Michael Simpson

With ancient Rome as a backdrop, composer Benjamin Britten's chamber opera chronicles the undoing of the virginal Lucretia at the hands of Tarquinius. Stars Kathryn Harries, Anthony Rolfe Johnson, Russell Smythe and Jean Rigby imbue the lead roles with fervor and suspense while the English National Opera Orchestra provides spectacular musical accompaniment to this powerful synthesis of Greek tragedy and opera.

Councillor Podkolyossin has called on the services of Madame Fyokla, the matchmaker - decision he is already beginning to regret. Against his better judgment he finds himself competing for the hand of Miss Agafya.

Complex battle of the sexes and classes as a neurotic rich woman has an affair with her father's calculating valet.

A bored and frustrated suburban housewife follows her dream of becoming a racing driver

A lesbian artist creates a love triangle when she moves in with a closeted teenage girl and the man in her pre-arranged heterosexual marriage.

Spend some time in the company of the guests at 'Wentworth' - all taking the waters except for the Colonel and Miss Howard, who has some leisure for the beginnings of a late romance. Gossip, bicycle rides, rounds of golf, bridge in the evenings and preparations for the charity concert all make time pass most pleasantly - don't they?

Feature-length 1984 BBC adaptation of Shelagh Delaney's classic play.

Miss Howard's exhibition of water-colours at the Green Salon falters but then takes off. The season at 'Wentworth' is now drawing to a close, peoples' plans for the winter unfold. Florence, for the first time in her life, refuses to go off with her selfish old father. Miss Howard has some momentous news, and the Colonel must make a very brisk about-turn.

Written by Willy Russell, Break In tells the story of three boys who break in to their school during the holidays to retrieve a confiscated football.

BBC production of the 1963 Broadway musical which was based on Ernst Lubitsch's 1940 film "The Shop Around The Corner."

Brian idolises his older brother Steve, who has left school and joined the army. The two brothers go for an evening out and end up in a local coffee shop, where Steve's faults become painfully obvious to Brian

Lou Parker feels very strongly that she and her husband, Ray, are different from the Farrells and the Ackerleys. With them it's all television. But she and Ray have the local library and The Observer. They keep abreast. They're different.

Scully invites his mates to gatecrash his mum's New Year's Eve party.

Three miners plan a weekend fishing.

A British Company in the WWI trenches await an inevitable German attack in this 1988 adaptation of R.C. Sherriff's play.

One man's defiant stand against the hypocrisy of polite society is the theme of Molière's comic masterpiece. Ian Holm stars in this film set in Paris in the 1920s.

Adaptation of the play by Alan Ayckbourn.

"Honestly, mam, it's all a load of rubbish. I mean, I read me horoscope and things like that, for a joke... but this." A group of women gather to have their fortunes told by a drunken clairvoyant.

The residents of Coronation Street are ordinary, working-class people, and the show follows them through regular social and family interactions at home, in the workplace, and in their local pub, the Rovers Return Inn. Britain's longest-running soap.

Play for Today is a British television anthology drama series, produced by the BBC and transmitted on BBC1 from 1970 to 1984. During the run, more than three hundred programmes, featuring original television plays, and adaptations of stage plays and novels, were transmitted. The individual episodes were between fifty and a hundred minutes in duration.

A BBC television anthology series featuring productions of classic and contemporary stage plays usually broadcast on BBC1. Each production featured a different work, often using prominent British stage actors in the leading roles. The series was transmitted from October 1965 to September 1983.

An anthology series of television plays which aired on BBC1 from October 1964 to May 1970. The plays were usually written for television, although adaptations from other sources also featured.

The daily lives of the men and women at Sun Hill Police Station as they fight crime on the streets of London. From bomb threats to armed robbery and drug raids to the routine demands of policing this ground-breaking series focuses as much on crime as it does on the personal lives of its characters.

Z-Cars or Z Cars is a British television drama series centred on the work of mobile uniformed police in the fictional town of Newtown, based on Kirkby, Merseyside. Produced by the BBC, it debuted in January 1962 and ran until September 1978.

An anthology of short plays shown on BBC Television between 1965 and 1973, used in part at least as a training ground for new writers, on account of its short length, and which therefore attracted many writers who later became well known.

A one-hour anthology television series of one-off contemporary and classic dramas produced by the BBC.

Rumpole of the Bailey is a British television series created and written by the British writer and barrister John Mortimer. It stars Leo McKern as Horace Rumpole, an aging London barrister who defends any and all clients, and has been spun off into a series of short stories, novels, and radio programmes.

Screenplay was a drama anthology television series, broadcast on BBC between 1986 and 1993. Numerous episodes were produced including one named "Boswell and Johnson's Tour of the Western Islands" starring Robbie Coltrane as English writer Samuel Johnson who in the autumn of 1773, visits the Hebrides off the north-west coast of Scotland. That episode was directed by John Byrne and co-starred John Sessions and Celia Imrie.

Softly, Softly is a British television drama series, produced by the BBC and screened on BBC 1 from January 1966. It centred around the work of regional crime squads, plain-clothes CID officers based in the fictional region of Wyvern, supposedly in the Bristol area of England.

Anthology series of half hour plays produced in BBC's Television Centre's studios.

This ten episode program was based on ten short stories written by Agatha Christie but with wide-ranging themes. Some were romances, some had supernatural themes and a couple were adventures. The common link was that all came from the talented pen of Agatha Christie, all were entertaining and each drama was carefully crafted and well cast with many of Britain's best known actors of the time represented.

Highly regarded anthology from the 1980s presenting a diverse range of high-quality single dramas that would serve as pilots for possible future series.

A series of dramas featuring staged theatre plays.

Pat Hollingsworth fancies the idea of fostering. But can she convert her husband Tom and their three teenage children to her way of thinking?

Prince Regent is a British period television series that first aired on the BBC in 1979. It depicted the life of George IV from his youth, time as Prince Regent and his reign as King. It consists of eight episodes of 50 minutes.

Three elegant murder mysteries adapted from the crime novels of Dorothy L. Sayers. Set in the 1930s, the relationship of amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey and mystery writer Harriet Vane unfolds in a realm of romance and intrigue.

In Britannia in 130, a young Roman officer named Marcus Flavius Aquila and his freed slave Esca search for the Ninth Legion's gold eagle standard, which vanished with the legion 13 years earlier.

A story of the joy and sorrow of young love that recreates late 1920s and early 1930s England in exquisite detail, tracing heiress Lydia Aspen's evolution from bashful teen to wild jazz-age flapper.

A girl's undying passion towards her first love. A young man makes an enemy of society in order to accept her feelings. The sorrow and redemption of a woman who, despite abiding strictly to her principles, is derailed by her husband's change of heart. The story of three people whose lives are placed at the mercy of the monster known as love.

A made-for-television adaptation of the J. B. Priestley play of the same title.