Dreams of Leaving - w David Hare. In 1971, eager, slightly gauche twentysomething journo William (Bill Nighy) leaves Nottingham for a tenure on a Fleet Street tabloid. After a string of tepid affairs, punctuated by the traditional liquid diet, he encounters Caroline (Kate Nelligan), an impossibly beautiful assistant at an art gallery. As he jumps in with both feet, he discovers Caroline is very much a girl of the London ‘scene’ - flitting from glamorous job to glamorous job (she gets sacked from the gallery, then becomes a photographer, gets involved with a rock band, and finally enrols in a dance school) with very little regard for any of them, and stringing William along by alternating him with endless tempestuous affairs, again none of which seem to involve any emotional engagement, or indeed effort, on her part. William is, of course, the opposite - he plugs away at the tabloid, even though he and his fellow hacks (including a lank-haired Mel Smith as old hand Xan) detest the crap they’re expected to fill the paper with. Evenings with Caroline at William’s flat prove fraught and fruitless, despite Caroline’s admission of having feelings for William above and beyond the usual drill - which provokes fear and awkwardness rather than anything deeper. Matters aren’t helped by her refusing to contact him, and then turning up at his office to surreptitiously watch him at work. William eventually gets sick of this treatment, and breaks off seeing her. Finally, he makes a rather abortive protest at a staff conference about the uselessness of it all (‘I dread a lifetime randomly producing something which we all distrust and despise. I dread the effects on my person of a lifetime given over to royalty and dogs.’) Then, he hears of Caroline again - her weight down to seven stone, she’s been committed into a mental hospital, and it’s not made clear if she’ll ever be able to leave (William confides ‘I was grateful […] thank God she was mad.’) Finally, we see William commuting from Fleet Street several years later to a suburban wife-two-kids existence - he’s managed to escape. It’s a very minimalist turn from Hare, the seedy world of early ‘70s Notting Hill and Fleet Street providing a very different backdrop from the period detail of Licking Hitler (as with that film, Hare directs as well). The entire play is far more cinematic than most paly for Today entries, even those shot wholly on film, as the use of William’s narration as a linking device between various disjointed scenes and images - almost like a more serious version of Annie Hall at points - is as far from the ‘filmed play’ origins of the strand as is possible to get. This is handy for extracting the unreality out of the realism - it’s clear we’re getting William’s selective version of events. As a diatribe against the modish, emotionally detached 'urban' lifestyle, it’s more effective than, say, Hard Feelings (see 1984 below), mainly because the characters, even down to bit parts like Xan and William’s Arabic scholar neighbour Andrew, are clearly drawn rather than rough hewn ‘types’ set up to be easily knocked down. The acting is fantastic, too, especially Nelligan’s cold inscrutability, and of course, Nighy’s beseeching earnestness, often bordering on the pathetic but never collapsing into chest-beating helplessness. Mike Williams’ cinematography is also first rate. A fine example of the refined films that were emerging from the strand from the late-’70s onwards, often superior to anything the British film industry was turning out at the same time.  

Thicker Than Water - w Brian Glover. Raucous goings-on and underhand gamesmanship aplenty in Glover's tale of a victory-hungry English team at the Europen Black Pudding Festival in Normandy.  

Murder Rap - w Michael Hastings. Elderly caretaker Arthur Lovegrove defends his house from 'invasion' by black and underprivileged council tenants. Featuring Liz Smith and Michael Sheard.    

No Defence - w Chris Kewbank. Judge Patrick Troughton presides over a complex rape case.  

That Crazy Woman -w David Hopkins. Zena Walker stars as Dr Barbara Moore in a dramatised account of her famed Land's End to John O'Groats walk in 1960.  

A Gift from Nessus - w William McIlvanney and Bill Craig. When a salesman terminates his long-term affair, the woman in question commits suicide. Turning to drink, he then discovers his wife has been similarly playing away with his boss, and makes moves to end her life as well. A bleak entry, to say the least, but prevented from going over the top.  

Two cinematic entries - Kate Nelligan and Bill Nighy in Dreams of Leaving, and Ian Holm and his TV sets in Soft Targets.

Kate, the Good Neighbour -w Peter Ransley. Sherrie Hewson dons the regulation BBC OAP make-up as the titular compassionate woman, reduced by old age and isolation to reminisce over her wartime experiences. With Dandy Nichols.  

Buses - w Geoffrey Case. The romance of running a private bus company in 1920s Yorkshire is compared to the romance of the fictional Old West in the mind of idealistic young bus driver Sebastian Abineri. Paul Shane appears briefly.  

Shadows on Our Skin - w Derek Mahon/Jennifer Johnston. Harsh and unsentimental study of the Troubles through the eyes of an eleven year old boy in Bogside (Macrea Clarke).    

