Despite a sometimes stormy relationship with Judy Garland, CBS had found success with several television specials featuring the star. Garland, who for years had been reluctant to commit to a weekly series, saw the show as her best chance to pull herself out of severe financial difficulties.
A housewife wins a prize to visit a spaceship. While she is there, it spontaneously goes into orbit. Following hot on the heals of Are You Being Served? Mollie Sugden starred in this excellent David Croft sitcom which is now sadly overlooked.
Timothy Lumsden leads a dull life - he works in a public library and lives at home with his domineering mother and self-effacing father. Timothy Lumsden is sorry...
There's no police like Holmes. But not all his TV exploits have been a success. Here's a classic example.
When Ronald Craven attempts to unravel the truth behind the murder of his daughter his investigations soon lead him into a murky world of government and corporate cover-ups and nuclear espionage, pitting him against dark forces that threaten the future of life on Earth.
Remaking a classic: Included in Time Magazine's 2007 list of "100 Best Shows of All Time", Sanford and Son was based on the BBC Galton and Simpson sitcom Steptoe and Son.
1960s legal and courtroom drama series
A teenager stows away aboard a rocket in order to visit her brother on another planet. But her actions put everyone else's safety in jeopardy.
In 1960 the BBC embarked on their most ambitious television production up until then, a fifteen-part serial adaptation of the eight sequential historical plays of William Shakespeare.
A Chinese invasion of South Vietnam triggers a new world war between East and West. In the town of Rochester, Kent, the anticipation of a nuclear attack leads to mass evacuations. This one-off drama proved to be so controversial that the BBC, who made it, refused to broadcast it for 20 years.
The Battle of Culloden, which took place on April 16th, 1746, was the last battle fought on British soil. This docudrama blurred the distinctions between documentary and drama and proved to be ground-breaking television.
Schoolmaster Andrew Crocker-Harris is retiring because of ill-health, and Taplow, one of his pupils, brings him a present on the eve of his retirement in this Terence Rattigan play from 1966.
"We are all conceived in close prison: in our mother's wombs, we are close prisoners all...and then all our life is but a going out to the place of execution, to death..." John Donne.
Worst Week of My Life is a hysterical farce-like take on the premise of Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em.
Doris Day was one of the few successful film actresses who made a smooth transition to television and her half-hour sitcom saved her from bankruptcy.
A soldier returns to India to find the girl he loved but had to leave.
Joel Fleischmann, desperate to find funding for a medical scholarship, finds himself trading his skills in return for his fees of $125,000 being paid for.
Critically acclaimed BBC drama series that tracks the lives of four friends from the sixties to the nineties.
Brutally real drama series, set in Baltimore, USA. The Wire centres around the city's inner-city drug scene, the dealers and the law enforcement agency that tries to bring them down.
Brian Potter and his hapless band of staff and regulars are determined to make the Phoenix Club a success no matter what.
Following in the mighty footsteps of Monty Python and influencing popular follow-ups like Little Britain, The League of Gentlemen always felt that little bit more twisted.
A review of the BBC's pioneering 1950s music show for teens.
Influential humorous improvisation series hosted by Clive Anderson - starring a myriad of quick-witted comedians.
When Nadia keeps dying and returning to the party that's being thrown in her honour on that same evening, she tries to find a way out of her strange and disturbing time loop.
Planned as a six-episode summer replacement in 1971, The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour did so well that CBS brought it back immediately as a weekly variety series.
Just as World of Sport had challenged the comfortable cosy chair of the BBC by throwing an afternoon of horse racing and wrestling for ‘grappling fans’ up against Grandstand, so The Big Match competed with its football coverage, while the BBC stood still.
An inept broadcaster whose inflated sense of celebrity drives him to treachery and shameless self-promotion.
An exquisitely written, hilariously funny and surprisingly profound piece of television about a young woman trying to cope with life in London whilst coming to terms with a recent tragedy.
The Nat King Cole Show originally aired without a sponsor, but NBC agreed to pay for initial production costs assuming that once the show actually aired a national sponsor would emerge.
After an encounter with a demon, a sceptical nurse and ex-scientist meets the mysterious John Strange.