TV

A pitcher on a major-league baseball team finds out that his catcher is desperately trying to hide something, he is dying of a terminal disease and he doesn’t want the owner to find out and fire him.Read More »

Tom and Elizabeth Carter inhabit the cultural desert of 1970s English suburbia. Their marriage seems empty of passion but one of Tom’s passions persists: his boyhood passion for model railways, which they attempt to discuss over breakfast. Elizabeth consistently mocks Tom’s enthusiasm for his hobby. “You’re so hot and passionate at the breakfast table, Tom.” Tom sets off to work and, shortly after his departure, Elizabeth takes a phone call from a neighbour who warns her that she’s spotted a strange man watching Elizabeth’s house. Elizabeth checks and, as she goes to ring her neighbour back, or maybe the police, so the doorbell rings and there is Glen, a young man in his twenties. “I’ve come a long, long way to see you…and to track you down, Elizabeth Alice Dale,” says Glen. “For God’s sake, who are you?” demands Elizabeth. “Your baby boy, momma dear,” is Glen’s reply…Read More »

Hands of a Stranger was adapted by playwright Arthur Kopit from the best-selling novel by Robert Daley. Armand Assante plays a New York City narcotics officer who aids DA Blair Brown in her investigation of a rape case in which drugs were involved. In the subsequent days, Assante becomes something of an expert in rape evidence. Thus, when his wife Beverly D’Angelo is sexually assaulted while en route to a rendezvous with her lover, Assante suspects something even though D’Angelo remains mum about the incident. Conducting his own investigation, Assante determines the rapist’s identity while wiretapping a phoned-in attempt to blackmail his wife. Will Assante forget everything he’s learned about police procedure and attempt to take the law into his own hands? Co-starring in Hands of a Stranger is Arliss Howard as the scummy rapist. Preceded by a warning that the film contained scenes of a violent and graphic nature, Hands of a Stranger was originally broadcast in two parts, on May 10 and 11, 1987.Read More »

PLOT:Part of a tv series in which foreign filmmakers portray a region or town in France.
Otar Iosselani looks at the Basque region and its inhabitants. Concentrating on the Fête Dieu, its traditional Pastorale during Summer 1982 and its festive preparation.Read More »

The Death of Yugoslavia is a BBC documentary series first broadcast in 1995, and is also the name of a book written by Allan Little and Laura Silber that accompanies the series. It covers the collapse of the former Yugoslavia. It is notable in its combination of never-before-seen archive footage interspersed with interviews of most of the main players in the conflict, including Slobodan Milošević, Radovan Karadžić, Franjo Tuđman and Alija Izetbegović.Read More »

Quote:
George and Betty, a middle-class English couple, have just moved into a big Edwardian house in London and are throwing a party to celebrate. Unfortunately, after ten days none of their furniture has arrived, having been sent to Carlisle by mistake, three of the four toilets don’t work and cracks are starting to appear in the ceiling. However, nothing can dent their determination to have a good time.Read More »

The made-for-TV BBC adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, directed by Colin Gregg.

From IMDb:
A faithful dramatization of Virginia Woolf’s novel. A lecturer, his family, the spinster Aunt Lily, an old friend, and a student, Charles Tansley, spend a summer in an isolated house in Cornwall just before World War I. The stern Mr. Ramsay scolds everybody, while Mrs. Ramsay is the linchpin in keeping the family together. Aunt Lily paints, and the family talk about sailing to the lighthouse, but the trip is always postponed.Read More »

A separate screenplay by Nigel Kneale for theaters, parallel to the 1979 Quatermass 4-part miniseries. The story, set in the near future, involves influences from outer space that are possessing people. Professor Quatermass must save his granddaughter from the clutches of a popular, sinister cult called “Planet People” that “performs raptures.”Read More »

The Family, Paul Watson, 1974

12 x 30’ – First “fly on the wall” documentary serial.
Press Critics Prize – National Archive.

A ‘fly on the wall’ look at the working-class Wilkins family from Reading.

Modelled on the 13-part observational series, An American Family (US, d. Craig Gilbert, 1972), producer Paul Watson’s 12-part The Family (BBC, 1974) is credited with creating the concept of the ‘fly-on-the-wall’ documentary in Britain. Regardless, Watson’s cinema verité-style, warts-and-all portrait of the working-class Wilkins family certainly popularised an ‘observational’ style still seen as the defining characteristic of British documentary some twenty-five years later.Read More »