Ladies - w Carol Bunyan. Female factory workers (including Patsy Rowlands and June Brown) celebrate one of their number's wedding in a lunch break, but resentment (especially against worker Jacqueline Tong) rises to the surface and during the resulting unpleasant scene the pregnant Rowlands miscarries.  

The Vanishing Army -w Robert Holles. Career army man Bill Patterson faces discharge in this examination of the harsh treatment of British NCOs. With Timothy Spall, and Kenneth Cope as the drill sergeant.  

Not for the Likes of Us - w Gilly Fraser. Pam St Clement chews the furniture as only she can, as the weary matriarch of a large working class family, finally achieving some form of symbolic recongition and dignity in the famous climactic scene where she becomes a nude model in an evening life class.  

The Executioner - w Lionel Goldstein. Polish army officer Paul Rogers kills a Nazi in WWII, then finds himself on trail in present-day West Germany, in an attempt by prosecutor Robert Stephens to get the statute of limitations on Nazi war crimes trials lifted, by demonstrating the impartiality of the trial system. In the process it is revealed that the Nazi was a senior SS officer and Rogers is a Jew, thus severely crippling Stephens' case. Rogers, meanwhile, has sussed what's going on and refuses to walk away quietly from the courtroom, seeking to blow the whistle on the Nazi-like ends-justifying-means modus operandi of the whole affair. An intelligent examination of the moral complexities of what was then a hotly debated issue. 

The Imitation Game - w Ian McEwan. In late 1940, 19-year-old Cathy Raine (Harriet Walter), lives a dull, stifling lower middle class existence in Frinton with an oppressive father and an only slightly more considerate boyfriend. Her only consolation is the family piano, on which she repeatedly tries to play Mozart’s Fantasia. As the war effort steps up, she turns down the usual route for local girls working at the munitions factory, and, wanting to ’make a difference’, joins the ATS, mush to her dad’s consternation. After basic training, during which she befriends working class Mary (Brenda Blethyn) she’s inducted into a wireless listening station, taking down Nazi Morse transmissions of the Enigma code. She becomes quickly disenchanted by this mind-numbing work. Seeking brief respite in a pub, Cathy and Mary share a drink, oblivious of the atmosphere-killing effect they’re having on this men’s realm. The publican approaches them to force them to leave, and gets a swift knee in the bollocks for his trouble. Such behaviour is, in the (male) major’s view, “more serious than rape, wouldn’t you say?” and she’s moved to Bletchley Park, the code-breaking centre of operations, to do menial mopping and tea making. There, some Cambridge mathematics dons, among them Turner (Nicholas Le Provost) discuss ’thinking machines’ and a test called The Imitation Game - a man and a woman sending messages to a third party, both of them trying to convince him/her they are the woman. Hearing her playing Fantasia in an empty mess room, Turner later approaches Cathy and, for the first time since moving to Bletchley, she’s engaged in conversation, an of an unexpectedly kind variety. Eventually, they go to bed together, but for Turner (who, it’s been implied, is a deeply repressed homosexual) it all comes to nought, and he reverts to male type with a paranoid harangue (‘You wanted to humiliate me and you’ve succeeded. You hate your own job and you’re jealous of me for mine.’) Shortly after, Cathy is caught in Turner’s room perusing Top Secret documents and is incarcerated in military prison for the rest of the war. Lastly, she’s given a package from Turner - the Fantasia sheet music from the mess. It’s perhaps surprising that two Play for Today entries (Licking Hitler in ‘78 being the other) should cover what seems superficially the same topic - young girl goes to war and finds the glass ceiling is still very much in place - but they’re very different in tone and temperament. Hare’s play hooked into class obsessions as a root cause of sexual abuse, but here there’s more a feeling of intense repression - of secrets, women, and homosexuality (Turner is based loosely on Alan Turing, about whose life this play was originally going to be, until McEwan’s research moved into other areas). Cathy’s home life, with a Moseley-sympathising father ruling the front room from his armchair, is something she’s desperate to get away from, but the war is not the liberating adventure she naively hoped for. It’s just the same. As she rises, haphazardly, through the code breaking Project ultra, from the peripheral wireless station to the centre of all things, the brilliant Turner, the isolation and feeling she doesn’t belong grows only deeper, until the ultimate isolation is forced upon her. Some of the personal touches are wonderful here - the rough and ready ATS girls forcing a ‘slag’ amongst their number (Belinda Lang) into a bath, the hilarious (and no doubt pretty spot on) lecture to male NCOs on how to deal with women in the army (ignore their crying, don’t let them stand up for too long etc.) delivered by - who else? - Officer Patricia Routeledge, and Cathy’s last contact with Mary via a telephone - an instrument neither of them have much experience of, giving their final goodbyes a halting, shouty quality that’s all the more poignant. Finely played by all the cast, and sensitively shot entirely on location by Richard Eyre, The Imitation Game, alongside Licking Hitler, is a great example of how Play for Today could return to the same subject and extract an entirely different world from it, where other channels would have just said ‘that’s been done’.  

