
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.



An anthology of short plays shown on BBC Television between 1965 and 1973, used in part at least as a training ground for new writers, on account of its short length, and which therefore attracted many writers who later became well known.

Screenplay was a drama anthology television series, broadcast on BBC between 1986 and 1993. Numerous episodes were produced including one named "Boswell and Johnson's Tour of the Western Islands" starring Robbie Coltrane as English writer Samuel Johnson who in the autumn of 1773, visits the Hebrides off the north-west coast of Scotland. That episode was directed by John Byrne and co-starred John Sessions and Celia Imrie.

A wealthy entrepreneur secretly creates a theme park featuring living dinosaurs drawn from prehistoric DNA. Before opening day, he invites a team of experts and his two eager grandchildren to experience the park and help calm anxious investors. However, the park is anything but amusing as the security systems go off-line and the dinosaurs escape.


The Storyteller, aided by his cynical dog, narrates classic folk tales, fables, and legends.


An hour-long anthology series hosted by Jim Henson and generally included two segments. The first, MuppeTelevision, features comedy skits starring the Muppets, as well as frequent guest appearances by popular entertainers. The second often rebroadcasts original productions, primarily The StoryTeller.

Environmental activist Emma Craven is murdered in front of her father, local police inspector Ronald Craven. Investigating the death leads him through a haunting revelation of the murkiness of British nuclear policy of the 1980s.

When their plane crashes, 25 schoolboys find themselves trapped on a tropical island, miles from civilization.

An advertising executive investigating the death of an old girlfriend uncovers a conspiracy to cover up the spread of BSE in humans.

Bird of Prey is a British techno-thriller television serial written by Ron Hutchinson and produced by Michael Wearing and Bernard Krichefski for the BBC in 1982. From its video game-inspired opening titles to its pervasive electronic music track, Bird of Prey went to great lengths to demonstrate its credentials as 'a thriller for the electronic age'. These elements, together with a clever and complex plot that combines a breathless fascination with the still-young field of computing with pan-European fraud, international terrorism, rogue intelligence operatives and organised crime, link it firmly to the early 1980s, expressing that era's growing anxieties about the burgeoning 'Eurocracy'.

Young Nicholas Nickleby sets out to make his fortune in order to prevent his mother and sister from depending upon his uncle, Ralph Nicklby. But he finds his first job as master at a Yorkshire school to be cruel, and runs away with one of the students. Meanwhile, Kate is subjected to the unwanted attentions of Sir Mulberry Hawk, aided by her uncle. Nicholas and his new friend, Smike, begin their adventures and eventually set out to rescue Kate, with the usual Dickensian twists, turns and asides.