BBC

With Anton Rodgers, Lucy Gutteridge, Julian Holloway, Rosalind Ayres.

When Sophie, the manicurist, learns that her best friend Muriel is to be married to the notorious and middle-aged Lord Quex, she determines to prevent it by exposing him for the despicable roué he is. But her plans go badly wrong. Pinero’s bitter-sweet comedy, first performed in 1898, scandalised the playgoers of the day with its unblushing portrayal of marital and sexual mores.

Adapted from the play by the British writer Arthur Wing Pinero.Read More »

Marlene celebrates her new position as MD of Top Girls Appointment Agency by giving a dinner party for five oddly assorted women from centuries past.Read More »

Four-part adaptation of Iain Banks’s blackly humorous novel. Student Prentice McHoan carries out his recently deceased grandmother’s request to find out what happened to his Uncle Rory, who disappeared seven years before. The chance discovery of a novel that Rory had begun working on at the time of his disappearance takes Prentice and his childhood friend Ashley on a complex journey through his family history.Read More »

Resolving the riddle of the Sphinx makes Oedipus the king of Thebes, but he also resolves another mystery – and it destroys him.Read More »

On his last night in London, Walter Hartright’s life is changed forever after a chance encounter with a mysterious woman, dressed in white and in deep distress. Travelling north, Hartright takes up a post as a drawing master to Laura Fairlie, a beautiful woman bearing an astonishing resemblance to the woman in white. Soon Hartfield, Laura and her half-sister Marian, find themselves drawn into to the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his charming friend Count Fosco, a man with a taste for white mice and vanilla bonbons. Only by unravelling the mystery woman’s dark secret can they escape from the web of deceit closing around them. Chilling, thrilling and filled with suspense and twists, this compelling BBC adaptation perfectly recreates the intrigue and drama of Wilkie Collins’ classic novel.Read More »

Michael Brooke wrote:
Alan Bennett’s debut play for television shows a day in the life of the members of a Halifax cycling club in 1911, following them from the town to the ruins of Fountains Abbey and eavesdropping on their conversations, which range from the inconsequential, to the reflective, to the ruefully ironic.

The most telling example of the latter comes when Boothroyd explains why there will never be another war, as the play is set three years before World War I cut swathes through a generation – and, as the 1919 coda implies, many of the club’s members as well.Read More »

Comedian Tony Hancock stars, in this BBC situation comedy TV series, as Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock, a down-at-heel comedian living in East Cheam.Read More »

As with most of Miller’s productions, the visual inspiration came from sixteenth-century Mediterranean painters, in this case Tintoretto, El Greco and Velasquez. At 205 minutes, this is one of the longest BBC Shakespeare productions, and the text is duly presented almost complete, with only minor trims to material rendered redundant by small-screen restaging.Read More »

Synopsis:
A university professor, confident that everything which occurs in life has a rational explanation, finds his beliefs severely challenged when, during a vacation to a remote coastal village in Norfolk, he blows through an ancient whistle discovered on a beach, awakening horrors beyond human understanding.Read More »