6/25

This show is a collection of tales that make for "ripping good" television. Sir Michael Palin played a different lead character in each yarn.

Trevor Chaplin teaches woodwork and likes to listen to jazz. Jill Swinburne teaches English and wants to help save the planet. Trevor tries to buy some jazz records but this leads to meeting a "dazzlingly beautiful platinum blond", a suspicious detective sergeant and a strange pair of men running a junior football team. Big Al and Little Norm agree to help Trevor and Jill with their school supplies problems. Jill decides to stand as a local councillor. A tale of "Black Economies", council corruption and many strange characters all set to a background of Bix Beiderbecke.

TV version of the popular BBC radio show of the same name, with Tony Hancock as the modern man of the world (in his own eyes). Sid James is there to bring him back to earth.

This show was a British television anthology drama series. It was produced by the BBC, and it was transmitted on BBC1 between 1970 and 1984. During this period, more than three hundred different episodes, featuring original television plays, and adaptations of stage plays and novels, were broadcast. Each episode was between fifty minutes and one hour and forty minutes in duration. Some of these plays, for example, Rumpole of the Bailey, subsequently became a television series.

Michael Murray is an ambitious and charismatic politician, Jim Nelson is a much loved headmaster of a local school for disturbed children. When the paths of these two men cross, things are destined never to be the same again for either of them.

This mystery series from the U.K. outlines the adventures of a psychologist employed by the police to aid them in profiling and questioning suspects. "Fitz" (Robbie Coltrane), an avowed drunkard and gambler, has an uncanny knack for boring directly into the hearts and minds of his subjects, many of whom may in fact be saner than he is...

"The Prisoner" is a unique piece of television. It addresses issues such as personal identity and freedom, democracy, education, scientific progress, art and technology, while still remaining an entertaining drama series. Over seventeen episodes we witness a war of attrition between the faceless forces behind 'The Village' (a Kafkaesque community somewhere between Butlins and Alcatraz) and its most strong willed inmate, No. 6. who struggles ceaselessly to assert his individuality while plotting to escape from his captors.

Called out of retirement to settle the affairs of a friend, George Smiley (Sir Alec Guinness) finds his old organization, the Circus, so overwhelmed by political considerations that it doesn't want to know what happened. He begins to follow up the clues of his friends past days, discovering that the clues lead to a high person in the Russian Secret Service, and a secret important enough to kill for. Smiley continues to put together the pieces a step ahead or a step behind the Russian killers.

A strangely, short-lived Scottish sitcom chronicling the eccentric passengers and crew of a fictional small airline operating out of Prestwick Airport. Notable for some very surreal comedy and the all singing, all dancing titles.

Sergeant Ernie Bilko is the ultimate con man. He runs the motor pool at a small Kansas U.S. Army Camp. Colonel Hall, nominally in charge of the base, tries to keep Bilko's plans in check. Bilko runs every money making scheme that he thinks he can pull off. Midnight cruises on landing craft, tank rides, poker games, and an interesting deal with local service stations for spare parts for Jeep tires.

Re-working material from his first novel, "Hide and Seek" (1973), and folding this into a prismatic blend of autobiographical details, popular music and 1940s film noir, Writer Dennis Potter delivered a drama now regarded as a twentieth century masterwork. Detective novelist Philip Marlow (Sir Michael Gambon) suffers from the crippling disease of psoriatic arthritis. Confined to a hospital bed, Marlow mentally re-writes his early Chandleresque thriller, "The Singing Detective", with him in the title role, drifting into a surreal 1945 fantasy of spies and criminals, along with vivid memories of a childhood in the Forest of Dean. As past events and 1940s songs surface in his subconscious, Marlow's voyage of self-discovery provides a key to conquering his illness, while his noir-styled hallucinations evoke the Philip Marlowe of Chandler's Murder, My Sweet (1944), starring Dick Powell, who later became a "singing detective" on radio's "Richard Diamond, Private Detective" (1949), crooning to girlfriend Helen Asher at the end of each episode.

A TV Series about a bunch of Law students, their everyday lives and their effort to make it through Law School. Hart, Ford, Bell and the rest of them have to face Kingsfield, the most feared of professors but they are determined to study hard and eventually get their diploma...

With spin doctors ery much in the spotlight of late, this TV adaption of the BBC radio series could hardly have picked a better time to rear its head. The show centres around the workings of Prentiss McCabe, a PR agency whose offices play host to a succession of minor celebrities, politicians and high-up businessmen who all need photo-shoots arranging and soundbites composing. Ethics are not a priority; the firm's staff will lie, cheat and possibly steal as long as it makes their clients look good.

Disillusioned after a long career at Sunshine Desserts, Perrin goes through a mid-life crisis and fakes his own death. Returning in disguise after various attempts at finding a 'new life', he gets his old job back and finds nothing has changed. He is eventually found out, and in the second series has success with a chain of shops selling useless junk. That becomes so successful that he feels he has created a monster and decides to destroy it. In the third and final series he has a dream of forming a commune which his long suffering colleagues help bring to reality. Unfortunately that also fails and he finds himself back in a job not unlike the one he originally had at Sunshine Desserts.

Arthur Daley, a small-time conman, hires former boxer Terry McCann to be his "minder" and protect him from other small-time crooks. While Terry is putting his life at risk as he tries his hardest to satisfy his employer's demands, Arthur is busy exploiting Terry for all he is worth. When other people hire Terry's services through Arthur, Arthur usually keeps most of Terry's share of the money for himself by misleading the hard-working Terry about the amount of money he (as Terry's agent) is receiving on Terry's behalf.

Lovejoy is a loveable rogue and an antiques dealer with an amazing talent for spotting hidden treasures. When not looking for the odd collectible, Lovejoy spends most of his time using his con-artist skills to help out the less fortunate. His partners in crime are wealthy Lady Jane, his dim assistant Eric, and the genially intoxicated Tinker.

Horace Rumpole is an "Old Bailey Hack," one of the underpaid barristers who ply the courtrooms of the Old Bailey, London's criminal court. Rumpole refused to handle most suits and will never prosecute. He always defends. Each of his trials has both a victory and a defeat in them, his clients who are acquitted often angrier than those who are found guilty. There is always at least one and often two subplots.

Before there was The Office, there was People Like Us. A mockumentary in the style of the "docusoap" British reality television shows popular at the time about regular people and their regular lives, People Like Us follows actors playing average citizens going about their days working (or failing to do so), with an inept interviewer in tow, frequently getting sidetracked or becoming haplessly involved with his subjects. It is perfectly droll and quintessentially British, with a slew of great deadpan actors, some of whom have gone on to gain larger fame.