A Walk in the Forest - w Jeremy Paul. John Alderton is a writer who befriend a dissident from the USSR. With John Bird and Paul Freeman  

Pasmore - w David Storey/Richard Eyre. Philip Jackson has an affair with Penelope Wilton, and undergoes a protracted nervous breakdown as wife Alison Steadman and dad Jimmy Jewel look helplessly on. Adapted by Eyre from the novel by This Sporting Life writer Storey. Also with Richard Wilson, Paul McDowell and Pat 'Bomber' Roach.  

C2H5OH - w David Turner. Thinly-veiled autobiographical story of playwright David Purser's alcohol-fuelled personal hell, with Dinsdale Landen.  

The Adventures of Frank - w/d John McGrath. Highly experimental two-parter from The Cheviot... writer-director and head of the 7:84 theatre company McGrath, partially adapted from his stage play The Life and Times of Joe of England. Mick Ford leaves Sheffield for the bright lights of the capital in first part Everybody's Fiddling Something, with his far from successful picaresque travails culminating in a tender scene with a Glaswegian girl at the end of second part Seeds of Ice. In between, comedic inserts, Jim Broadbent, songs by ex-members of Lindisfarne among others and, most striking of all, the liberal use of Quantel video effects and transitions leaven this highly politicised take on the emerging Thatcherite state. Though rather dated in appearance now, the presentation was staunchly defended by McGrath as the antithesis to what he saw as the de-politicised naturalistic style prevalent at the time. It's a debate that had been raging since the early '60s, when MacTaggart's Studio 4 series of pre-Wednesday plays employed rudimentary "distancing" devices such as showing the cameras and various behind-the-scenes studio paraphernalia, though such techniques were out of favour by the '80s, and the more "filmic", naturalistic style was prevalent, making McGrath's work more of a stand-out than ever.  

Minor Complications - w Peter Ransley. A woman's fight for compensation after a botched operation. With David 'Science Workshop' Hargreaves.

Number on End - w Gordon Flemyng. On the eve of a conference of African leaders in Brussels, documentary maker Nick 'Space 1999' Tate uncovers an assassination plot which the authorities want him to keep under wraps. With John Challis..

Jude - w Lesley Brice. James Laurenson engineers an awkward afternoon reunion with his 12 year old son Dorian Ford.

The Flipside of Dominick Hide - w Alan Gibson/Jeremy Paul. Zooming over the grey skyline of early '80s London is a quaint flying saucer piloted by Dominick Hide (Peter Firth), a "correlator" from the year 2130, observing the movements of London buses in order to replace historical records which were destroyed in an unidentified millennial apocalypse. Curious about a great-great-grandfather he understands to be living there, Dominick breaks all protocol and lands his saucer in London, falling haphazardly in love with Jane (Caroline Langrishe), whose carefree, bohemian life puts the sterile domesticity of Dominick's future spouse Ava (Pippa Guard). Shuttling back and forth between eras, Dominick manages to exasperate both. Finally, after his saucer is nicked by a travelling funfair, Jane reveals she is pregnant. It slowly dawns on Dominick that he has become his own great-great-grandfather, and what's more his sinister overseer Caleb Line (Patrick Magee) tells Dominick it was all planned from the start - the anomaly of his parentage had been known for some time, and Dominick was allowed to break the rules to fulfill it. Dominick makes one final visit to Jane, with a bit of financial help for her and their new son in the form of next Saturday's football pools results. This has long been a fondly-recalled entry in the series for those of a certain age, mainly due to obvious genre reasons, but it's perhaps surprising how well it stands up today. Making allowances for the undernourished production design (the tweeness of the saucer is mocked by many citizens of 1980, in a refreshing change from the usual disbelief-suspending shock and awe), it has a story which follows the sci-fi conventions while not forgetting to include real character. Firth as Hide makes what could easily have become an annoying idiot savant role endearingly innocent - the hazards and responsibilities he has to deal with in 1980 are met with perfectly-judged polite confusion. This makes for both pleasant comedy and unforced pathos - the very qualities which attract Jane and Dominick to each other are also the root of unbridgeable differences. On that level, it's a simple and fairly conventional romance, which is the main strength of the script - this down-to-Earth focus prevents it running away with grandiose half-baked ideas to which a great deal of ambitious science fiction is all to prone. Yes, it's a sentimental tale, but sentimentality is what it's about - the hopeless nostalgia for our present of a future race shorn of all mankind's animal trappings by the march of civilisation. Television has mused on the likelihood of technology infantilising us before (Nigel Kneale's great Year of the Sex Olympics, shown in the Wednesday Play strand), but here it's realised perfectly - every 'civilised' advance Dominick's era enjoys (eg. sex being a clean, passionless affair after which partners offer a solemn "thank you") is shown to have emotionally retarding effects in the past (when Dominick chances on Karl Howman and 'friend' shagging on a bit of waste ground, there's no embarrassment or possibly even comprehension about what they're up to). The future is indeed a sterile, emotionless void - all plastic surfaces, Muzak holograms, instant dinners and shiny jerkins (although tea appears to have survived the holocaust). It's not visually impressive, but the script makes that part of the point - while technology is superior, in every other aspect the future world is lacking compared to the present, and it knows it. Thus the production never overreaches itself in the manner sci-fi of a restricted budget can tend to do - the only jarring scene is a long conversation between Dominick and Ava where it has for some reason been deemed a good idea to superimpose their talking heads over each other rather than cut to and fro in the conventional manner. A wistful theme song from Rick 'Fingerbobs' Jones (fronting his band Meal Ticket) completes this delightful play - certainly not a big-hitter in relation to many of the Play for Today heavyweights, but a memorable and well-written diversion with a little bit more to offer than at first seems.  

