Making its debut with Romeo and Juliet on 3 December 1978, and concluding nearly seven years later with Titus Andronicus on 27 April 1985, the BBC Television Shakespeare project was the single most ambitious attempt at bringing the Bard of Avon to the small screen, both at the time and to date.Read More »
Harold Pinter’s 1975 play, adapted for television by Granada in 1978.
A legendary pairing for John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson, No Man’s Land is Pinter at his most ethereal and individual. Pinter’s obsession with memory making victims of us all is the starting point for this tale of Hirst, a wealthy writer haunted by his past, and Spooner, the man without a past who tries to rescue him. Spooner’s personality is built on a bundle of self-inventions that are likely to topple at any moment. It is a play of despair, of emptiness, vague in its diction and purveying an air of loneliness and waste. As a hypnotic treatise on the pipe dream of a past made good, it is a spellbinding, haunting cautionary tale.Read More »
Andrew Crocker-Harris is an aging classics master at a British public school with only a few days left in his career but who is suddenly forced to confront his own life’s failures. Starring Judi Dench, Michael Kitchen, John Woodvine, Ian Holm. Directed by Michael A. Simpson. Originally broadcast December 31, 1985.Read More »