About this season
Screenplay was a drama anthology television series, broadcast on BBC between 1986 and 1993. Numerous episodes were produced including one named "Boswell and Johnson's Tour of the Western Islands" starring Robbie Coltrane as English writer Samuel Johnson who in the autumn of 1773, visits the Hebrides off the north-west coast of Scotland. That episode was directed by John Byrne and co-starred John Sessions and Celia Imrie.
Episodes (6)
1. Love Lies Bleeding/L'Inconnue de Belfast
Aired 22 September 1993 • 89 min
Conn is an IRA murderer serving a life sentence in an Irish prison. He is given a 24 hour home leave during which he goes from point to point in Belfast looking to revenge his lover's murder.
2. The Merrihill Millionaires
Aired 29 September 1993 • 75 min
They were a top team - five miners who together had mined a million tons of coal but now they must face up to redundancy.
3. The Vision Thing
Aired 6 October 1993
In the run-up to a General Election, the British Prime Minister thinks he is receiving messages from God.
4. Safe
Aired 13 October 1993 • 66 min
Kaz and her friends spend their days trying to get by and their nights in a homeless shelter. But how did they end up there and what does the future hold for them?
5. Not Even God Is Wise Enough
Aired 20 October 1993
Sometimes Busi is a champion boxer, sometimes a rock star. But when he escapes from court, where he is facing charges of assault, he embarks on an odyssey that brings him before his estranged father.
6. Boswell & Johnson's Tour of the Western Isles
Aired 27 October 1993 • 30 min
In the autumn of 1773, the English writer Samuel Johnson visits the Hebrides, or Western Isles, off the North-West coast of Scotland. With him are his friend, the Scotsman James Boswell, and his black servant Francis Barber. Staying with a series of hosts, including elderly Jacobite heroine Flora McDonald, Johnson and Boswell encounter traditional Scottish hospitality at first-hand, all the time arguing about politics (and in Boswell's case losing his head over every pretty woman he meets). Meanwhile, Francis and another black servant they encounter provide evidence of the new consciousness emerging in Britain's soon-to-be-independent American colonies.