ScreenPlay
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.
Seasons
1. All Together Now
Air Date: 1986-07-09
The weekly brass band rehearsal is an enjoyable, light-hearted occasion. Then Mathew, the conductor, introduces James, a newcomer to the village, who is an enthusiastic bandsman from the north, where they do these things properly.
2. Daylight Robbery
Air Date: 1986-07-16
Neglected by her family, kept apart from her grandchildren, desperately short of money, Bea begins to gamble - at first for small stakes, but ultimately for the highest stake of all: revenge for the past.
3. Brick Is Beautiful
Air Date: 1986-07-23
'Bricks have a future, Mr Clark - you can count on that. They're out there waiting to be taken!' 'There is one small problem.' 'What's that?' 'Well - they're still attached to buildings, most of them, aren't they?' Steve thinks there is a fortune in reclaimed bricks. But how will his ambition affect his girlfriend, Maureen, and his mates, Brad, Dez and Snapper?
4. Knowing the Score
Air Date: 1986-07-30
Graeme has musical talent and is struggling to be allowed to express it. Lois is being pushed by her mother into solo parts in the girls' choir. Together they have to perform at a competitive concert while parents and supporters keep score.
5. Drums Along Balmoral Drive
Air Date: 1986-08-06
'I don't think at first I thought at all. I had a nice house, lovely kids. I didn't think about blacks at all. I should've done, but I didn't. They were just there.'
6. Asinamali
Air Date: 1986-08-13
Five blacks in South Africa end up in jail - for crimes which range from shooting a security policeman to sleeping with a white boss's wife. What they all share is the conviction that the 'Day of Reckoning' is at hand.
7. In Traction
Air Date: 1986-08-20
Matters are bad enough when Mr Gentle tries to commit suicide. They are even worse when the attempt fails. Worst of all is being confined to a hospital bed when a bunch of juvenile delinquents are sent to visit you.
8. The Mozart Inquest
Air Date: 1986-08-27
Mozart's death in 1791 is surrounded by mystery. What are the secrets of his burial in an unmarked grave? Was he poisoned or did he die of natural causes? Now, almost 200 years later, an inquest is convened to examine the evidence both original and new. A team of real barristers confronts key witnesses from the period, in this unscripted spontaneous event. You and the invited studio jury will decide the outcome.
9. The Marlowe Inquest
Air Date: 1986-09-03
In an unscripted inquest, three practicing barristers interrogate actors portraying relevant figures of the 16th century in order to determine what really happened to the playwright and poet, Christopher Marlowe.
10. Blood, Sweat and Tears
Air Date: 1986-09-10
'Is this the judo place?' 'Dojo, yeh.' 'Wants a chuffin' coat of paint, if you ask me.' 'What is it you want?' 'Self-defence thingy.' That's all judo is to Louise and hundreds like her. It doesn't take long to change her mind. And then there's the small matter of a black belt..
11. Shift Work
Air Date: 1986-09-24
Julie, a cab driver, collects a fare from the local airport one evening. Unfortunately he dies of a suspected heart attack on his way home in her taxi and Julie has to decide how best to handle the situation.......
12. Paying Guests - Part 1
Air Date: 1986-10-01
Spend some time in the company of the guests at 'Wentworth' - all taking the waters except for the Colonel and Miss Howard, who has some leisure for the beginnings of a late romance. Gossip, bicycle rides, rounds of golf, bridge in the evenings and preparations for the charity concert all make time pass most pleasantly - don't they?
13. Paying Guests - Part 2
Air Date: 1986-10-02
Miss Howard's exhibition of water-colours at the Green Salon falters but then takes off. The season at 'Wentworth' is now drawing to a close, peoples' plans for the winter unfold. Florence, for the first time in her life, refuses to go off with her selfish old father. Miss Howard has some momentous news, and the Colonel must make a very brisk about-turn.
1. The Trial of Klaus Barbie
Air Date: 1987-07-15
Decades after the end of World War II, escaped war criminal Klaus Barbie is brought to justice
2. Land
Air Date: 1987-07-22
The Amazonian jungle, Brazil, 1987. Ruthless landowners are hiring gunslingers to evict peasants from their land. The peasants look to their priest for help. should they resist the Violence passively - or defy the church's teaching and take up arms? When a stranger on the run arrives in town, the answer becomes clear.
3. Lily My Love
Air Date: 1987-07-29
Lily is 13, Colin is 39 and a vagrant. They run away together. 'One and a half to the English Lakes, single, because we're never coming back, we're going on.'
4. Carianai and the Courtesans
Air Date: 1987-08-05
A painter falls in love with a woman whom he suspects may be a thief and a prostitute.
