DISC ONE

Heart to Heart (The Largest Theatre in The World)

The first in the “Largest Theatre in the World” series of plays, Heart to Heart centres around a TV interviewer determined to get a coup on a dodgy cabinet minister.

Starring Kenneth More, Ralph Richardson, Derek Francis.
Directed by Alvin Rakoff
Originally broadcast December 6, 1962.
Approx. 115 minutes

All On Her Own (A Touch of Venus)

Rosemary returns from a party to the empty Hampstead house where she has lived since the death of her husband, but was his overdose of sleeping pills purely accidental? She is going to try to find out.

Starring Margaret Leighton, Nora Gordon
Directed by Hal Burton
Originally broadcast September 25, 1968.
Approx. 19 minutes
NB: A series of 13 monologues for famous actresses.
BBC archive only shows All On Her Own

DISC TWO

Separate Tables (BBC Play of the Month)

Loneliness, desire and repression are explored in the setting of a Bournemouth Hotel.

Starring Geraldine McEwan, Eric Porter, Annette Crosbie, Robert Harris, Hazel Hughes,
Pauline Jameson, Cathleen Nesbitt
Originally broadcast March 15, 1970.
Approx. 93 minutes

French Without Tears (BBC Play of the Month)

The comic, sometimes painful, fallings-out of five young male English students at a residential language cramming establishment in France.

Starring Nicola Pagett, Michael Gambon, Anthony Andrews,
Barbara Kellermann, Nigel Havers, Tom Woodward
Originally broadcast May 16, 1976.
Approx. 94 minutes

DISC THREE

The Winslow Boy (BBC Play of the Month)

The term at Osborne Naval College is not yet over. Why, therefore, has cadet Ronnie Winslow returned home? And why, moreover, is he hiding in the garden in the rain?

Starring Alan Badel, Eric Porter
Directed by David Giles
Originally broadcast January 16, 1977.
Approx. 112 minutes

The Browning Version

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.
Approx. 74 minutes

DISC FOUR

After The Dance (Performance)

Set in the Mayfair Flat of a high living, hard drinking writer in 1938 this truthful play attacks the moral vacuity of the ‘bright young things’ unknowingly poised on the brink of war.

Starring Anton Rogers, Gemma Jones, Imogen Stubbs
Directed by Stuart Burge
Originally broadcast December 5, 1992.
Approx. 112 minutes

The Deep Blue Sea (Performance)

Middle aged Hester Collyer suffers the dramatic personal consequences of a passionate affair with a young, ex-RAF pilot named Freddie Page.

Starring Colin Firth, Ian Holm, Carmel McSharry, Wojtek Pszoniak,
Stephen Tomkinson, Edward Tudor-Pole, Penelope Wilton
Directed by Karel Reisz
Originally broadcast November 12, 1994.
Approx. 99 minutes

DISC FIVE

Adventure Story (BBC Sunday Night Theatre)

Rattigan’s own dramatic study of Alexander the Great. Starring Sean Connery, Margaretta Scott

Directed by Karel Reisz
Originally broadcast June 12, 1961.
Approx. 110 minutes

SPECIAL FEATURES

Separate Tables at The Apollo

John Mills and Jill Bennett in a scene from Act 2 of Separate Tables at the Apollo Theatre.

Cause Célèbre at Her Majesty’s Theatre

Two extracts from Terence Rattigan's play Cause Célèbre, starring Glynis John, Neil Daglish, Charles Dore, Philip Bowen and Lee Montague. This was shot during a theatre preview at Her Majesty’s Theatre.