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.

Producer Cedric Messina was already an experienced producer of one-off television Shakespeare presentations, and was thus ideally qualified to present the BBC with a daunting but nonetheless enticingly simple proposition: a series of adaptations, staged specifically for television, of all 36 First Folio plays, plus Pericles (The Two Noble Kinsmen was considered primarily John Fletcher’s work, and the legitimacy of Edward III was still being debated).

The scale of Messina’s proposal, far greater than that of previous multi-part Shakespeare series such as An Age of Kings (BBC, 1960) and Spread of the Eagle (BBC, 1963), required an American partner in order to guarantee access to the US market, deemed essential for the series to recoup its costs. Time-Life Television agreed to participate, but under certain controversial conditions – that the productions be traditional interpretations of the plays in appropriately Shakespearean period costumes and sets, designed to fit a two-and-a-half-hour time slot.

The running-time requirement was swiftly jettisoned when it became clear that the major tragedies in particular would have suffered severely, but other artistic restrictions remained largely in place throughout. Although later productions under Messina’s successors Jonathan Miller and Shaun Sutton would be more experimental, Miller was unable to persuade first-choice directors such as Peter Brook and Ingmar Bergman to take part, and Michael Bogdanov resigned from Timon of Athens (eventually tx, 4/16/1981, with Miller himself directing) after his modern-dress interpretation was considered too radical a departure.

This gave the BBC Television Shakespeare cycle the reputation of being overly staid and conventional, which was not always deserved. Though Messina’s own productions (1978-80) were largely conservative, Jonathan Miller (1980-82) revamped things both visually (thanks to a design policy of sourcing sets and costumes from great paintings of the era in which the play was set) and in terms of direction and casting, in some cases using popular actors with little or no Shakespeare experience (John Cleese as Petruchio, Bob Hoskins as Iago) to attract new and younger audiences.

Under Miller, directors such as Jack Gold, Jane Howell and Elijah Moshinsky were encouraged to be more adventurous, with Howell in particular adopting such a stylised approach for The Winter’s Tale (tx. 8/2/1981) and the Henry VI/Richard III cycle (tx. 2-23/1/1983) that they pushed the definition of “traditional” to the limit, but also garnered the series some of its best reviews. Miller’s aesthetic policies continued under Shaun Sutton (1982-85), who brought the project to a belated close.

Whatever its artistic reputation, there was no doubt that the BBC Television Shakespeare was a commercial triumph, breaking even financially by 1982 (ahead of expectations) and fully justifying Messina’s gamble. Its success was helped by the rapid growth of video recorders in schools, creating a secondary market that was much bigger than initially predicted – though the initial decision to sell the plays only as a complete set provoked complaints from people who baulked at paying the substantial asking price because they were after a smaller selection or individual titles. The BBC eventually released some of the more popular titles separately, but it was not until late in 2005 that the entire series was available individually on DVD at a competitive price.

Although the BBC Television Shakespeare project as a whole met with a mixed reception, it had several positive virtues. Chief among them was the fact that its completist remit meant that several of the more obscure plays received their first television adaptation, and in most cases the BBC version remains the only one. Happily, such productions as Henry VIII (tx. 25/2/1979), Cymbeline (tx. 10/7/1983), Pericles (tx. 11/6/1984) and Titus Andronicus were considered amongst the cycle’s most impressive achievements, with Henry VIII subsequently voted the best production of all by the Shakespeare Association of America.

A complete list of BBC Television Shakespeare productions is as follows:

Series One (producer: Cedric Messina): Romeo and Juliet (tx. 3/12/1978), Richard II (tx. 10/12/1978), As You Like It (tx. 17/12/1978), Julius Caesar (tx. 11/2/1979), Measure For Measure (tx. 18/2/1979), Henry VIII (tx. 25/2/1979)

Series Two (p. Cedric Messina): Henry IV Part One (tx. 9/12/1979), Henry IV Part Two (tx. 16/12/1979), Henry V (tx.23/12/1979), Twelfth Night (tx. 6/1/1980), The Tempest (tx. 27/2/1980), Hamlet (tx. 25/5/1980).

Series Three (p. Jonathan Miller): The Taming of the Shrew (tx. 23/10/1980), The Merchant of Venice (tx. 17/12/1980), All’s Well That Ends Well (tx. 4/1/1981), The Winter’s Tale (tx. 8/2/1981), Timon of Athens (tx. 16/4/1981), Antony and Cleopatra (tx. 8/5/1981)

Series Four (p. Jonathan Miller): Othello (tx. 4/10/1981), Troilus and Cressida (tx. 7/10/1981), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (tx. 13/12/1981)

Series Five (p. Jonathan Miller, Shaun Sutton): King Lear (tx. 19/9/1982), The Merry Wives of Windsor (tx. 28/12/1982), Henry VI Part One (tx. 2/1/1983), Henry VI Part Two (tx. 9/1/1983), Henry VI Part Three (tx. 16/1/1983), Richard III (tx. 23/1/1983), Cymbeline (tx. 10/7/1983)

Series Six (p. Shaun Sutton): Macbeth (tx. 17/10/1983), The Comedy of Errors (tx. 24/12/1983), The Two Gentlemen of Verona (tx. 27/12/1983), Coriolanus (tx. 21/4/1984), Pericles (tx. 11/6/1984)

Series Seven (p. Shaun Sutton): King John (tx. 24/11/1984), Much Ado About Nothing (tx. 30/11/1984), Love’s Labour’s Lost (tx. 5/1/1985), Titus Andronicus (tx. 27/4/1985)

The BBC also produced Shakespeare in Perspective, an accompanying series of 25-minute personal introductions to individual plays by an eclectic range of presenters from the literary (Anthony Burgess, Dennis Potter, Jilly Cooper) to the scholarly (Germaine Greer, Frank Kermode, Michael Wood) to the celebrity (Roy Hudd, George Melly, Barry Took). These usually took the form of straight-to-camera addresses from assorted locations with some connection to the play, which were intercut with extracts from the accompanying BBC Shakespeare production, usually screened later that evening.

Michael Brooke

Video Tracks:
XviD, 704 x 544, 25 fps, 959 kbps

Audio Tracks:
MPEG Layer-3 Audio stereo, 44.1 kHz, 128 kbps

https://nitro.download/view/110ACFF62371009/King_Lear_(Jonathan_Miller,_1982).avi
https://nitro.download/view/1E69FEAD34FCD7C/King_Lear_(Jonathan_Miller,_1982).srt

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English (STR)

The post Jonathan Miller – King Lear (1982) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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.

No Man's Land (Peter Hall & Julian Amyes 1978).mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 30 min
Size: 	1.40 GiB
Video
Codec: 	h264
Resolution: 	696x570 ~> 760x570
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	1 970 kb/s
BPP: 	0.199
Audio
#1:  	2.0ch AC-3 @ 256 kb/s (Stereo)

https://nitro.download/view/6FA723743DE20FE/No_Man’s_Land_(Peter_Hall_&_Julian_Amyes_1978).mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Julian Aymes & Peter Hall – No Man’s Land (1978) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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.

1.19GB | 1 h 14 min | 762×572 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/D1B062338BC1F20/The.Browning.Version.1985.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post Michael A. Simpson – The Browning Version (1985) first appeared on Cinema of the World.