5. Our Lady Blue
Air Date: 1987-08-12
In a Liverpool convent a touching and unusual friendship is forged between Rachel, a young volunteer, Paul, doing 100 hours of community service, and Sheila, a dying prostitute. It results in a strange and forbidden journey to Lourdes.
6. White Lady
Air Date: 1987-08-26
In a derelict farmhouse, deep in the English countryside, Gil struggles alone to bring up his little daughters 'to need very little. - strong against all harm'. But unknown to any of them, in the surrounding fields of wheat and barley, and in the nodding branches of the fruit trees, there lurks a deathly power.
7. The Shutter Falls
Air Date: 1987-09-16
A 19th Century photographer travels to the North of Scotland to document the fishing industry, where he falls in love with one of the Gaelic-speaking fish gutting girls
8. Christine
Air Date: 1987-09-23
Depiction of the everyday life of a teenage heroin addict.
9. The Interrogation of John
Air Date: 1987-09-30
A man is brought into a small London police station and charged with gross indecency. A terrible murder has also been committed in the area. Is there a connection? Might the assembled officers have an early result? Not if he refuses to say anything or even give his name.
10. Road
Air Date: 1987-10-07
Your tour guide for the night is one drunken man called Scullery. Prepare yourself for the experience of your lifetime as he shows you an average night along a derelict Lancashire road in the 1980s.
1. No Further Cause for Concern
Air Date: 1988-07-13
'I'm doing 15 years, three years at a time, and when I come out I'm going to be the same man as when I came in. The same man!' But even hard man Danny Monk can't foresee the consequences when he barricades himself in a cell during a prison riot with a prison officer as hostage.
2. A Woman Alone
Air Date: 1988-07-20
A housewife confides to her neighbour about the troubles she has been having with her possessive husband, her romantic lover and her lecherous invalid brother-in-law. In spite of the impressive battery of mod cons in her home, she feels that love and marriage are not all they are cracked up to be.
3. Burning Ambition
Air Date: 1988-07-27
When the luckless Martin and Renato have the bright idea of starting up a guided coach tour of the M25, London's orbital motorway, they think they're on to a winner - but they soon discover they're on course for disaster.
4. Eskimos Do it
Air Date: 1988-08-03
When the widowed Mrs Bing goes into hospital for a routine operation, she little realises she will soon make a dramatic bid for the most essential freedom of all.
5. Out Of Love
Air Date: 1988-08-10
The shy, hard-working farmer Thomas Price, whose life is dominated by his father Emrys, is strongly attracted to the independent Englishwoman Ruth and they become drawn into a passionate love affair.
6. Home Front
Air Date: 1988-08-24
'What about us? We have rights too. This is not just any residential home for kids in care. This is Home. You. tell them - they try and close us down, we're gonna fight....'
7. Between The Cracks
Air Date: 1988-08-31
The performers in this drama are not actors reciting other people's lines. They are who they say they are and they speak from their own real experience. The stories you are about to hear are true.
8. The Black and Blue Lamp
Air Date: 1988-09-07
In 1949, Tom Riley is arrested for the murder of PC George Dixon. As he awaits interrogation at the station, he is mysteriously transported into an episode of "The Filth", a 1988 police series where the hard men rule.
9. The Diary of Rita Patel
Air Date: 1988-09-14
It's a new start for teenager Rita Patel and her family - new home, new school, new diary, new life. But their happiness is short-lived when racist skinheads attack the family and their home.
10. Edvard
Air Date: 1988-09-20
Set in 1902, this is the story of the artist Edvard Munch and his stormy affair with Tulla Larsen , the inspiration behind some of his most famous paintings.
11. Starlings
Air Date: 1988-09-28
Gary Wilson loses his factory job, retrains as a butler and under the patronage of a wealthy young woman finds success in the City.
1. Testimony of a Child
Air Date: 1989-07-05
Being accused of child abuse is a nightmare every family dreads. The Taylors are an ordinary happy family, but Paul and Jill are worried about their 11-year-old son Mark, who is not eating. The family GP has diagnosed 'failure to thrive', and Mark is sent to the hospital for a check-up.
2. A Night on the Tyne
Air Date: 1989-07-12
When four shipbuilders are made redundant they decide that as a protest they will launch the ship they have been working on.
3. Loving Hazel
Air Date: 1989-07-19
Mike and his ex-wife have an 8-year-old daughter, Hazel. She calls her new mother's boyfriend 'daddy', which Mike goes along with until his access to Hazel is limited.
