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Play For Today
''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. History 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 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
BBC One
BBC One is a British free-to-air public broadcast television channel owned and operated by the BBC. It is the corporation's oldest and flagship channel, and is known for broadcasting mainstream programming, which includes BBC News television bulletins, primetime drama and entertainment, and live BBC Sport events. The channel was launched on 2 November 1936 under the name BBC Television Service, which was the world's first regular television service with a high level of image resolution. It was renamed BBC TV in 1960 and used this name until the launch of the second BBC channel, BBC2, in 1964. The main channel then became known as BBC1. The channel adopted the current spelling of BBC One in 1997. The channel's annual budget for 2012–2013 was £1.14 billion. It is funded by the television licence fee together with the BBC's other domestic television stations and shows uninterrupted programming without commercial advertising. The television channel had the highest reach ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kenith Trodd
Kenith Trodd (born 1936) is a British television producer best known for his professional association with television playwright Dennis Potter. Early life The son of a crane driver, Trodd was born in Southampton, Hampshire, and raised in the Christian fundamentalist Plymouth Brethren. A graduate of Oxford University, he worked as a university teacher in West Africa. Career Trodd began his career in television as an assistant to Roger Smith, script editor of ''The Wednesday Play'' in 1964. In that year Trodd changed his given name from Kenneth to Kenith, based on association with the word 'zenith'. A problem with the script of '' Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton'' first brought Trodd into contact with Dennis Potter, the play's author. A desire to adapt a short story for an episode of BBC2's ''Thirty-Minute Theatre'', led to a phone call from its writer, Simon Gray, beginning Trodd's association with him and Gray's work in drama. In 1968, with colleagues Tony Garnett, Ken Loach, P ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Graham Reid (writer)
Joseph Graham Reid (born 1945) is a British playwright from Belfast, Northern Ireland. Background Born into a working-class family in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Reid left school at age 15, served in the British army, married young, but returned to education and graduated from Queen's University of Belfast, Queen's University in 1976. He became a teacher at Gransha Boys' High School in Bangor, County Down but left in 1980 to concentrate on his writing career. His first play, ''The Death of Humpty Dumpty'' is a story about an innocent man who gets caught in the cross fire of the troubles in Belfast. Characters in his work ''The Hidden Curriculum'' were based on pupils and teachers from the school he taught at. Premiered at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin in 1982, after a subsequent production the following year at the Lyric Players Theatre in Belfast, Ulster Television commissioned a screenplay which was broadcast in 1984. His trilogy, colloquially known as the Billy plays, for the B ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alan Plater
Alan Frederick Plater (15 April 1935 – 25 June 2010) was an English playwright and screenwriter, who worked extensively in British television from the 1960s to the 2000s. He is best known for the sitcom ''Oh No It's Selwyn Froggitt'' and the comedy drama serials ''The Beiderbecke Trilogy''. Career Plater was born in Jarrow, County Durham, although his family moved to Kingston upon Hull, Hull in 1938. He attended Kingston High School, Hull, Kingston High School. Jarrow was much publicised as a severely economically depressed area before the Second World War (Plater joked that his family left Jarrow just after the Great Depression to catch Hull just before Hull Blitz, the Blitz). He trained as an architect at Newcastle University, King's College, Newcastle (later the Newcastle University School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape), but only practised in the profession briefly, at a junior level. He later stated that it was shortly after he was forced to fend off a herd ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arthur Hopcraft
Arthur Hopcraft (30 November 193222 November 2004) was a British screenwriter, well known for his TV plays such as '' The Nearly Man'', and for his small-screen adaptations such as '' Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy''; '' Hard Times'', ''Bleak House'', and ''Rebecca''. Before taking up writing for TV, he was a sports journalist for ''The Guardian'' and ''The Observer'', writing ''The Football Man: People and Passions in Soccer''. He also had four other books published, including an autobiographical account of his childhood, and wrote the screenplay for the film ''Hostage''. Hopcraft won the BAFTA Writers Award in 1986. Career Hopcraft was born in Shoeburyness, Essex. He soon moved to Cannock, Staffordshire, and as a teen, he started working at local newspapers. By the age of 17, he was reporting on the Stafford Rangers' semi-professional football games using the pseudonym "Linesman." After his service in the military, he worked at the ''Daily Mirror'' in Manchester and then ''The G ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alan Bleasdale
Alan George Bleasdale (born 23 March 1946) is an English screenwriter, best known for social realist drama serials based on the lives of ordinary people. A former teacher, he has written for radio, stage and screen, and has also written novels. Bleasdale's plays typically represented a more realistic, contemporary depiction of life in Liverpool than was usually seen in the media. Early life Born in Liverpool, Bleasdale is an only child; his father worked in a food factory and his mother in a grocery shop. From 1951 to 1957, he went to the St. Aloysius Roman Catholic Infant and Junior Schools in Huyton-with-Roby outside Liverpool. From 1957 to 1964, he attended the Wade Deacon Grammar School in Widnes. In 1967, he obtained a teaching certificate from the Padgate College of Education in Warrington (which became Warrington Collegiate Institute, now part of the University of Chester). For four years he worked as a teacher at St Columba's Secondary Modern School in Huyton from 1 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
