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 (with a few exceptions noted below) between fifty and a hundred minutes in duration. A handful of these plays, including Rumpole of the Bailey, subsequently became television series in their own right.
The strand was a successor to The Wednesday Play, the 1960s anthology series, the title being changed when the day of transmission moved to Thursday to make way for a sport programme. Some works, screened in anthology series on BBC2, like Willy Russell's Our Day Out (1977), were repeated on BBC1 in the series. The producers of The Wednesday Play, Graeme MacDonald and Irene Shubik, transferred to the new series. Shubik continued with the series until 1973[1] while MacDonald remained with the series until 1977 when he was promoted. Later producers included Kenith Trodd (1973–1982), David Rose (1972–1980), Innes Lloyd (1975–1982), Margaret Matheson (1977–1979), Sir Richard Eyre (1978–1980), and Pharic MacLaren (1974–1982).
Plays covered all genres. In its time, Play for Today featured contemporary social realist dramas, historical pieces, fantasies, biopics and occasionally science-fiction[2] (The Flipside of Dominick Hide, 1980). Most pieces were written directly for television, but there were also occasional adaptations from other narrative forms, such as novels and stage plays.
Some installments in the series were spun off into full-blown series, including Rumpole of the Bailey, which was produced as a one-off in the Play for Today strand in 1975 and three years later became a series for Thames Television, again with Leo McKern. Alan Bleasdale's The Black Stuff, was a single play broadcast on BBC2 in January 1980, which was developed into Boys from the Blackstuff. It was never part of the Play For Today strand, although it was repeated on BBC1 later that year as a single play.[3][4]
Other offshoots were Gangsters, Headmaster, and a single series of science fiction-based plays styled as Play for Tomorrow. Towards the end of the run, three plays set in Northern Ireland were written by Graham Reid. Known as the Billy Plays, they starred Kenneth Branagh as Billy Martin in his first acting role following his graduation from RADA.
There were also some groups of plays transmitted that — for various reasons — did not go out under the Play for Today banner, but which were funded from the same department, used much the same production team and are generally regarded in episode guides and analysis as being part of the Play for Today canon.
Several plays were BAFTA award winners. John Le Mesurier and Patricia Hayes were named Best Actor and Actress, respectively, for their roles in the 1971 series Traitor and Edna, The Inebriate Woman, the latter also being named Best Drama Production. Dame Celia Johnson was named Best Actress for Mrs. Palfrey At The Claremont, broadcast in 1973. Stocker's Copper (1972), Kisses At Fifty (1973), Bar Mitzvah Boy (1976), Spend, Spend, Spend! (1977), Licking Hitler (1978) and Blue Remembered Hills (1979) were all named Best Single Play by BAFTA.
Videotapes of thirty-seven of the episodes produced between 1970 and 1975 were wiped after transmission, and no copies of many of them are known to exist.[5][6]
Two plays were controversially pulled from transmission shortly before broadcast due to concerns over their content: these were Dennis Potter's Brimstone & Treacle in 1976 and Roy Minton's Scum the following year. In the case of Brimstone & Treacle it was due to concerns over the play's depiction of a disabled woman's rape at the hands of a man who may possibly have been the devil, and with Scum the worry was its supposed sensationalism of life in a borstal. Scum and Brimstone & Treacle were eventually transmitted, although in the meantime both had circumvented their withdrawal by being re-made as cinema films.
One play, The Other Woman, generated some mild controversy for its "graphic depiction" of lesbianism, and for the onscreen kiss between Jane Lapotaire and Lynne Frederick.[7][8]
Demise and legacy
After fourteen seasons and numerous repeats of individual productions, the programme officially ended in August 1984, although two seasons of single dramas without Play for Today billing were broadcast on BBC1 in a similar time slot from July to December 1983 and from November 1984 to February 1985. Thereafter the strand of single dramas became Screen Two on BBC2 from January 1985, and later also Screen One on BBC1 from September 1989. The general trend in 1980s television production was away from one-off plays and towards a greater concentration on series and serials. When one-offs were produced, such as Film on Four on Channel 4, they tended to be made with a cinematic approach rather than betraying television drama's roots in the theatre that Play for Today and earlier series on both the BBC and ITV had often demonstrated.
