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1-43 of 43
- Two symbiotic sociopaths play obscurely deviant mind games with each other while engaging in perversely brutal acts of violence against victims apparently chosen at random.
- A virtuous young woman is oppressed by her ambitious family and a rake who's becomes obsessed with her.
- Social satire on life on Cambridge College - from the headmaster to the students and even one memorable bedder...
- Richard of Gloucester uses murder and manipulation to claim England's throne.
- The adventures and the exploits of notorious English thief and prison-breaker Jack Sheppard in 1720s London.
- Nine-year-old Daisy wrote a novel in 1890 about an awkward gentleman meeting a young lady on a train. He invites her to his London home. She wants to meet high society, so he takes her to a lord's country estate.
- George Phillips, a middle-aged Londoner, works as an estate agent for the firm of Frobisher, Rendell and Ross. His home life is soured by clashes with his wife over whether their teenage son's girlfriend should be allowed to sleep over at their house, a situation the timid, melancholic George dislikes but hasn't the guts to forbid. His professional life is dominated by his attempts to find a buyer for Sunley House, a once-fashionable 1960s office block which has lain unoccupied for over a year. When his wife leaves for Colchester to look after her elderly father, George avoids conflict with his son by sleeping over at Sunley House. Meanwhile, his workplace rival, a younger man called Rycroft, is also trying to find a buyer for Sunley House (and thereby usurp George's place in the firm). One morning George finds himself locked in and has to crash through a window to escape. When Rycroft finds the broken window, he sets out to find the culprit.
- 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.
- In the spring of 1913, Parisian businessman Gabriel Astruc opens a new theater on the Champs Elysées. The first performance is the premiere of Igor Stravinsky's 'The Rite of Spring', danced by the Ballet Russes. The rehearsal process is extremely fraught: the orchestra dislike Stravinsky's harsh, atonal music; the dancers dislike the 'ugly' choreography of Vaslav Nijinsky. The volatile, bisexual Nijinsky is in a strained relationship with the much older Sergei Diaghilev, the Ballet Russes' charismatic but manipulative impresario. Public expectation is extremely high after Nijinsky's success in 'L'apres-midi d'un faune'. Finally, 'The Rite of Spring' premieres to a gossip-loving, febrile, fashion-conscious Parisian audience sharply divided as to its merits.
- Roman warrior Titus Andronicus finds himself trapped in a nightmarish cycle of vengeance, misery, and bloodshed.
- Henry Bolingbroke has now been crowned King of England, but faces a rebellion headed by the embittered Earl of Northumberland and his son, (nicknamed "Hotspur"). Henry's son, Hal, the Prince of Wales, has thrown over life at court in favor of heavy drinking and petty theft in the company of a debauched elderly knight, Sir John Falstaff. Hal must extricate himself from some legal problems, regain his father's good opinions, and help suppress the uprising.
- Innocent, optimistic Candide grows up in the secluded paradise of a German castle, illegitimate nephew of a wealthy baron. His tutor Dr Pangloss instils in him the doctrine that 'All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds': anything, however apparently terrible, is part of the benevolent Creator's plan. But Candide is expelled from the family after falling in love with the baron's daughter, and what he experiences as he travels across Europe and America (war, bigotry, slavery, natural disaster) puts Pangloss's teachings very much to the test. Leonard Bernstein's musical version of the famous satire by Voltaire went through multiple rewrites over the decades. This BBC broadcast is the world premiere of the 1988 Scottish Opera version, with the composer himself as a guest of honour in the audience.
- In 1998, former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet visits Britain for medical treatment. On being tipped off, Amnesty International seize the chance to bring to justice a man they insist is guilty of multiple human rights violations. The newly-elected Labour government is initially amenable, and soon Pinochet is under house arrest (albeit in a detached house in leafy suburbia) and awaiting extradition to Spain. However, Amnesty are up against the complexities of British law, the vacillations of Home Secretary Jack Straw, Pinochet's former ally Margaret Thatcher, and the Senator's own vast reserves of cunning.
