About this season
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.
Episodes (21)
1. Stan's Last Game
Aired 25 October 1983 • 75 min
James Grout and Bert Parnaby are rival chairmen of a northern football club in the run-up to an important cup match. As tempers fray, retiring president Charles Lamb provides a calming voice of sanity.
2. Young Shoulders
Aired 14 February 1984 • 75 min
Cynical teenager Andrew Groves re-evaluates his attitude to life and his parents after his sister dies in a plane crash.
3. A Coming to Terms for Billy
Aired 21 February 1984 • 75 min
When his father comes home to Belfast after more than 2 years in England, conflicts arise with Billy
4. Z for Zachariah
Aired 28 February 1984 • 75 min
After a nuclear holocaust, only a man and a woman survive in a Welsh valley.
5. Moving on the Edge
Aired 6 March 1984 • 75 min
A woman in a state of personal crisis finds it hard to communicate with her husband and family.
6. Desert of Lies
Aired 13 March 1984 • 75 min
An expedition tracing the path of long-lost missionaries meets with tragedy in the Kalahari Desert.
7. Hard Feelings
Aired 20 March 1984 • 75 min
A group of unemployed Oxford drop-outs living in a Brixton commune get their come-uppance by one of them.
8. Under the Hammer
Aired 27 March 1984 • 75 min
Concerning the life of the artist Vincent Van Gogh
9. King
Aired 3 April 1984 • 75 min
A man who has had a good life in England wants to retire to Jamaica, but the celebration with his daughters doesn't go as expected.
10. Rainy Day Women
Aired 10 April 1984 • 75 min
In 1940, during World War II, an officer is sent to investigate rumors of German spies in a sleepy village where various people are the victims of war hysteria
11. Dog Ends
7.0Aired 17 July 1984 • 75 min
In a future society where euthansia is common, a man signs papers to have his father put down
12. The Groundling and the Kite
Aired 24 July 1984 • 75 min
Peter is a songwriter, while his old friend Jimmy is an A and R (Artists and Repertoire) man. But when Jimmy tries to sell one of Peter's songs, Peter is furious. Can the friendship survive?
13. The Cry
Aired 31 July 1984 • 75 min
In 1959 Ulster, a journalist witnesses the beating of a youth
14. It Could Happen to Anybody
Aired 14 August 1984 • 75 min
A long-suffering Glasgow housewife puts up with years of her husband's violence and drunkenness - and then something happens which makes her snap and fight back.
15. Only Children
Aired 21 August 1984 • 75 min
A young woman's comfortable life is turned upside down when she has a baby.
16. The Amazing Miss Stella Estelle
Aired 28 August 1984 • 75 min
Miss Stella Estelle is a cabaret singer in working men's clubs, and she sings songs from the 1960s to support a large and difficult family. But how long can it go on? The backdrop is a family in decay: husband out of work, wife working and still doing the domestics, daughter the singer and hopeful star, son her "manager" but in reality going nowhere. Stella plays a crummy club circuit, singing songs for oldies for £50 a night - She's never going to be a star because of her parents' short-sighted greed.
17. The Long March
Aired 20 November 1984 • 90 min
A woman returns to Belfast after ten years in England and becomes involved in the Maze prison protest.
18. Punters
Aired 27 November 1984 • 75 min
What is the secret of Joey and Spansky's success at the races?
19. Talk To Me
Aired 11 December 1984 • 75 min
Matthew and his wife are deeply suspicious of psychoanalysis. It's not their sort of thing at all.
20. Bird Fancier
Aired 15 January 1985 • 75 min
21. Brigadista
Aired 5 February 1985 • 75 min
When best-selling author James Fuller Hayes comes to Glasgow to publicise his personal account of the Spanish Civil War, a surprise reunion with two of his old comrades from the Int Brigade reveals contradictory & devastating information.