4. The Attractions
Air Date: 1989-07-26
When Danny, 'one of Maggie's wandering minstrels', visits a seaside horror museum, he is rather disappointed. 'It's all about victims. Now people are interested in who done it, not who it got done to ...' So begins a process of disintegration which culminates in a new type of exhibit, 'an attraction' for the modern age.
5. Chinese Whispers
Air Date: 1989-08-02
Kenny's work as a nurse in a psychiatric hospital isn't just a job, it's a vocation. His special group of patients are his friends - his only friends. When a strange young man is introduced to the group, he threatens the love, discipline and respect that have been the very basis of Kenny's authority, and all that surrounds the institution is scant protection from the madness of the world beyond.
6. The Act
Air Date: 1989-08-09
Eastern Europe, February 1944: Johann Frink and Otto Hansen, once famous Berlin cabaret artists, are summoned to take part in a special 'entertainment', devised by a mysterious Nazi captain. When they discover where they are to perform, they find themselves with an appalling dilemma.
7. Scout
Air Date: 1989-08-16
Man United's scout for many generations of young footballers, sending across the water the best Irish talent regardless of background. As six more hopefuls gather at his isolated cottage for a weekend trial, their dreams of following George Best's path from Belfast are shattered by the violent return of a past graduate.
8. The Spirit of Man
Air Date: 1989-08-23
In pursuit of faith, God and the Devil, spells are cast, buckets of water thrown and men with black beards dance and sing.
9. Beyond the Pale
Air Date: 1989-08-30
Milly and her friends have been going on holiday together ever since they've known each other. This summer they return to one of their favourite haunts, a beautiful Irish country hotel. It's a place full of fond memories for all of them, but on this occasion their sense of ease and comfort is destroyed when a terrible secret is revealed.
10. The Hen House
Air Date: 1989-09-06
Lily lives on a remote smallholding in County Donegal. She keeps herself to herself. But a game of hide-and-seek exposes a secret.
11. Seeing in the Dark
Air Date: 1989-09-13
Tony has begun to panic that life may be passing him by. As his friends forge ahead, he feels stuck in a dead end job and trapped by his relationship with Judith. One day, he starts to be plagued by a series of mysterious phone calls and letters. Tony becomes haunted by a growing premonition of catastrophe.
12. A Small Mourning
Air Date: 1989-09-20
When Marjorie's husband of 20 years dies of a brain tumour, she's hit financially as well as emotionally. The money she makes packing tights in a factory isn't enough to cover her rent, and her TV is repossessed. Soon after the funeral she meets Arnold, a wealthy pub landlord, who squires her to the local Conservative Club ball in an effort to cheer her up. Life with Arnold promises not only companionship but undreamt-of luxury, but Marjorie's friends and family do not necessarily approve.
1. Amongst Barbarians
Air Date: 1990-07-11
Two teenage boys, Ralph and Bryan, are in a jail in Malaysia, awaiting death. They have been found guilty of smuggling drugs. 48 hours before their execution, their parents arrive to visit them.
2. Antonia and Jane
Air Date: 1990-07-18
Plain Jane Hartman hates her life. She's goofy, boring and only has sex if she reads Iris Murdoch novels out loud to her loopy boyfriend. Her oldest friend Antonia McGill knows about everything. She orders the right food; she can complain and get results. She's beautiful and has a brilliant career. Is it any wonder that they hate each other's guts?
3. Night Voice
Air Date: 1990-07-25
Clarence Flamer hosts a late-night talk show on regional radio station North Star Sound. A phone call he takes one night leads to his discovering a mortgage scam being run by a group of estate agents. His attempts to delve deeper have tragic consequences.
4. The Englishman's Wife
Air Date: 1990-08-01
A woman and her daughter are stranded in a rambling old house deep in the countryside of County Tyrone. Their economic circumstances are hopeless, but it is friends and former business associates who pose the greatest threat to their happiness.
5. The Land of Dreams
Air Date: 1990-08-08
Joseph Mnwana arrives at Heathrow on a flight from Johannesburg and asks for political asylum. But what is he fleeing from? The authorities are suspicious, and Joseph has an uncertain future in store.
6. Keeping Tom Nice
Air Date: 1990-08-15
Doug and Winnie have tried hard to keep their disabled son Tom 'nice', but when Stephen, a young social worker, takes a professional interest it has tragic consequences.
7. A Safe House
Air Date: 1990-08-22
In the aftermath of the Guildford and Woolwich pub bombings, a large number of people of Irish descent were rounded up for questioning by the police in London. Most were subsequently released. But for the Maguire family, 3 December 1974 was the start of a nightmare that is only now ending.
8. Afters
Air Date: 1990-08-29
A man discovers his love for his wife as he prepares to face life without her.