Name for the Day - w Colin Haydn Evans. Richard O'Callaghan suddenly decides to go mad - much to the consternation of wife Elizabeth Sladen. With Simon Cadell, Pauline Quirke and Lennard Pearce.

Jessie - w Bryan Forbes. Nanny Nanette Newman looks after the mute male child of a Victorian household. Written and directed by Forbes, and also starring Nigel Hawthorne and Keith Barron.  

Childhood regression in Potter's Blue Remembered Hills, and adult realities in Bleasdale's The Black Stuff.

The Black Stuff - w Alan Bleasdale. In the late-’70s Liverpool of fast-rising unemployment, a gang of tar layers strike out in an old transit for a job laying the road in front of a new housing development in Middlesborough. Along the way, one of their number, Yosser Hughes, comes into contact with a pair of gypsies offering a little non-union work laying the road to a nearby farm. In a seedy hotel that night, while young Kev tries unsuccessfully to take advantage of the ‘masseur’ operating in the next room (and getting set up by the other lads in the process) Yosser drunkenly conceives his own tarmacadam company, ‘Tar La’, and despite their best judgement, all the others, save Kev and foreman Dixie, go along with it. An increasingly farcical game of cat-and-mouse ensues, with the gang trying desperately to sneak off from under Dixie’s nose in order to complete the two jobs at once. Unfortunately, their boss, the devoutly unprincipled McKenna (David Calder) swoops in on them in his helicopter, and summarily fires the lot of them on the spot with disdainful relish. Finally, it dawns on them their new gypsy compadres have stitched them up something rotten, and after Yosser goes after them in a desperate but doomed car chase (in Transit vans!) they return, forlornly, to the ‘Pool, and the dole office - thus setting the scene for the later Boys from the Blackstuff series. Like that series, this play has a reputation for being dour and depressing, and while the ultimate message of both is hardly ‘feel good‘, this is far from being a protracted wallow in the despair of those at the bottom of the pile. The characters are all marvellously drawn. Foreman Dixie (Tom Georgeson), overprotective of his desperate-to-come-of-age son (Bleasdale‘s nephew Gary); the ailing but still proudly principled George (Peter Kerrigan); Loggo (Alan Igbon), applying his own set of scruples to fit the main chance; the honest-yet-naïve Chrissy (Michael Angelis); and of course the borderline psychotic Yosser (Bernard Hill), determined to make a name for himself yet quite clearly completely incapable of sufficiently relating to other people in order to do something about it. He can lead a gang of lads, though, in a social sense - the scene on the way to Middlesbrough where they give a lift to plain student Janine Duvitski, whom Yosser starts mercilessly laying into, shows his quick tongue (‘wit’ might be stretching things a bit) and his short fuse in equal measure - Duvitski’s parting shot ‘Your wife must give you hell!’ results in the surreal shot of the trademark hughes repeated headbutt on the van doors as it drives away. There’s humour aplenty in the film, all of it firmly employed to feed the characters - the magnificently believable double act of Sean Lynch and Alan Lake as the two gypsies; the on-site ribbing of foreman Dixie, the malevolent clerk of works, and ‘the lad’ (especially Loggo convincing the boy that Hermasetas are a powerful aphrodisiac); as well as revealing little touches cribbed from urban folklore, like the ferrets, pigeons and geese being taken along with the lads in the van, and McKenna opportunistically pulling up his Merc alongside an unguarded generator with a view to sneakily towing it away. Presented as a Play for Today special, the response to this play was so great that the BBC commissioned Bleasdale to expand each character into a separate drama. The first of these, The Muscle Market, featured Pete Postlethwaite replacing Calder as the owner of the building contractors, and Alison Steadman. It went out under the Play for Today banner in 1981 as a stop-gap measure while Bleasdale finished the other five, which were made by Philip Saville on (for the most part) the new, lightweight video OB cameras, and shown as the drama series The Boys From The Blackstuff. The rest is history.  