David Hare (dramatist)
Sir David Rippon Hare (born 5 June 1947) is an English playwright, screenwriter and theatre director. Best known for his stage work, Hare has also enjoyed great success with films, receiving two Academy Award nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay for writing ''The Hours'' in 2002, based on the novel by Michael Cunningham, and ''The Reader'' in 2008, based on the novel by Bernhard Schlink. In the West End, he had his greatest success with the plays'' Plenty'' (1978), which he adapted into a 1985 film starring Meryl Streep, ''Racing Demon'' (1990), ''Skylight'' (1997), and ''Amy's View'' (1998). The four plays ran on Broadway in 1982–83, 1996, 1998 and 1999 respectively, earning Hare three Tony Award nominations for Best Play for the first three and two Laurence Olivier Awards for Best New Play. His other notable projects on stage include ''A Map of the World'', ''Pravda'' (starring Anthony Hopkins at the Royal National Theatre in London), '' Murmuring Judges'', ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stephen Poliakoff
Stephen Poliakoff (born 1 December 1952) is a British playwright, Film director, director and screenwriter. In 2006 Gerard Gilbert of ''The Independent'' described him as the UK's "pre-eminent TV dramatist" and that he had "inherited Dennis Potter's crown". Early life Poliakoff was born in Holland Park, West London, to Ina (née Montagu) and Alexander Poliakoff. His father was a Russian-Jewish immigrant and his mother was a British Jews, British Jew. His maternal grandfather had bought 16th-century mansion Great Fosters, and his maternal great-grandfather was Samuel Montagu, 1st Baron Swaythling. Poliakoff's paternal grandfather, Joseph Poliakoff, Joseph, was a Russian Jew who experienced first-hand the effects of the communist revolution in Russia from the family's Moscow flat across from the Kremlin. Near starvation after the revolution, he was given a government job as a district telephone inspector from an admiring commissar and he helped build Moscow's first automatic tel ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dennis Potter
Dennis Christopher George Potter (17 May 1935 – 7 June 1994) 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, often set or partly set in the Forest of Dean of his childhood, 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. Born in Gloucestershire and graduating from Oxford University, Potter initially worked in journalism. After standing for parliament as a Labour candidate at the 1964 general election, his health was affected by the onset of psoriatic arthropathy which necessitated Potter to change career and led to his becoming ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Osborne
John James Osborne (12 December 1929 – 24 December 1994) was an English playwright, screenwriter, actor, and entrepreneur, who is regarded as one of the most influential figures in post-war theatre. Born in London, he briefly worked as a journalist. before starting out in theatre as a stage manager and actor.. He lived in poverty for several years before his third produced play, '' Look Back in Anger'' (1956), brought him national fame. Based on Osborne's volatile relationship with his first wife, Pamela Lane, it is considered the first work of kitchen sink realism, initiating a movement which made use of social realism and domestic settings to address disillusion with British society in the waning years of the Empire.Heilpern, pp. 93–102 The phrase “ angry young man”, coined by George Fearon to describe Osborne when promoting the play, came to embody the predominantly working class and left-wing writers within this movement. Osborne was considered its leading figure ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ian McEwan
Ian Russell McEwan (born 21 June 1948) is a British novelist and screenwriter. In 2008, ''The Times'' featured him on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945" and ''The Daily Telegraph'' ranked him number 19 in its list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture". McEwan began his career writing sparse, Gothic short stories. His first two novels, '' The Cement Garden'' (1978) and '' The Comfort of Strangers'' (1981), earned him the nickname "Ian Macabre". These were followed by three novels of some success in the 1980s and early 1990s. His novel '' Enduring Love'' was adapted into a film of the same name. He won the Booker Prize with ''Amsterdam'' (1998). His next novel, '' Atonement'', garnered acclaim and was adapted into an Oscar-winning film featuring Keira Knightley and James McAvoy. His later novels have included '' The Children Act'', '' Nutshell'', and '' Machines Like Me''. He was awarded the 1999 Shakespeare Prize, and the 2011 Jerusalem ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Flipside Of Dominick Hide
"The Flipside of Dominick Hide" is a British television play first transmitted on BBC1 on 9 December 1980 as part of the ''Play for Today'' series. Peter Firth stars in the title role as a time traveller from Earth's future who illegally visits the London of 1980 to search for an 'ancestor' and finds a world very different from the one he left behind. The story concludes with a plot twist involving a causal loop, a popular concept in time-travel fiction. Plot summary In 2130, Earth has attained a clean, safe and anaesthetised future. Dominick is a time traveller whose job is to observe transport systems on the 'flipside' – the era before the Time Barrier was broken. Dominick's 'Circuit' (the period in time and space he must observe) is London 1980, where he believes he may have an ancestor – his great-great-grandfather, also named Dominick Hide. Breaking the rules, Dominick lands on the flipside to search for his great-great-grandfather. London of 1980 is a different place ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
