Noel Collins

Play for Today

Johnny

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.

Bread

Mr. Hayworth

Bread is a British television sitcom, written by Carla Lane, produced by the BBC and screened on BBC1 from 1 May 1986 to 3 November 1991. The series focused on the devoutly-Catholic and extended Boswell family of Liverpool, in the district of Dingle, led by its matriarch Nellie through a number of ups and downs as they tried to make their way through life in Thatcher's Britain with no visible means of support. The street shown at the start of each programme is Elswick Street. A family called Boswell had also featured in Lane's earlier sitcom The Liver Birds and Lane admitted in interviews that the two families were probably related. Nellie's feckless and estranged husband, Freddie, left her for another woman known as 'Lilo Lill'. Her children Joey, Jack, Adrian, Aveline and Billy continued to live in the family home in Kelsall Street and contributed money to the central family fund, largely through benefit fraud and the sale of stolen goods.

The Play on One

Ray

A series of television plays, some original, some based on pre-existing plays or novels.

Enemy at the Door

Ambulance Man

Enemy At The Door is a British television drama series made by London Weekend Television for ITV. The series was shown between 1978 and 1980 and dealt with the German occupation of Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands, during the Second World War. The programme generated a certain amount of criticism in Guernsey, particularly for being obviously filmed on Jersey despite being ostensibly set on Guernsey. The series also marked the TV debut of Anthony Head as a member of the island resistance. The theme music was by Wilfred Josephs.

Juliet Bravo

Sergeant George Parrish

Juliet Bravo was a drama that focused on two female police inspectors, neither of whom were called Juliet Bravo! These two inspectors worked in the small fictional town of Hartley, Lancashire. Jean Darblay was on the scene first and had trouble with her sexist colleagues. However she soon managed to gain their trust and prove a woman could be a successful police officer and housewife. Jean's call sign was Juliet Bravo. When she was promoted and moved on she was replaced by Kate Longton who not only took over the patch but also the headaches that went with it.

New Scotland Yard

DI Jones

New Scotland Yard is a police drama series produced by London Weekend Television for ITV from 1972 and 1974. It features the activities of two officers from the Criminal Investigations Department in the Metropolitan Police force headquarters at New Scotland Yard, as they dealt with the assorted villains of the day.

Pennies from Heaven

Chaplain

Pennies From Heaven is a 1978 BBC television drama serial written by Dennis Potter. The title is taken from a song of the same name written by Johnny Burke and Arthur Johnston. It was one of several Potter serials to mix the reality of the drama with a dark fantasy content, and the earliest of his works where the characters burst into miming to popular 1930s songs. During the Great Depression, a sheet music salesman seeks to escape his dreary life through popular music and a love affair with an innocent schoolteacher.

Tell Me Lies

Adapted and directed by Peter Brook from the Royal Shakespeare Company’s ‘production-in-progress US’, this long-unseen agitprop drama-doc – shot in London in 1967 and released only briefly in the UK and New York at the height of the Vietnam War – remains both thought-provoking and disturbing. A theatrical and cinematic social comment on US intervention in Vietnam, Brook’s film also reveals a 1960s London where art, theatre and political protest actively collude and where a young Glenda Jackson and RSC icons such as Peggy Ashcroft and Paul Scofield feature prominently on the front line. Multi-layered scenarios staged by Brook combine with newsreel footage, demonstrations, satirical songs and skits to illustrate the intensity of anti-war opinion within London’s artistic and intellectual community.

The Executioner

Warder

Jan and Meg Citron are on holiday in Germany. Their car is stopped by the police. A simple traffic offence? But their seemingly innocent past is ripped open and life will never be the same again.

The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here!

Mortimer Mooney

In early 20th-century England, the Mooneys are an eccentric clan live in a large rural home. Invalid patriarch Pa is a retired medical doctor claiming to be 199 years old. Phoebe, the eldest daughter, runs the household. Eldest son Mortimer is a businessman who conducts the finances and contributes to the income. Younger daughter Monica is a sadist who keeps live rats as pets, frequently mutilating them and other small animals. Youngest son Malcolm is a half-wit with animalistic tendencies to the point where he's kept locked in a room with live chickens. But the whole family have a dark, furry secret.

Days in the Trees

Nightclub Guest

A frail old woman meets a middle-aged man - her estranged son, whom she hasn't seen for five years.

Never Never Land

Sergeant

Zena has been abandoned by her parents and left in the care of her aunt Bee Melvin. She is treated poorly by two of her cousins, and taking the lead from the story Peter and Wendy, she runs away from home with her younger cousin.

Doctor Who: Battlefield

Pat Rawlinson

Knights from a parallel universe arrive on Earth to find the legendary sword Excalibur. Only the Doctor and Ace, with the assistance of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, can save the Earth from total catastrophe.

Don't Be Silly

Johnny

Play about middle class domestic abuse.

A Master of the Marionettes

Ray

Teddy Rose's passion is security - selling alarm systems to prosperous yet fearful suburban homes, one of which he and his family inhabit with conspicuous success. Then one Saturday morning a violent street encounter starts a chain of events which calls into question his every assumption and changes his life for good

Curse of the Full Moon

Mortimer Mooney

The daughter in a family of werewolves decides to put an end to the family curse.