Saturday Playhouse — Season 1

Aired 4 January 1958

An anthology series of dramatisations of plays.

Aired 11 January 1958

An upper middle-class family is ruled by the ancient and churlish matriarch. Her daughters' marriages are all in jeopardy, with affairs and communions with the dead. It's difficult to find any solitude or sanity in the family.

Aired 18 January 1958

Aired 25 January 1958

Aired 1 February 1958

A spinster schoolteacher arrives in a Welsh mining valley and discovers a boy genius in her class.

Aired 8 February 1958

Aired 15 February 1958

Aired 22 February 1958

Ellen Creed struggles to hold down her job as housekeeper-companion to the retired actress Leonora Fiske whilst trying to protect her two disturbed sisters from the threat of incarceration.

Aired 1 March 1958

A dying old man changes his will to leave everything to the new housemaid who has caught his eye, much to the alarm of his three grown up children and grandson.

Aired 8 March 1958

Aired 15 March 1958

The action takes place in a bedroom in a Portsmouth hotel, the wardroom of H.M.S. Sherwood, and the living-room at Admiralty House.

Aired 22 March 1958

The love affairs of three young Englishmen at a language cramming school in the south of France. Diana, the sister of one of the boys, arrives in town to flirt with all of her brothers' schoolmates.

Aired 29 March 1958

Aired 5 April 1958

A financier is accused of murder when his brother-in-law is found dead in his garden pond. After winning the court case he returns home to find that his lawyer has romantic inclinations towards his wife.

Aired 12 April 1958

The host of a dinner party is murdered.

Aired 19 April 1958

Aired 26 April 1958

Aired 13 September 1958

A wealthy man lives on the Dover Road, a traditional path of elopers. His practice of forcing such couples to see one another in the sober light of home life in his house leads to a personal involvement for him.

Aired 20 September 1958

Aired 27 September 1958

Aired 25 October 1958

Aired 22 November 1958

Aired 6 December 1958

A duke imprisoned for 15 years in a castle in France feigns blindness for five years to lull the suspicions of his captors in order to plan his escape.

Aired 20 December 1958

A widow weds a magistrate and makes her 19-year-old son act as a boy.

Aired 27 December 1958

Aired 17 January 1959

in 19th-century Paris, a sinister hypnotist tries to turn a simple Irish girl into an opera star.

Aired 14 February 1959

Eynon Evans plays the part of Inspector Probert George, who was tortured in a prisoner-of-war camp when his plans for escape were discovered, is dead after five years in a mental home. His five fellow prisoners had sworn that if George died they would kill the man who had betrayed him to the Germans. But which of them was to do the killing? And how?

Aired 28 February 1959

Aired 28 March 1959

Aired 9 May 1959

At an old, dark house, on a dark and stormy night, an ill-assorted group of people meet for the reading of a millionaire's will. But there's a madman on the loose.

Aired 20 June 1959

The story of a young boxer's rise to fame.

Aired 4 July 1959

A woman who has an absolutely untarnished reputation unaccountably steals a black-chiffon nightgown days before her son's wedding.

Aired 18 July 1959

Aired 1 August 1959

Aired 8 August 1959

Aired 15 August 1959

Aired 29 August 1959

Aired 26 September 1959

Aired 24 October 1959

Aired 21 November 1959

Aired 5 December 1959

After his daughter weds, a middle-aged widower with a profitable farm decides to remarry but finds choosing a suitable mate a problematic process.

Aired 19 December 1959

Aired 16 January 1960

Aired 30 January 1960

Aired 13 February 1960

Aired 27 February 1960

Aired 12 March 1960

Aired 26 March 1960

Aired 9 April 1960

Aired 23 April 1960

Aired 7 May 1960

Sheridan Whiteside, famous as an author, broadcaster and expert on just about everything, is invited to dinner by a pompous small-town businessman - and stays rather longer than anyone anticipated.

Aired 21 May 1960

Aired 4 June 1960

A working-class boy gets a scholarship to a public school.

Aired 18 June 1960

Aired 16 July 1960

Aired 13 August 1960

A young lady is filled with daydreams until she meets her reality man.

Aired 27 August 1960

Descius Heiss is a French expatriate, and former Devil's Island prisoner, with two passions; driving shrewd bargains in antiques at his Sly Corner Shop, and the care of his motherless, violin-playing daughter, Margaret. But, his comfortable wealth comes more from being a fence for stolen goods than it does buying-and-selling antiques. His secret is discovered by his shop assistant Archie Fellowes, a nasty, sniveling young rat, and he begins blackmailing Heiss. Heiss employs the usual solution to blackmailers, and the film ends in a London concert-hall where Margaret is playing the Mendelssohm Violin Concerto.

Aired 8 October 1960

What is Margaret hiding from the rest of the family when they arrive for their father's funeral?

Aired 22 October 1960

Aired 19 November 1960

Aired 3 December 1960

An embittered professor comes near to wrecking the lives of a young man and young woman whose love for each other has been accidentally revealed to him through a letter written by the boy to the girl.

Aired 17 December 1960

Aired 31 December 1960

Aired 14 January 1961

Aired 28 January 1961

The up-and-down lives of a married couple over decades, depicted as a series of bedroom scenes.

Aired 11 February 1961

Aired 25 February 1961

Aired 4 March 1961

A Navy lieutenant is borrowed by the British to supervise torpedo experiments after one of their scientists is killed.