1981  

Beyond the Pale - w Les Blair. Dramatisation of the British Brothers march into the East End Jewish quarter of Bethnal Green in 1902. Michael Maynard leads the cast, Tony Robinson makes a brief appearance.  

The Muscle Market - w Alan Bleasdale. First of the post-Black Stuff (qv) character studies. Pete Postlethwaite runs a failing building contractor's, and resorts to sub-gangster thuggery to keep the business afloat. The other plays, detailing the lives of his former employees, formed The Boys from the Blackstuff.  

A Brush with Mr Porter on the Road to Eldorado - w Don Haworth. A pleasant hotel restaurant is disrupted by "nice, affable gobblers" the Porters, who proceed to gorge themselves on everything in the menu, much to the disgust of fellow diners, in bizarre ways (eg. throwing bread rolls to each other over the soup course a la relay runners). With Nigel Hawthorne, Harold Goodwin and, as Mr. P, Christopher Benjamin, familiar to children watching from the "Hubba hubba yum yum" Quaker Harvest Crunch ads. 

Dear Brutus - w JM Barrie. Adaptation of the melancholc fantasy from the author of Peter Pan, with a group of guests (including Frank Finlay and Stratford Johns), each with a secret regret, gather at a country house for midsummer, and find themselves entering a magic forest wherein they witness their longed-for alternative lives.  

The Cause - w Derek Lister. Trade union secretary Jimmy Jewel, caught up in an industrial dispute at a London hospital, has flashbacks to his part in the Spanish Civil War. 

Beloved Enemy - w Charles Levinson and David Leland. Dramatisation of a real-life business deal between Britain and the USSR in which the UK exchanged anti-missile systems for cheap Russian industrial products. Not a little polemic involved. Based on Charles Levinson's book Vodka Cola. With Graham Crowden and Stephen Berkoff. 

The Kamikaze Gound Staff Reunion Dinner - w Stewart Parker. Raucous, wry satire of the macho, infantile depths a gang of men can drag themselves down to, the fictional old boys' dinner (in Tokyo) being inspired by the author's experiences of a scout reunion he attended. To enforce the point, the entirely white, British cast play the roles of ex-Japanese servicemen as if they were old English comrades, with no concession to accent or mannerism. "A few drinks, and Bojo's your uncle!" Starring Peter Sallis, Richard Vernon and Harold Goodwin.  

The Union - w Tony Perrin. Story of the 1961 ballot rigging by the Electrician's union to get a communist candidate elected General President. Perrin himself is a former electrician.  

Sorry - w Carol Bunyan. Cheeky office post boy Nicholas Ball invites co-worker Meg Davies round to his place during the lunch hour, but behind closed doors he is a very different man. An agonised, intense exploration of misogyny with the threat of rape hanging over the proceedings with unbearable inevitability.  

The Garland - w HO Nazareth and Horace Ove. Patricia Garwood derides Bollywood romantic films as sentimental fluff until her life, including her 17 year old son's romance with a Muslim girl, begins increasingly to resemble one.  

The Sin Bin - w Tony Parker. Gruelling tale of a group therapy session for six ostensibly hopeless men variously sentenced to life imprisonment, and the straight 'outsider' who takes on the job of getting through to them. See also A Life is for Ever and Chariot of Fire for similar themes tackled by Parker. 

Before Water Lillies - w Robert Marshall. William 'Porkins' Hootkins is an American Academic obsessed with Monet. John 'Boycie' Challis also stars.  

Bavarian Night - w Andrew Davies. An eponymous parent's fund-raising social gathering after hours at a primary school brings out a few home truths for the participants. With Bob Peck, and a young Gary Olsen.  

The Good-Time Girls - w Alan Clews. The wives of absentee North Sea oil rig workers start playing away.  

Baby Talk - w Nigel Williams. Pregnant career woman Susan Littler seeks advice from her neighbour Pauline Quirke.  

A Turn for the Worse - w John Bill. Bernard Hill plays a scouse talent scout who discovers unemployed alternative comedian Max Hafler in a working men's club and takes him on. Christopher Ryan appears.  

An excercise in minimalism - the claustrophobic Psy-Warriors.

Psy-Warriors - w David Leland. Prisoners of war apparently being brutally tortured by terrorists in Northern Ireland are eventually revealed to be soldiers from the same army on a psychologically gruelling training exercise which gets out of hand. Transmitted shortly after the death of incarcerated MP Bobby Sands. Directed, with the same flair for disorienting camerawork he would apply to the infamous Screen Two Troubles saga Elephant, by Alan Clarke. With john Duttine, Colin Blakely and Warren Clarke. 