- A serious heart condition puts an end to Charlie King's job as a "street copper", but he refuses the offer of a desk job and a promotion. When a secret team of negotiators approaches him with the offer of a job, he's intrigued, but who is he dealing with?
- Mr and Mrs Cooper are staying at a boarding-house in the seaside resort of Morecambe with their small children, Colin and Jennifer. Mr Cooper has just been made redundant, but the family are trying to keep this a secret from the other guests. Also staying at the hotel are Keith and Jo, a young couple on their honeymoon, and an older couple, Mr and Mrs Thornton. Waking early one morning, Colin amuses himself by dangling one of his sister's sandals out of the window on a piece of string. The sandal accidentally lands on a flat roof just outside the window of the honeymooning couple, and his father's now straitened financial circumstances mean Colin has to get it back, by fair means or foul.
- Warsaw, 1945. The invading Nazis are gone and, in a symbolic gesture, the preserved heart of Polish composer and national hero Frédéric Chopin is returned. Under German rule, even the mention of Chopin was forbidden; now, as the war-battered nation reassembles itself, author Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz recommences work on his biography of the great man. A strange woman contacts him, carrying revelatory letters that she claims the composer wrote her great-grandmother, his lover. But is the woman a fraud? Are the letters forgeries? And since they show Chopin in a less than flattering light, would Poland prefer to suppress them?
- Late in 1926 acclaimed mystery writer Agatha Christie disappears after marital problems and creates a media frenzy.
- Morgan, a sensitive 12-year-old, growing up in richness and royalty, finds a true friend in Julien, a young man hired to tutor him.
- Boyo lives with his brother Sid, his sister Gwenny and their elderly mother Marlene in an economically depressed area of South-West Wales. Their father has vanished when they were small children, apparently headed for America. The leather-jacketed, motorbike-riding Sid has grown up obsessed with American culture and dreams of joining his father in the States. When the brothers discover that an open-cast mine is opening nearby they join the scramble for jobs, but their mother is unaccountably against the idea. On the morning when they need to report for work, they find she has sabotaged Sid's bike, scuppering their chances of employment. Sid and Gwenny begin to spend more and more of their considerable spare time together, washing down medication they've obtained under their mother's name with pilfered booze. Marlene's increasingly eccentric behaviour leads to her being interred in a hospital, but Boyo is powerless to stop his brother and sister from drifting dangerously out of touch with reality.
- In 1963, flamboyant, eccentric English theatre critic Kenneth Tynan is made 'literary manager' of London's National Theatre. His views on censorship (can't stand it) and sexuality (as much of it onstage as possible) set him on a collision course with the NT's Chair, Sir Oliver Lyttelton. Tynan has a friend and ally in the Governor, Laurence Olivier, but cannot always count on the older, more conventional man's support. Demoted after becoming the first person to drop the F-bomb on British TV, Tynan struggles to stage his 'erotic entertainment' "Oh Calcutta" in the face of opposition from friends, family and colleagues, and in spite of his own deteriorating health.
- This film presents scenes from the life of German composer George Frideric Handel in the style of a baroque opera. After the success of his London debut, Handel settles in England. He abandons aristocratic and royal patronage and throws himself on the mercy of the marketplace, having to deal with money worries and fickle audiences as well as fluctuating health. After the public rejects a string of his operas and a stroke nearly fells him, Handel embarks on a high-risk gamble for his 1742 oratorio "Messiah": he premieres the new work far from fashionable London and with a leading singer whose career is tainted by scandal.
- Whitechapel works as a slave on a Virginia plantation; he has been given the name of his owner, Mr Whitechapel. The plantation's overseer is the violent and hard-drinking Sanders, embittered by the death of his wife. When Whitechapel's beautiful young bride attracts Sanders's attention, the stage is set for a tragedy that spans generations.
