Home > Drama > Play for Today >

Season 9

AD:This title is currently not available on Prime Video

Play for Today Season 9

October. 17,1978
|
7.8
| Drama

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.

...
Watch on Prime Video

With 30 Day Free Trial!

Stream Now
AD:This title is currently not available on Prime Video

Play for Today

1970

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.

READ MORE

Watch Trailer

Genres
Watch on Prime Video

With 30 Day Free Trial!

Stream Now

Play for Today Season 9 Full Episode Guide

Episode 14 - Blue Remembered Hills
First Aired: January. 30,1979

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."

Episode 8 - Soldiers Talking Cleanly
First Aired: December. 05,1978

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.

Episode 6 - Sorry
First Aired: November. 21,1978

Consists of two plays ""Audience"" and ""Private View"" about a brewery worker and writer who incurs the wrath of the autocratic government

Episode 4 - Dinner at the Sporting Club
Episode 3 - A Touch of the Tiny Hacketts
Episode 1 - Nina
First Aired: October. 17,1978

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

Free Trial Channels

AD
Show More

Seasons

Similar titles