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 (18)
1. Stronger than the Sun
Aired 18 October 1977 • 75 min
A worker discovers a radioactive leak at the nuclear power plant where she works and tries to make it public knowledge.
2. Come the Revolution
Aired 25 October 1977 • 75 min
Mike and his commune have a performance of their musical theatre "Diver" at the local pub, and ITV's Beth Bailey is coming along to see it. But will Beth's visions for the play as an incitement to revolution please everyone?
3. Abigail's Party
Aired 1 November 1977 • 75 min
Comedy of manners focusing on the bourgeois affectation and sexual frustration of a young married couple. Abigail's mother Sue is invited to take refuge from her teenage daughter's party with a neighbouring couple, Beverly and Laurence. They have also invited Angela and Tony, new arrivals in the street. Beverly plies her guests with alcohol as Sue becomes increasingly withdrawn and embarrassed by the pretentious goings-on. Slowly, marital tensions emerge and the evening is breaking up in disarray.
4. Oy Vay Maria
Aired 8 November 1977 • 75 min
The story of the romance between a Jewish boy and an Irish Catholic girl
5. Nipper
Aired 15 November 1977 • 75 min
Teenager Jimmy's life begins to unravel after the death of his father. With his mother promiscuous and his new stepfather and stepbrother difficult to get along with, he begins to fall into a cycle of petty crime and self harm.
6. One Day at a Time
Aired 22 November 1977 • 75 min
"People coming to their first AA meeting, prosperous people, sometimes, accustomed to the best. They look round the places where we meet, and you can see them thinking: what am I doing here? I owe my life to these rooms!"
7. The Mayor's Charity
Aired 29 November 1977 • 75 min
Olive Major is determined that her year of office as Mayor will be a happy and successful one. But her appointment of Ex-Warrant Officer Higham as Attendant and Mace-bearer causes the storm-clouds to gather over Medburgh Town Hall.
8. Catchpenny Twist
Aired 6 December 1977 • 75 min
Three schoolteachers in Belfast give up teaching to become singers/songwriters.
9. Charades
Aired 13 December 1977 • 75 min
"We've just got to get it right. It'll be our little secret. When all the other servants have gone out, we'll play this little game to amuse ourselves. A sort of private charade."
10. The Thin End of the Wedge
Aired 20 December 1977 • 75 min
"Five days of darkness then. Unless you get it together we will have five days of darkness. And on the sixth day you will say, let there be light, and no doubt it'll be such an effort that on the seventh day you'll have to rest!"
11. Scully's New Year's Eve
Aired 3 January 1978 • 75 min
A Liverpool teenager has a hectic night out on New Year's Eve.
12. Licking Hitler
Aired 10 January 1978 • 75 min
During World War II, a young woman joins the propaganda department and makes radio broadcasts to Germany from a British country house.
13. Red Shift
Aired 17 January 1978 • 75 min
A stone axehead links three couples living at different times in the same place in Wales.
14. The Spongers
Aired 24 January 1978 • 75 min
The story of a single mother of four living on welfare
15. Destiny
Aired 31 January 1978 • 75 min
A story dealing with racial tensions and fascism during a by-election in a West Midlands town
16. Our Day Out
Aired 7 February 1978 • 75 min
When a teacher takes a group of troubled school children on a school trip to Conwy in Wales, the children understand life outside of Liverpool.
17. The After-Dinner Joke
Aired 14 February 1978 • 75 min
The story of a well-meaning charity worker
18. The Legion Hall Bombing
Aired 22 August 1978 • 75 min
The story of the trial of Willie Gallagher, convicted of bombing the Strabane British Legion Hall in 1976.