9. Wedded
Air Date: 1990-08-29
A husband drives throughout the night on a voyage of self-discovery, while his wife waits at home, raking over the ashes of their marriage as their child sleeps in the next room.
10. Available Light
Air Date: 1990-09-05
A mercenary art dealer and his beguiling young assistant pay a visit to a once-famous artist. In his isolated house, they discover disturbing paintings depicting the course of a passionate love affair. But the paintings also seem to reveal startling evidence of a murder. The visitors begin to fear for their lives.
11. Needle
Air Date: 1990-09-12
Danny and Paula are a young married couple with a baby. They are moving up in the world, leaving their high-rise for a house of their own. The future of their marriage is threatened by only one thing: Danny is a heroin addict.
12. Shoot the Revolution
Air Date: 1990-12-16
During the Romanian Revolution in December 1989, a young girl is shot in the head by Tudor Barbu, a member of the Securitate. His brother Octavian was the girl's teacher who "filled her head with the ideas of truth." The question is not how did she die, but why?
13. August Saturday
Air Date: 1990-12-29
Grania did something 15 years ago that brought her great happiness but also great pain. The events of that day have been a heavy secret to bear that, if discovered, would devastate those closest to her.
1. Redemption
Air Date: 1991-07-03
After 16 years away Stan Peachey returns to his village. His wife still loves him but his sister wants revenge. What was his crime?
2. Broke
Air Date: 1991-07-10
A man and his wife, who are proprietors of a struggling window-covering business, agree to install curtains in an exclusive club patronized by a wealthy friend of theirs. After completing the job, the shop owner has great difficulty collecting payment for the job. His "friend" becomes scarce and Spall finds he has no legal foot to stand on since there is no written record of the informal transaction. With the couple's business floundering due to mounting debts, and their former friend's crass attitude towards their predicament, anger and frustration reach the boiling point.
3. Events at Drimaghleen
Air Date: 1991-07-17
The painful memories of the tragedy that awaited the people of Drimaghleen on 2/11/88 have just begun to fade; Hetty Fortune and her TV documentary team travel there to piece those memories together into a story of horror.
4. The Fallout Guy
Air Date: 1991-07-24
Raymond Gold, a 40-year-old Walter Mitty character from Philadelphia, is recruited to pass secrets of the atom bomb to the Russians in the 1940s. His girlfriend Danica discovers he is a fantasist while the FBI suspect him of spying. His world falls apart, with tragi-comic results.
5. Murder in Oakland
Air Date: 1991-07-31
Oakland, California, is the murder capital of the USA - there were 161 homicides in 1990 in a city the size of Cardiff. Blue and Eric are new additions to the Police Department's five overworked homicide teams. When they investigate a seemingly motiveless prostitute killing, they find themselves drawn into the centre of a fight for survival among Oakland's dangerous drug gangs.
6. The Hour of the Lynx
Air Date: 1991-08-14
A young murderer in a psychiatric institution is given a cat to care for as part of a controlled experiment. He heaps devotion on it and the experiment seems a great success - until there is a baffling outbreak of violence.
7. Clubland
Air Date: 1991-08-28
Sylvie, a Belgian girl living in London, arrives at her local police station. She starts to tell how she was picked up in a nightclub by the handsome Ajay, and the listening DC Judd realises he is onto a most unusual case.
8. Arise and Go Now
Air Date: 1991-09-04
Exploding poets, randy bishops and bungling IRA hoodlums are causing havoc in a small town in Northern Ireland. Kevin, an IRA recruit, and Father Dade, the local priest, try to drive some sanity into their world.
9. Message to Major
Air Date: 1991-09-11
This BBC film written and performed by South African satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys, is a 'video postcard' to the British Prime Minister from one Mrs Evita Bezuidenhout, South African ambassador to the fictitious black homeland of Bapetikosweti. Relishing his opportunities to satirise both the 'new' and the old South Africa, Dirk Uys delivers a lesson in history.
10. Journey to Knock
Air Date: 1991-09-18
Journey to Knock humorously follows three disabled men on their pilgrimage from the North of England to Knock shrine in Co. Mayo.
1. The Countess Alice
Air Date: 1992-07-01
A reporter is assigned a then-and-now piece on a 50-year old photospread of three society beauties. One of them, Lady Alice Munroe, now the widowed Grafin von Holzendorf, has agreed to be interviewed. A few questions set the Grafin's daughter, Connie, thinking about her past, and she sets off for her fatherland, now that the Berlin wall is down, to find out where she comes from. But what she finds out may destroy her relationship with her mother.
