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. Nina
Aired 17 October 1978 • 75 min
The story of two Soviet dissidents living in London and slowly coming apart under the strain of his drinking and her enforced separation from her child
2. Victims of Apartheid
Aired 24 October 1978 • 75 min
George, a black South African, finds it hard to settle down in London after his experiences in South Africa.
3. A Touch of the Tiny Hacketts
Aired 31 October 1978 • 75 min
A young man is declared a hero when he catches a burglar until it's discovered that the burglar is a dwarf.
4. Dinner at the Sporting Club
Aired 7 November 1978 • 75 min
A story about young boxers whose fighting provides entertainment for diners at a sporting club
5. Donal and Sally
Aired 14 November 1978 • 75 min
Adolescent love can be difficult at the best of times, but Donal and Sally have special problems - problems which alarm their families and the instructors at Strathvale Centre.
6. Sorry
Aired 21 November 1978 • 75 min
Consists of two plays ""Audience"" and ""Private View"" about a brewery worker and writer who incurs the wrath of the autocratic government
7. Butterflies Don't Count
Aired 28 November 1978 • 75 min
"Whether priest or thespian, never once let yourself doubt that the role you're playing is real. Lead your little flock from childhood to the grave via God's sweet sacraments and let no doubts intrude - ever."
8. Soldiers Talking Cleanly
Aired 5 December 1978 • 75 min
A freelance TV presenter has been hired by the BBC to film a documentary about the British army stationed in Germany. Unfortunately the budget is so low he is only allowed to film soldiers talking, and all bad language must be censored.
9. One Bummer Newsday
Aired 12 December 1978 • 75 min
What happens to provincial journalists when there's nothing in the news and they have a paper to fill?
10. The Out of Town Boys
Aired 2 January 1979 • 75 min
"This could be a bit special, Maggie. This could be the first case of an office block falling down during the topping-out party."
11. Vampires
Aired 9 January 1979 • 75 min
Three boys watch horror films on late night TV and see a man in a local cemetery whom they believe to be a vampire.
12. The Chief Mourner
Aired 16 January 1979 • 75 min
For a successful man with public responsibilities Alan Berry is strangely reluctant to help the police when his wife is murdered.
13. Waterloo Sunset
Aired 23 January 1979 • 75 min
A young man and an old woman try to fit in when their neighborhood goes West Indian
14. Blue Remembered Hills
Aired 30 January 1979 • 75 min
The play activities of seven children living in the countryside during the summer of 1943 end in tragedy; the children were played by adults in childrens clothing. The title is taken from A.E. Housman's 1896 poem: "Into my heart an air that kills; From yon far country blows; What are those blue remembered hills..." It's 1943 on a summer's afternoon and 7 children play in the fields & woods of old England. The children's roles are all played by adults to act as "A magnifying glass to show what it's like to be a child." "When we dream of childhood," said Dennis Potter, "we take our present selves with us. It is not the adult world writ small; childhood is the adult world writ large." Since Potter viewed childhood as "adult society without all the conventions and the polite forms which overlay it," he repeated the device he had introduced 14 years earlier (in "Stand Up, Nigel Barton"); children's roles were cast with adult actors in this naturalistic memory drama of a "golden day" that turns to tragedy. On a sunny, summer afternoon in bucolic England of 1943, seven West Country children (two girls, five boys) play in the Forest of Dean. Their games and spontaneous actions (continuous and in real time) reflect their awareness of WWII, but no adults are present to intrude. As the group moves through the woods and back to the grassy hills, their words and actions illustrate how "childhood is not transparent with innocence." When the two girls push a pram into a barn to play house, the casting concept is heightened, doubling back on itself in a remarkable moment: adults are suddenly seen to be acting as children who are pretending to be adults, and lines from Housman echo across the years: "That is the land of lost content/I see it shining plain/The happy highways where I went/And cannot come again."
15. Who's Who
Aired 6 February 1979 • 75 min
A story about a dinner party given by the managers and employees of a brokerage house
16. The Last Window Cleaner
Aired 13 February 1979 • 75 min
The Irish troubles as seen by residents of a boarding house called ""The Crumlin View""
17. Ploughman's Share
Aired 27 February 1979 • 75 min
"Ploughman. Nobody calls you that. You're a has-been. Your head and heart went into a museum wi' that lot you keep in there. Face it: you're redundant."
18. Degree of Uncertainty
Aired 6 March 1979 • 75 min
"I'm 37 years old, remember? I'm not a dead-pan, genned-up, discreetly nymphomaniac ex-head-girl like the majority of your female students. I'm an innocent. I'm vulnerable."
19. Light
Aired 13 March 1979 • 75 min
A village in Cheshire. A deserted cinema. A poet murdered by Stalin. A blown fuse. Victor Silvester. Pickets on trial. Trimmers and fishwires.
20. Coming Out
Aired 10 April 1979 • 75 min
A closeted homosexual writer is content to lead a double life
21. Don't Be Silly
Aired 24 July 1979 • 75 min
A young wife tries to cope with her abusive husband.