Nonetheless, the series is generally remembered as a benchmark of high-quality British television drama, and has become a byword for what many continue to argue was a golden age of British television. In 2000, the British Film Institute produced a poll of industry professionals to determine the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes of the 20th century, and five of the programmes included in the final tally were from Play for Today.
A new programme publicised as a return of Play for Today, but under the working title of The Evening Play, was announced at the beginning of March 2006,[9] but nothing has been heard from it since. Kevin Spacey, film star and director of the Old Vic, in March 2008 told BBC News that he would like to see the return of the show,[10] but the journalists Michael Gove and Mark Lawson expressed disagreement, Gove (by then a ConservativeMP) describing them, at best counter-intuitively [according to whom?], as "exercises in viewer patronisation".[11][12]Jan Moir in The Daily Telegraph wrote in support of Spacey, saying "the British loved Play for Today once, and would do so again. A good piece of drama looks at the human condition, and tells us something we should know about ourselves."[13]
The following list was sourced according to the BBC Genome archive of Radio Times magazines.[14] Titles that carried the tag Play For Today on the BBC listings for their first or subsequent transmission are included, along with some repeats such as the repeat of the Days of Hope quartet, where the initial broadcast was not branded Play for Today, but the repeat was. Repeats of the individual productions are excluded. All episodes were broadcast on BBC1, except for the delayed broadcast of Scum in 1991 which was broadcast on BBC2.
Some early episodes are missing or no longer exist in colour.
Included on the Play for Today Vol. 1 BFI Blu-ray set[15]
Written by Ingmar Bergman, translated by Paul Britten Austin. A production for The Largest Theatre in the World project of the EBU. Winner of the SFTA award for best drama production of 1970. Repeated on BBC2 31 Mar 1971, and on BBC1 16 Mar 1972.
Due to a power cut, the ending of this episode was blacked out in many areas, necessitating a repeat of the full episode on 25 Feb 1971.[17] 16mm b&w print
David Agnew is a BBC in-house pen name typically used when multiple writers contributed to a script. Anthony Read was the author commissioned to write the play. Repeated 25 May 1972. Missing.
First shown under The Wednesday Play, 04/02/1970.[19] Winner of the first prize and the silver Dore Catholic Prize at the 1971 Monte Carlo International Television Festival.
Included on the Play for Today Vol. 2 BFI Blu-ray set[23]
BAFTA Best Single Play. Writers' Guild Awards 1972: Best British Original Teleplay. Repeated 18 Dec 1972 and 31 Aug 1982. Shown in the USA on 23 July 1977 as a Piccadilly Circus episode.
DVD release by BBC;[35] also included on the Mike Leigh at the BBC DVD set[26]
Adapted from the stage play. Repeated 7 Aug 1979, on BBC2 6 Sep 1982, 5 Jul 1992 and 1 Nov 1997, and on BBC4 26 Jun 2002, 11 Aug 2002, 28 Oct 2007, 17 Dec 2007, 7 Nov 2010, 21 Mar 2013, 24 Nov 2014, 14 Oct 2020 and 1 Jun 2022.
First shown as a Play of the Week on BBC2, 28 December 1977. Repeated on BBC2 26 Dec 1979, and in 3 instalments under Scene, 14, 21 & 28 Jan 1994, and on BBC4 22 Aug 2008.
Included on the 'Boys from the Black Stuff' DVD set[41]
The Black Stuff was commissioned and produced for the Play for Today strand in 1978, but not broadcast until 1980, as a one-off play on BBC2 (not billed as a Play for Today).[3] However BBC sources today generally do refer to it as a Play for Today.[42] Repeated on BBC1 30 Jul 1981, and on BBC4 19 Sep 2010 and 17 Nov 2020.