Country: A Tory Story - w Trevor Griffiths. July 1945, shortly after the election, and aristocratic Kentish brewing dynasty the Carlions are gathering for a christening. At their head, Sir Frederic (Leo McKern) is giving his wife cause for concern with his increasingly fragile grasp on the world. Prodigal son Philip (James Fox), a 'gay bachelor' who writes for a Punch-like satirical magazine, returns to the fold, and immediately starts stirring things up with threats of salacious stories concerning his mother. Far more disruptive, however, is his long-missing sister Virginia (Penelope Wilton) who gatecrashes breakfast on election results morning in French resistance coat and beret (it transpires she's been 'underground' in Spain and France during the war) and breaks with family protocol to deliver an impassioned speech about just what the rest of the country thinks of the Carlions and their ilk, and how they now seem intent on dealing with them, as all the while news of the devastating Tory rout are broadcast on the radio. Philip, though amenable to his siter's views, eventually caves in to tradition and accepts chairmanship of the brewery (his damaging gossip only used, it turns out, to ensure his position in the family remains secure). With post-war Britain seemingly on the verge of a socialist revolution, he embodies the resilient spirit of Tory future, tying up with the present (Griffiths wrote the play shortly after the 1979 landslide victory). Unusually for a Play for Today, and especially so for Griffiths' work, it's an extremely cinematic piece - not just a play shot on location on film, but a complex ballet of points of view, tracking shots, chiaroscuro lighting and large-scale production design, managed by Griffiths and director Richard Eyre with astonishing fluidity (Griffiths' only previous contact with 'proper' films had been a gladiatorial turn writing the script for Warren Beatty's Russian revolution romance Reds). Set-pieces, including the opening Eton fire drill, the eerie dusk gathering on the terrace, and the confrontation with local hop-pickers who've taken over a stable in the spirit of the coming New Socialism (leaving the horses to roam free through the estate and house) are at once immediate and vivid, yet also distinctly distanced - embalmed, even - by the meticulous production. While in so many period dramas this is just taken on trust as part of the genre, here it's used by Griffiths to put up a barrier between viewer and subject - it is made clear that these people are not, when all's said and done, 'just like us'. The conflict between the family and the hop-pickers is perhaps a tad overdone - the same point is made far more succinctly in the little scene where the poacher-turned-temporary-butler, in a quiet moment, nicks one of Philip's posh cigarettes and indulgently poses with it and a glass of beer. The playing is superb all-round, too, especially McKern's masterful embodiment of an Old Tory sinking into confusion, nostalgia and despair. Stiff, formal family conversation (broken up only by Virginia and the eccentric Sir Piers Blair, played, on Griffiths' instructions, as an 'upper class Frank Randle') and 'I'd like a quick word' asides are the stifling order of the day, the actors parading, along with the camera, in an endless, assured ballet of cigarette-to-cheek speeches and asides. The play was scheduled against the second episode of Brideshead Revisited on ITV. Sadly the rosier view of the upper classes won out, and, citing cost reasons (Country broke Play for Today records at £450,000) the BBC scrapped the five subsequent plays in the series Griffiths was to call Tory Stories, covering the fortunes of the same brewing dynasty through other major upheavals in the life of the post-war Conservative party - the Macmillan government's banking rate leak of 1957 (causing massive inflation and initiating the 'boom and bust' economics associated with Conservatism to this day); the Profumo affair; the rise of British Marxism during the 1968 Paris riots; the fall of the Heath government in 1973/4; and the final episode set in a late-'80s future of entrenched Thatcherism. As with Jim Allen's mega-drama The Commune, cancelled by LWT in 1980 in the wake of their three Dennis Potter plays overspending and underperforming, it's nothing short of tragic that this fascinating idea was never given the chance to go into production.  

Both ends of society - Country and Home Sweet Home.

London is Drowning - w Graham Williams. A dramatisation of a hot topic of the time - the flooding of the Thames. Done in almost exactly the same manner as Peter Watkins' The War Game over 15 years before, with budget-allowing hand-held work and portentous time-line voiceovers ("12.15 - Whitechapel tube station is evacuated" etc.) with the added touch of faked weather bulletins with Michael Fish. Not a scarefest in the War Game league (in fact viewers north of Watford seemed to rather enjoy it) but a great bit of of-its-time polemic all the same.  

A Room for the Winter - w Rose Tremain. Exiled white South African writer Jack Shephard clashes with his Jamaican landlady in London. Michael Kitchen plays his gay lover back in SA.  

No Visible Scar - w Rosemary Davies. Nurse Barbara Flynn is mercilessly interrogated by the authorities for helping a wounded terrorist. 

Iris in the Traffic, Ruby in the Rain - w Stewart Parker. Simple but effective study of two girls on a winter's day in Belfast, coping with separate yet similar tragedies. Stiff Little Fingers provide the soundtrack, and singer Jake Burns appears as Iris's friend.  

