Terence Bayler

Play for Today

Play for Today is a British television anthology drama series, produced by the BBC and transmitted on BBC1 from 1970 to 1984. During the run, more than three hundred programmes, featuring original television plays, and adaptations of stage plays and novels, were transmitted. The individual episodes were between fifty and a hundred minutes in duration.

Doctor Who

Major Barrington

The adventures of The Doctor, a time-traveling humanoid alien known as a Time Lord. He explores the universe in his TARDIS, a sentient time-traveling spaceship. Its exterior appears as a blue British police box, which was a common sight in Britain in 1963 when the series first aired. Along with a succession of companions, The Doctor faces a variety of foes while working to save civilizations, help ordinary people, and right many wrongs.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

The Bloody Baron

Harry Potter has lived under the stairs at his aunt and uncle's house his whole life. But on his 11th birthday, he learns he's a powerful wizard—with a place waiting for him at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. As he learns to harness his newfound powers with the help of the school's kindly headmaster, Harry uncovers the truth about his parents' deaths—and about the villain who's to blame.

Upstairs, Downstairs

Darrow Morton

Upstairs: the wealthy, aristocratic Bellamys. Downstairs: their loyal and lively servants. For nearly 30 years, they share a fashionable townhouse at 165 Eaton Place in London’s posh Belgravia neighborhood, surviving social change, political upheaval, scandals, and the horrors of the First World War.

Life of Brian

Gregory

Brian Cohen is an average young Jewish man, but through a series of ridiculous events, he gains a reputation as the Messiah. When he's not dodging his followers or being scolded by his shrill mother, the hapless Brian has to contend with the pompous Pontius Pilate and acronym-obsessed members of a separatist movement. Rife with Monty Python's signature absurdity, the tale finds Brian's life paralleling Biblical lore, albeit with many more laughs.

The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes

The Duke

An anthology series produced by Thames Television, comprised of short mystery, suspense or crime adaptations featuring, as the title suggests, detectives who were literary contemporaries of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes.

Justice

James Lywood

Justice is a British drama television series which originally aired on ITV in 39 hour-long episodes between 8 August 1971 and 16 October 1974. Margaret Lockwood stars as Harriet Peterson a female barrister in the North of England. It was made by Yorkshire Television and was based loosely on Justice Is a Woman, an episode of ITV Playhouse broadcast in 1969 in which Lockwood had previously also played a barrister. The theme music was Crown Imperial by William Walton.

Centre Play

Major Woods

Anthology series of half hour plays produced in BBC's Television Centre's studios.

Mystery and Imagination

Nemeth

Mystery and Imagination is a British television anthology of classic horror and supernatural dramas. Five series were broadcast from 1966 to 1970 on ITV and produced by ABC and Thames Television.

Brazil

T.V. Commercial Presenter

Low-level bureaucrat Sam Lowry escapes the monotony of his day-to-day life through a recurring daydream of himself as a virtuous hero saving a beautiful damsel. Investigating a case that led to the wrongful arrest and eventual death of an innocent man instead of wanted terrorist Harry Tuttle, he meets the woman from his daydream, and in trying to help her gets caught in a web of mistaken identities, mindless bureaucracy and lies.

Me & My Girl

Harry

While running the advertising agency Eyecatchers, Simon Harrap explores his relationships with his daughter Samantha, his business partner Derek Yates, and a string of romantic liaisons. His mother-in-law, Nell, often interferes in his attempts to raise Samantha on his own, but usually haa her granddaughter's best interests at heart.

Life Begins

Jack Russell

Life Begins is a British television drama first broadcast on ITV between February 2004 and October 2006, starring Caroline Quentin and Alexander Armstrong, Anne Reid and Frank Finlay.

The Remains of the Day

Trimmer

A rule-bound head butler's world of manners and decorum in the household he maintains is tested by the arrival of a housekeeper who falls in love with him in post-WWI Britain. The possibility of romance and his master's cultivation of ties with the Nazi cause challenge his carefully maintained veneer of servitude.

Time Bandits

Lucien

Young history buff Kevin can scarcely believe it when six dwarfs emerge from his closet one night. Former employees of the Supreme Being, they've purloined a map charting all of the holes in the fabric of time and are using it to steal treasures from different historical eras. Taking Kevin with them, they variously drop in on Napoleon, Robin Hood and King Agamemnon before the Supreme Being catches up with them.

Lipstick on Your Collar

General

During the Suez Crisis of 1956, two young clerks at the stuffy Foreign Office in Whitehall display little interest in the decline of the British Empire. To their eyes, it can hardly compete with girls, rock music, and the intrigue of romantic entanglements.

Macbeth

Macduff

Scotland, 11th century. Driven by the twisted prophecy of three witches and the ruthless ambition of his wife, warlord Macbeth, bold and brave, but also weak and hesitant, betrays his good king and his brothers in arms and sinks into the bloody mud of a path with no return, sown with crime and suspicion.

Eye of the Storm

James Montliskeard

A father and daughter's search for a covered-up threat to the environment collides with a malevolent old local woman, her disturbed young boy, and the evil legacy of his seventeenth century alchemist ancestor in a fantastical eco-thriller.

You Can't Win

You Can't Win was a 1966 British television series made by ITV as an adaptation of the novels Scenes from Provincial Life and Scenes from Married Life by William Cooper. It stars Ian McShane as protagonist Joe Lunn, an English provincial grammar school physics teacher in 1939 who later moves to London and into the English establishment.

Doctor Who: The Ark

Yendom

The Doctor and his companions Steven Taylor and Dodo Chaplet arrive some ten million years into the future, on board a generation starship which is carrying the last of humanity away from an Earth that is about to fall into the Sun. However, the cold that Dodo has could prove devastating to these future humans and their servants, the Monoids.

The Lie

Stephen Calman

Ingmar Bergman play looking at the cool and brittle relationship between a successful architect (Frank Finlay) and his academic wife (Gemma Jones). Commissioned by the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation on behalf of European members participating in ‘The Largest Theatre in the World’. This, the Radio Times explained, was ‘a project which enabled a play to be broadcast simultaneously in several languages across Europe.’ This UK Play For Today version was directed by Alan Bridges, whilst an American version was put out on CBS, directed by Alex Segal