for the first time in years, She clings to an ideal : 'What I want most in the whole world is to be in love and to be loved'. Reality can be harsh and unforgiving.
A Christmas black comedy based on the tradition in Hammond's Bank that a member of the board should take a turkey and 6 pence to a deserving poor family.
Channel 4 was barely a year old when G F Newman's searing drama about the NHS debuted. A commission from Euston Films, produced by the legendary Verity Lambert, The Nation's Health cemented the channel's reputation for hard hitting drama, particularly at a time when Thatcher's government was sharpening its knives ready to butcher the welfare state amidst her own drive to reverse what she saw as a national decline. There is no doubt she inherited a UK dubbed 'the sick man of Europe', crippled by high inflation, high unemployment and stagnant growth. The NHS was caught up in her desire to deregulate the finance sectors and labour markets and flog state owned assets and companies.
Johnny Jarvis and Alan Lipton are two teenagers in their final year of secondary school at a comprehensive in Hackney in 1977. Energetic, anxious and occasionally naïve, the unlikely pair are on the brink of entering the adult world of the late '70s and early '80s when prospects are slim.
A slow-witted couple decide to start a family.
Like alcoholism, gambling is a disease. Ches, a compulsive gambler, is sent for medical help. A wonder drug perhaps? Or hypnosis maybe? Ches finds that his psychiatrist has other ideas.
Sixteen-year-old Otis loathes school. He wants to be a professional footballer, but is good at drawing, so his mother wants him to be a draughtsman. Then, a new sports teacher appears at his South London comprehensive school, and life starts to look a little more hopeful...
The TARDIS arrives on the unnamed planet of the Gonds, who are ruled and taught in a form of self-perpetuating slavery by the alien Krotons — crystalline beings whose ship, the Dynatrope, crash-landed there thousands of years earlier after being damaged in a space battle. The Krotons are in suspended animation, in a crystalline slurry form, awaiting a time when they can be reconstituted by absorption of mental energy. Periodically, the two most brilliant Gond students are received into the Dynatrope, nominally to become "companions of the Krotons", but in truth to have their mental energy drained, after which they are killed.
To escape from the volcanic eruption on Dulkis, the Second Doctor uses an emergency unit. It moves the TARDIS out of normal time and space. The travellers find themselves in an endless void where they are menaced by white robots. Having regained the safety of the TARDIS, they believe they have escaped — until the ship explodes. They find themselves in a land of fiction, where they are hunted by life-size clockwork soldiers and encounter characters like Rapunzel, the Karkus, and Swift's Lemuel Gulliver.