Protest - w Vaclav Havel. Autobiographical account of the Czech playwright's hounding by the authorities, with Nigel Hawthorne as the man himself.  

United Kingdom - w Jim Allen. More social(ist) comment from Allen, this time centering on a breakaway local council in the North-East headed by a (relatively) fresh-faced Ricky Tomlinson, concluding with the inevitable showdown with the police, among them Colin Welland. 'They say the pen is mightier than the sword. Swords come in handy sometimes. They always come with swords.'  

PQ17 - w Roger Mulner. Richard Briers plays a commander on the merchant navy Russian convoy of WWII who purposely disobeys an order to 'scatter', believing it to be suicidal, then faces the consequences. With Patrick Troughton.  

The Factory - w David Hopkins. Tragi-comic tale of a factory lock-out, with the business relocating to Wales and manager Leonard Rossiter and skeleton staff (including Ray Winstone) attempting bravely (and foolishly) to carry on as usual.  

1982  

England's Green and Pleasant Land - w Rita May. A mini-Watergate scandal erupts before local elections in south Yorkshire when a motorway extension is slated to be built through either a golf course or allotments.  

A Cotswold Death - w Tony Bicat. Agatha Christie-style rural murder mystery pastiche with a twist - the offed "lord of the manor" is an oil-rich sheik. Ian Richardson is Inspector Anthony Arrowsmith, Timothy Spall his sergeant.  

Under the Skin - w Janey Preger. Race and class tensions between Frances Tomelty and Jacqueline Tong. With George Costigan and Bill Nighy.  

Commitments - w Dusty Hughes. Fringe theatre transfer to the screen set in the 1973-4 winter of the three day week, following a clan of Trotskyite activists led by Kevin McNally.  

Life After Death - w Rachel Billington. Study of bereavement with Dorothy Tutin.  

The Silly Season - w Stephen Mulrine. Four students cause chaos working part-time in a factory. Together at last - Pierce Brosnan and Iain 'Fingermouse' Lauchlan.  

Too Late to Talk to Billy - w Graeme Reid. Kenneth Branagh is the young Billy Martin, suffering life in a poor working class Belfast family under his oppressive father James 'Z Cars' Ellis, after his mother dies of cancer. Followed by A Matter of Choice for Billy in 1983 and A Coming to Terms for Billy in 1984.  

Willie's Last Stand - w Jim Allen. Middle-aged Paul Freeman tries to recapture the abandonment of youth with a big night out with mates, including Roger Sloman. A rare excursion into outright comedy for the usually highly politicised Allen.  

Tishoo - w Brian Thompson. Paul Daneman and Anne 'Onedin Line' Stallybrass star as a biology professor and his lab technician in a southern England university in the present day (ie. early doors Thatcher's Britain), seventeen years into their ramshackle-but-dilligent research into the cure for the common cold, in a run-down Victorian building on the edge of a newly-expanded concrete campus. On the day Frank (Daneman) rushes to work on his saddle-less bike and excitedly breaks the news to Barbara (Stallybrass) that he feels he is close to a cure, cantankerous trade unionist college porter Cullin (Milton Johns) breaks the news that Frank's research is for the chop in the latest round of budget cuts. At the same time, a very tentative affair between Frank and Barbara (who is married, but dissatisfied) comes to a head, a new, young female research assistant arrives, and the vice-chancellor engages Frank in a discussion about the social usefulness of his research. BArbara announces her decision to leave, threatens her conservative PE teacher husband on Cullin, and then turns on Frank ('I have listened to your fear of me for so long it's eventually become boring'). All this moves Frank, only ever on nodding terms with the real world anyway, to finally lose it and, his life's work swiped away from under him, end up on the phone to a middle eastern branch of the Samaritans. It sounds like a farce, and indeed there are many farcical elements - Frank's duel with the working to rule Cullin, who ends up having his bike compacted into a comical square lump, some test-tube drunkenness, and Frank and Babs forever being discovered in a clinch by the other characters - but, just as the play's title is an exclamation mark short of true farce, so the tone of the play itself never quite slips over into all-out door-slamming panic. In fact, Frank is the only farcical character in the play, slipping in and out of reverie and periodically disconnecting with cast members' (even his own) trains of thought, in a lovely performance by Daneman. With politics - governmental, economic, sexual, generational - all round him, he's retreated into his work, the certainties of science (Frank to Cullin ('Looking down my microscope, there are no politics. If I do a white blood cell count, you don't get the red cells demanding a recount') over the years, until this day, when Barbara's eventual declarations of love prove more than he can handle. In fact, all the characters prove more than he can handle, each turning out to be more complex than he (and, initially, we) expects. Barbara is no longer the faithful assistant. Cullin rises, albeit mometarily, above the 'ignorant leftist' stereotype. The vice-chancellor turns out to know more about Franks' research than his classics-trained reputation suggests. And Frank makes a hideous job of trying to relate to Claire, the new assistant. This isn't merely an absent-minded boffin, but a tragic figure who has long ago abnegated his existence in the real world (he's been long divorced, we learn) for the comfort of his research, and now finds himself with nothing, taken right back to the point he chose his profession, to grammar school ('I'm still a child [...] being eleven was the most serious thing that ever happened to me.') The vice-chancellor suggests that a cold can be useful, leaving convalescents alone to 'get to know the wallpaper pattern in the bedroom and feel sorry for themselves [...] review their life, even frighten themselves a bit,' and Frank cannot comprehend. All this is set against a backdrop of nationwide cuts and shortages (the scientists subsist on celery and Rumanian Marmite sandwiches), with a mini-Winter of Discontent taking place in the lab via huge sacks of dropping from the experimental rabbits, which the militant porters refuse to move. But, again, it's not a simple polemic about Thatcherite economics either. In fact, simplifying the world to avoid real thought and responsibility is probably the play's main subject. A deceptively light and simple-looking story that, in best Play for Today tradition, runs into greater depths than the situation suggests.  