- On February 17 2001, Welsh punk rock band the Manic Street Preachers played at the Karl Marx Theatre, Havana, becoming the first Western rock act to play in Communist Cuba. This film documents their concert, their interviews with the local media and their two meetings with Cuban head-of-state Fidel Castro.
- When Denis Midgley's father is rushed to hospital, Midgley drops everything to be by his side. They've never really got on, so Midgley wants to be sure he's there if his father ever regains consciousness. As he hates his job as a schoolteacher, and his home-life with his wife, her senile mother and their insolent teenage son, he has no qualms about lingering around the hospital. But as days turn into weeks, his father obstinately refuses to 'slip away', and Denis' motivation for staying by his father's bedside has more and more to do with Valery, a young nurse.
- Mr Wyman is an elderly man whose increasingly unreliable memory has landed him in a geriatric ward. Here he is visited by his daughters Val and Molly, and Molly's husband Harold. Another elderly man on the ward, the foul-mouthed Mr Riscoe, makes repeated attempts to escape but is always intercepted by one of the ward's two male nurses, Vic and Donald. Vic and Donald are in competition for a promotion. Donald needs the money as he and his girlfriend are trying to buy a house but are having difficulty arranging a mortgage. From the window at which he sits, Mr Wyman can see a wall. He repeatedly pesters Donald with questions about what is on the other side. Donald constructs a fantasy of the future he dreams of with his girlfriend: a house and garden inhabited by a married couple. As Donald works at night and his girlfriend during the day, almost the only time they have to be together comes when she sneaks into the ward at night. While they are having furtive sex, Mr Wyman seizes the chance to make an escape bid of his own.
- In Britain in the mid-1990s, terrorism and civil disobedience are rife. Jack Bentham, a senior Scotland Yard detective, has two cases involving shooting to investigate: one at a demonstration by radical nurses, one by police officers in Wales. The further he delves into both cases, the more evidence he discovers of corruption at the highest administrative levels.
- 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.
- Franz, a young man, works in a dye factory in Prague. One day he notices a skin-rash, like eczema, growing on his hands. All attempts to treat it with ointment fail, and the rash gradually spreads over his body. After complaining to the management he is laid off work; his relationship with his fiancee is affected. In an attempt to get compensation from his former employers he goes to insurance firm Assicurazion Generali, where he encounters an enigmatic clerk called Kafka.
- Arthur Dodsworth has recently retired. He lives alone except for his budgie and memories of his late wife Winnie. One afternoon his nap is interrupted by the doorbell; his former secretary, Peggy Prothero, has come to visit. A brash, charmless woman who seems to take no pleasure in anything but putting people down, Miss Prothero wants to fill her old boss in on all the changes that have taken place at work since he left. Dodsworth isn't very curious, and as the visit wears on it puts a little strain on his politeness and patience. Miss Prothero doesn't enjoy it much either, but lingers on as there's a bombshell she wants to drop. The docketing system Dodsworth introduced thirty years earlier, which revolutionised the firm, has been scrapped by her adored new boss Mr Skinner. The crowning achievement of Dodsworth's career has just become obsolete, and she wants to tell him all about it.
- 1986–199330m6.7 (26)TV EpisodeIn 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.
- 1970–19841h 9m7.5 (9)TV EpisodeOn August the 15th, 1945, after the official surrender of the Empire of Japan, Admiral Matome Ugaki led the last Special Attack Force pilots across the Pacific, to crash into American ships. Thirty-five years later, the men who serviced the aeroplanes are still meeting up for their annual dinner. Now settled into civilian jobs - dentist, baker, taxi-driver, insurance salesman - and with children and grandchildren, they bemoan the decay of traditional Japanese values. Hard liquor is imbibed, toasts raised to the memory of the heroic dead, and old rivalries resurface. The survivors' dissatisfaction with post-war life comes to a head when, in a moment of drunken inspiration, Tokkotai the airline pilot decides on a symbolic gesture to show that the kamikaze spirit lives on.