Based on the book by Marjorie Wallace and Michael Robson, dramatised by William Humble and Anthony Simmons. First shown as a Play of the Week on BBC2, 28 Mar 1979. Repeated on BBC2 4 Nov 1986.
The BFI have released three box sets of the series on Blu-ray, each consisting of various plays from throughout the show's run. Volume 1 contains seven plays broadcast between 1970 and 77; The Lie (1970), Shakespeare or Bust (1973), Back of Beyond (1974), Passage to England (1975), Your Man from Six Counties (1976), Our Flesh and Blood (1977), and A Photograph (1977). Five of the productions were remastered using the original 16mm film negatives which still exist in the BBC Archives.
Volume 2 contains six plays broadcast between 1972 and 79; Stocker's Copper (1972), The Elephants' Graveyard (1976), Gotcha / Campion's Interview (1977), The Spongers (1978), Victims of Apartheid (1978), and Just a Boys' Game (1979).
Volume 3, released on 21 March 2022, contains six plays broadcast between 1971 and 79; Edna, the Inebriate Woman (1971), Just Another Saturday (1975), Bar Mitzvah Boy (1976), The Mayor's Charity (1977), Coming Out (1979), and A Hole in Babylon (1979).
Dennis Christopher George Potter was an English television dramatist, screenwriter and journalist. He is best known for his BBC television serials Pennies from Heaven (1978) and The Singing Detective (1986) as well as the BBC television plays Blue Remembered Hills (1979) and Brimstone and Treacle (1976). His television dramas mixed fantasy and reality, the personal and the social, and often used themes and images from popular culture. Potter is widely regarded as one of the most influential and innovative dramatists to have worked in British television.
Brimstone and Treacle is a 1976 BBC television play by Dennis Potter. Originally intended for broadcast as an episode of the series Play for Today, it remained untransmitted until 1987. The play was made into a film version co-starring Sting. Both versions also star Denholm Elliott.
Rumpole of the Bailey is a British television series created and written by the British writer and barrister John Mortimer. It starred Leo McKern as Horace Rumpole, a middle-aged London barrister who defended a broad variety of clients, often underdogs. The popularity of the TV series led to the stories being presented in other media, including books and radio.
Doomwatch is a British science fiction television programme produced by the BBC, which ran on BBC1 between 1970 and 1972. The series was set in the then present day, and dealt with a scientific government agency led by Doctor Spencer Quist, responsible for investigating and combating various environmental and technological dangers.
The Wednesday Play is an anthology series of British television plays which ran on BBC1 for six seasons from October 1964 to May 1970. The plays were usually original works written for television, although dramatic adaptations of fiction also featured. The series gained a reputation for presenting contemporary social dramas, and for bringing issues to the attention of a mass audience that would not otherwise have been discussed on screen.
"Cathy Come Home" is a 1966 BBC television play about homelessness. It was written by Jeremy Sandford, produced by Tony Garnett and directed by Ken Loach. A 1998 Radio Times readers' poll voted it the "best single television drama" and a 2000 industry poll rated it as the second-best British television programme ever made. Filmed in a gritty, realistic drama documentary style, it was first broadcast on 16 November 1966 on BBC1. The play was shown in the BBC's The Wednesday Play anthology strand, which often tackled social issues.
Theatre 625 is a British television drama anthology series, produced by the BBC and transmitted on BBC2 from 1964 to 1968. It was one of the first regular programmes in the line-up of the channel, and the title referred to its production and transmission being in the higher-definition 625-line format, which only BBC2 used at the time.
Play of the Month is a BBC television anthology series, which ran from 1965 to 1983 featuring productions of classic and contemporary stage plays which were usually broadcast on BBC1. Each production featured a different work, often using prominent British stage actors in the leading roles. The series was transmitted regularly from October 1965 to May 1979, before returning for the summer seasons of 1982 and 1983. The producer most associated with the Play of the Month series was Cedric Messina. Thirteen productions were also shown previously or subsequently on BBC2 in the period 1971-73 under Stage 2. Productions were broadcast in colour from November 1969.