Medical dilemmas for Paul Daneman in Tishoo and Leonard Rossiter in Dog Ends.

Home Sweet Home - w Mike Leigh. After the relative drop in quality of Who’s Who, Mike Leigh came roaring back to form, first with the formidable 1980 BBC2 Playhouse entry Grown Ups, then with this masterful, low-key study of the tragically interconnected lives of three Hitchin postmen. Gordon Leach (Timothy Spall, son of a postal worker himself) is morose, lazy and in a rut with both his life and argumentative slimmer of the year wife Hazel (Kay Stonham). Harold Fish (Tim Barker) cheerlessly prattles inane jokes out loud to himself and has an even more tenuous relationship with his chintzy, repressed spouse June (Su Elliott). Stan (Eric ‘Sgt Bob Cryer’ Richard) is more alert and (relatively) personable than the other two, but his wife has left him, leaving their daughter Tina in a home, plagued with regular and inconsequential visits from hopeless social worker Melody (Frances ‘Hard Feelings’ Barber). The loose friendship between the three men finally degenerates when, dodging a visit to Tina, Stan picks up and has sex with Janice, a lonely, lame misfit in a laundrette. He has also had an affair with June in the past, a confession she finally blurts out to Harold who, being the eternal sap he is, is not so much crestfallen as instantly lost to the world, what faltering command he had of his life suddenly whipped from under him. Hazel modestly flirts with Stan, but otherwise she and Gordon continue to argue, he not committing to her desire for a child, consigning their marriage to an endless despairing slanging match. Finally, Melody walks out on Stan’s case, leaving her colleague and boyfriend Dave (Lloyd Peters) to take over. After a squalid Sunday lunch for the three couples (Tina is Stan‘s plus one, and she witnesses Stan and Hazel indulge in a chaste kiss over the washing up) Dave harangues Stan with a stream of strident yet meaningless socio-speak as the play comes to its appropriately inconclusive end. Save for Harold’s pathetic comeuppance, there’s little of the sometimes overplayed catastrophic climax present in Abigail’s Party and the like. Instead, like much of blue-collar provincial life, and Carl Davis’ loping score played by the London Double Bass Quartet, there’s a sense, both depressing and, at times, strangely reassuring, of characters either unable or refusing to absorb the meaning of events and undergo the ‘great change’ a lot of conventional drama demands by default. The women wear expressions of sorrowful regret and agonising frustration, the men have only Saturnine lust or uncomprehending blankness on their faces. This, for better or worse, is how it is. The lead performances are excellent, especially Richard’s, and there’s a remarkable cameo from Sheila ‘Nuts in May’ Kelley as the ghostly, forlorn apparition of Janice. Leigh’s preferred working method - working up character profiles with each actor in turn, then bringing them together in various combinations for a series of improvised rehearsals with which to lay down the plot - is as apt to fall apart as it is to gel convincingly, and here, without either losing its way into cul-de-sac vignettes or winding itself up into a cathartic, violent explosion, it works magnificently.  

A Sudden Wrench - w Paula Milne. Housewife Rosemary martin raises eyebrows when she embarks on an 'unladylike' career. With Anna Raeburn as herself.  

Eve Set the Balls of Corruption Rolling - w Marcella Evaristi. Six former Catholic-educated old friends reunite for the first time in twelve years and swap tales of sexual misadventure.  

Whistling Wally - w Wally K Daly. Kenneth Farrington plays a popular but troubled misfit. With Paul McGann, Julie Peasgood.  

PLAY FOR TOMORROW - Following the success of "Flipside..." Play for Today gave rise to a mini-season of six plays set in various extrapolated futures, formulated by holding a futurology seminar for the authors, with scientists, economists, sociologists and the line. The result was a mixed bunch.