- Winnie is a mentally handicapped woman who lives with her elderly mother (Cora) and aunt (Ida). They visit the cemetery where Winnie's father is buried. Also in the cemetery are two art students, one of whom (Liz) asks if she can take a photograph of the three women. She takes it while they are not prepared, making them look ridiculous (Cora is putting her make-up on, Winnie is staring at the camera with her mouth open). Cora is angry, and Liz takes another of them properly posed. But she enters the first photograph for a competition, where it wins a prize.
- 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.
- In 1560, Queen Elizabeth I's close friendship Robert Dudley is frowned on. When Dudley's wife dies a scandal threatens the monarchy. Glasgow 1855, Madeleine Smith is accused of poisoning lover Emile L'Angelier over her scandalous letters.
- William Bligh was an expert navigator and an unusually humane ship's captain for his time. He received a hero's welcome on returning to Britain in 1790, after bringing his loyal crew back to safety in an open boat with no charts and minimal rations. This documentary explores how he got a reputation as the worst tyrant in British naval history.
- Middle-aged park-keeper Wilfred is full of righteous indignation about litter, graffiti, vandalism and unleashed dogs. Nonetheless, his patchy employment record and the fact that he and his long-suffering wife have had to move houses reflect that he has his own, secret vices.
- On a journey to London, Casanova meets an Englishman so boneheaded he might almost be Lorenzo's double, and reunites with Schalon, whose pomposity has only grown since his release. Finding that his charms do not work on English ladies, he advertises for a female tenant with the intent of seducing her, but the plan turns sour when he finds himself genuinely falling in love. Obsessed with and repulsed by sex, Casanova wonders whether he is any freer than he was in prison.
- Casanova longed for books in his imprisonment; now, as an old man, he is surrounded by them. Aged 73, he works as a librarian in a German castle, although disquieting rumours have reached the ears of tyrannical major-domo Herr Feldkirchner about the whereabouts of Casanova's hand in relation to the cook's skirts. Plagued by a heart ailment, Casanova struggles to put into literary form the memories of his life, including his triumphant escape from prison.
- Continued incarceration and the conversation of his cellmate are starting to take their toll on Casanova. His mind is cast back to a visit he once made to Mantua. On the run from an angry mob after he disrupted a commedia dell'arte troupe's performance, he took refuge in the house of an elderly judge with a beautiful daughter. Seeing the old man's credulity about holy relics and the occult, Casanova hatched a plot to part him from his money and the girl from her virginity.
- Casanova's helpful friend Senator Bragadin uses his influence to have him moved to a larger, better-lit cell - just as he was making headway on an escape tunnel. Discovering the hole, vindictive turnkey Lorenzo takes the opportunity to stripsearch him, on pretext of looking for the instrument he dug it with. To increase Casanova's misery, he has to share his new cell with an acquaintance, the obnoxious broker Schalon, whose perfumed silks bring with them memories of happier, pre-incarceration times.
- The guardians of Venetian morality burst into the apartments of notorious libertine Giacomo Casanova. He is indicted for atheism, possession of indecent literature, and fornication - the last a hard charge to shake off, as he happens to be in bed with an equally naked woman. As his friend Senator Bragadin tries to intercede for him, the imprisoned Casanova is tormented both by evil jailer Lorenzo and by memories of his lost love, the innocent country girl Cristina, whom he betrayed.
- The act of impulsively throwing a stone through a window sparks off a chain of memories from Casanova. He thinks back on his Venetian prison experiences while watching the torture and execution of Robert-François Damiens, would-be assassin of Louis XV, from the window of a Parisian apartment. Later, in Grenoble, his memories of both occasions haunt him as he is drawn to a pious young woman he sees at a Vivaldi concert and seduces her compulsively despite his friend Valenglart's warnings.
- A re-enactment of the Whitehouse v Lemon court case. In 1976, British magazine Gay News publishes a poem, 'The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name', describing Jesus as a practising homosexual, and Christian activist Mary Whitehouse brings a private prosecution for blasphemy against its editor Denis Lemon.