Supernatural is a British anthology television series that was produced by the BBC in 1977. The series consisted of eight episodes and was broadcast on BBC1. In each episode, a prospective member of the "Club of the Damned" was required to tell a horror story, and their application for membership would be judged on how frightening the story was. Applicants who failed to tell a sufficiently frightening story would be killed.
Life on Mars is a British television series broadcast on BBC One between 9 January 2006 and 10 April 2007. It follows Sam Tyler, a Manchester policeman in 2006 who wakes up after a car accident to discover that he has time-travelled to 1973, where he works the same job in the same location under the command of Detective Chief Inspector Gene Hunt while attempting to solve the mystery of what has happened to him.
Planet Earth is a 2006 British television series produced by the BBC Natural History Unit. Five years in the making, it was the most expensive nature documentary series ever commissioned by the BBC and also the first to be filmed in high definition. The series received multiple awards, including four Emmy Awards, a Peabody Award, and an award from the Royal Television Society.
Out of This World is a British science fiction anthology television series made by the ITV franchise ABC Weekend TV for ITV. It was broadcast on ITV in 1962. A spin-off from the Armchair Theatre anthology series, each episode was introduced by the actor Boris Karloff. Many of the episodes were adaptations of stories by science fiction writers including Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick and Clifford D. Simak. The series is described by the British Film Institute as a precursor to the BBC science fiction anthology series Out of the Unknown, which was created and produced by Out of This World creator Irene Shubik after she left ABC.
Irene Shubik was a British television producer and story editor, known for her contribution to the development of the single play in British television drama. Beginning her career in television at ABC Weekend TV, she worked on Armchair Theatre as a story editor, where she devised the science fiction anthology series Out of this World.
A television play is a television programming genre which is a drama performance broadcast from a multi-camera television studio, usually live in the early days of television but later recorded to tape. This is in contrast to a television movie, which employs the single-camera setup of film production.
"Penda's Fen" is the 16th episode of fourth season of the British BBC anthology TV series Play for Today. The episode was a television play that was originally broadcast on 21 March 1974. "Penda's Fen" was written by David Rudkin, directed by Alan Clarke, produced by David Rose, and starred Spencer Banks.
Nature's Great Events is a wildlife documentary series made for BBC television, first shown in the UK on BBC One and BBC HD in February 2009. The series looks at how seasonal changes powered by the sun cause shifting weather patterns and ocean currents, which in turn create the conditions for some of the planet's most spectacular wildlife events. Each episode focuses on the challenges and opportunities these changes present to a few key species.
This is a list of British television related events from 1987.
The Evacuees is a 1975 play written by Jack Rosenthal and directed by Alan Parker for the BBC. It was broadcast by BBC2 on 5 March 1975 with a repeat on BBC2 25 December 1975 and again on BBC1 on 13 April 1976.
Thirty-Minute Theatre was a British anthology drama series of short plays shown on BBC Television between 1965 and 1973, which was used in part at least as a training ground for new writers, on account of its short running length, and which therefore attracted many writers who later became well known. It was produced initially by Harry Moore, later by Graeme MacDonald, George Spenton-Foster, Innes Lloyd and others. Thirty-Minute Theatre began on BBC2 in 1965 with an adaptation of the black comedy Parson's Pleasure. Dennis Potter contributed Emergency – Ward 9 (1966), which he partially recycled in the much later The Singing Detective (1986). In 1967 BBC2 launched the UK's first colour service, with the consequence that Thirty-Minute Theatre became the first drama series in the country to be shown in colour.
Resnick is a British television crime drama series, first broadcast on 31 March 1992, that ran for two series on BBC1. The series, based on the Charlie Resnick novels by author John Harvey, starred Academy Award-nominee Tom Wilkinson as the title character, alongside Paul Bazely, Paul Jesson, David Neilson and Daniel Ryan. The first series, an adaptation of the novel Lonely Hearts, was adapted for television by Harvey himself. Bruce MacDonald was assigned to direct.
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