2. Force of Duty
Air Date: 1992-07-08
RUC detective Simpson Gabby is consumed by guilt after he fails to act decisively in a moment of terror. As the pressure on him builds, Gabby gradually loses control of his life.
3. Bad Girl
Air Date: 1992-07-15
A young single mother has to convince the authorities that she is a fit parent.
4. Bitter Harvest
Air Date: 1992-07-22
A young black British woman goes to the Dominican Republic as an aid worker. When she goes missing, her parents make an emotional journey to piece together her story.
5. Man to Man
Air Date: 1992-07-29
A German woman takes on her husband's identity after his death, and spends the next 40 years impersonating him.
6. Death and the Compass
Air Date: 1992-08-05
In the comic book world of a timeless Latin American country, famed policeman Inspector Lonnrot becomes embroiled in a series of murders. Rejecting all obvious solutions to the crime he discovers a more complex set of clues only to find himself enmeshed in a diabolical plot.
7. Dread Poets Society
Air Date: 1992-08-12
Benjamin Zephaniah, renowned Rastafarian poet/rapper is traveling by train from Birmingham to Cambridge to receive his Creative Arts Fellowship sharing a carriage with a racist and philistine car spares salesman; by chance the poets Keats, Byron, Shelley and writer Mary Shelley are transported from a séance they are conducting in The Villa Como by a freak electrical storm. A battle of wits, drug taking and poetry performance ensues.
8. Buying a Landslide
Air Date: 1992-09-02
Republican senator Walter Partin trails Democrat Philip Kautsky in the polls and will shortly face him in a televised debate. Drafted to play Kautsky in rehearsals is Michael Tyne, ex-Democrat turned Republican. But Tyne is alarmed by an unexpected twist in the Partin campaign and reacts in devastating fashion.
9. Continental Drift
Air Date: 1992-09-09
An eccentric Scottish spinster greets the collapse of communism by snapping up a statue of Lenin on the cheap and towing it home across a bemused or hostile Europe. / Two members of the British fascist movement bring fraternal greetings to their neo-Nazi counterparts in Berlin. / Marijke and Pieter were in love. Now it has gone sour, but they still have to finish their George Formby documentary on location in Lancashire.
10. A Little Bit of Lippy
Air Date: 1992-09-16
Cross-dressing husband is unmasked but eventually wins through.
11. Small Metal Jacket
Air Date: 1992-09-23
1969: America is losing the war in South-East Asia. A female officer plans a fresh initiative.
12. You, Me and Marley
Air Date: 1992-09-30
A group of bored Roman Catholic teens from Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom, steal cars and joyride around the city, causing havoc among the nearby Protestants and local Irish Republican Army members, all of who are outraged by the youths' nihilism. The gang, led by ace thief Sean, is connected with the IRA but couldn't care less about the group's politics. But things turn serious when an IRA member captures one of the boys, Marley, in an effort to end the mayhem.
1. Love Lies Bleeding/L'Inconnue de Belfast
Air Date: 1993-09-22
Conn is an IRA murderer serving a life sentence in an Irish prison. He is given a 24 hour home leave during which he goes from point to point in Belfast looking to revenge his lover's murder.
2. The Merrihill Millionaires
Air Date: 1993-09-29
They were a top team - five miners who together had mined a million tons of coal but now they must face up to redundancy.
3. The Vision Thing
Air Date: 1993-10-06
In the run-up to a General Election, the British Prime Minister thinks he is receiving messages from God.
4. Safe
Air Date: 1993-10-13
Kaz and her friends spend their days trying to get by and their nights in a homeless shelter. But how did they end up there and what does the future hold for them?
5. Not Even God Is Wise Enough
Air Date: 1993-10-20
Sometimes Busi is a champion boxer, sometimes a rock star. But when he escapes from court, where he is facing charges of assault, he embarks on an odyssey that brings him before his estranged father.
6. Boswell & Johnson's Tour of the Western Isles
Air Date: 1993-10-27
In the autumn of 1773, the English writer Samuel Johnson visits the Hebrides, or Western Isles, off the North-West coast of Scotland. With him are his friend, the Scotsman James Boswell, and his black servant Francis Barber. Staying with a series of hosts, including elderly Jacobite heroine Flora McDonald, Johnson and Boswell encounter traditional Scottish hospitality at first-hand, all the time arguing about politics (and in Boswell's case losing his head over every pretty woman he meets). Meanwhile, Francis and another black servant they encounter provide evidence of the new consciousness emerging in Britain's soon-to-be-independent American colonies.
Select an episode to start watching
Rating
6.0/10
Release Date
1986-07-09
Episodes
87 (8 seasons)
Status
Ended