Beginning in September 1950, The Colgate Comedy Hour gave a number of performers, destined to become famous, their first opportunity to appear before a large television audience.
The earliest complete surviving BBC television play of the 1950s.
Adapted from R.C. Sheriff's successful play, Journey's End is set against the background of life in the trenches during World War One and concentrates on a group of officers behind British lines at St. Quentin, France.
After broadcast in 1952 the BBC was bombarded with letters of enthusiastic appreciation and gratitude for this simple yet moving piece of drama...
The Troubled Air was Irwin Shaw's novel chronicling the rise of McCarthyism in the USA and in particular the anti-Communist witch-hunt among radio-programme workers.
Albert Stokes finds himself perpetually fighting the dominance of women, not least of all his possessive widowed mother.
It is 1915. Young Annie Hudd, in spite of her family's jeers, is determined to go to France to help the wounded soldiers. She is to suffer many setbacks before her ambition to become a nurse is realised.
Frederick James Parsons is fanatical, dedicated, sincere; with his willing but slow-witted accomplice, Harry Warblow, he has planned a crime so sensational that it will surely call world-wide attention to his aims.
Noel Coward's short story starring Lynn Redgrave as an ugly duckling who only later turns into a most possessing young swan.
The rich and attractive Lady Pruella writes to a marriage bureau for a husband and a most surprising candidate turns up...
The end of a summer; pale sky; white sand; a small tent - enter small, immaculate, dapper Teddy singing "By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea!" Not the beginning of a musical but of Molly Kazan's comedy Rosemary.
The world of beautiful women and fashion photographers-what happens when a girl from the country arrives in London and finds herself out of her depth?
A pearl trader and a priest-both fighting for the use of the same hall-one for a casino, the other for a church. Rose becomes the unwilling pawn in this battle between sacred and profane in a small Australian town.
A group of building workers have one thing in common - their dreams for the future; but Ken, the foreman, is cruelly determined to make them see that their dreams can never be fulfilled.
One of the most significant pieces of unrecorded and therefore "missing" drama presentations from the television archives, 'Number Three' was an 80-minute science fiction drama shown under the BBC's 'Sunday-Night Theatre' strand.
Harold Crombie (Robert Lang) is something of a nonentity-the sort of man who merges into the background so well that even his office colleagues barely notice he's there.
How many marriages are dying of boredom? How many couples are dragging out a dreary, meaningless existence because they have long ceased to care for each other?
Life in the Royal Flying Corps seems pleasant enough to young Bill St. Aubyn as he basks in the French sun. But when an important offensive is mounted, he is suddenly faced with the grim reality of war.
Peter Wildeblood's adaptation of Laurence Housman's Victoria Regina was broadcast in 1964 as four individual plays and starred Patricia Routledge who portrayed four ages of the monarch.
Most people are quite happy talking about life, but try to avoid living it. They need home and security so they can sit in comfort and talk about life-a roof over their mouths.
Angela (June Whitfield), whose husband is abroad, wakes to find she has been sharing a bed with a strange man.
Who is the strange man brought by the police to Dr. Frame? Is he a murderer? How did he gain his uncanny knowledge of Frame's private life? Is it possible that he really comes from another time?
Should a doctor tell his patients the truth - whatever the cost? Harry Branksome, brilliant surgeon, is dedicated to the truth, no matter whom it hurts.
Set partly on a building site, a boy (15-year old Dennis Waterman) and a girl (16-year old Judith Geeson) meet secretly in a partly-built block of flats each day after the builders leave.
The Earth has been at war with the Outspacers for many years. The fate of the planet depends on the success of a vital project headed by one man.
The story of a crowded day in the life of a modern Russian family - a day in which a young girl falls in love, a black marketeer is trapped by police, and a few hasty words spark a teenage rebellion.
Lord Arthur Saville postpones his wedding in order to commit a murder. Which of his many relatives is to have the honour of being the victim?
Accepting the luck of the draw has become the Green's family motto. But Arthur, at 28 the only unmarried one, begins to have doubts. Should he carry on as before or should he forget family tradition and give fate a definite hand?
At a famous public school, a housemaster is in love with a girl without realising that her young brother is a member of his house. The boy takes a photograph of his sister in the housemaster's arms.
Children can sometimes have an instinct for situations that are beyond the grasp of their young minds...