A
Directing
Alistair Clarke
No biography available.
Known For
Protest · 1981Protest
1981
MovieDramaTV Movie
A dissident Czechoslovakian playwright awaits trial for his activities against the current political regime.
Sorry · 1981Sorry
1981
MovieDramaTV Movie
Play by Carol Bunyan. Two very different ladies share an office, a common enemy and a sense of humour. Sorry follows them through a day and their very different, and in one case, traumatic, lunch hour.
Play for Today · 1970Play for Today
★ 6.61970
SeriesDrama
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.
Emmerdale · 1972Emmerdale
★ 4.31972
SeriesSoapDrama
The lives of several families in the Yorkshire Dales revolve around a farm and the nearby village. With murders, affairs, lies, deceit, laughter and tears, it's all there in the village.
Grange Hill · 1978Grange Hill
★ 6.71978
SeriesDrama
Children's drama series following the lives of students and teachers at Grange Hill comprehensive school.
Dramarama · 1983Dramarama
★ 7.31983
SeriesSci-Fi & FantasyDrama
Dramarama is the name of a British children's anthology series broadcast on ITV between 1983 and 1989. It tended to feature drama of a science fiction or supernatural bent. The series was created by Anna Home, then head of children's and youth programming at TVS, however production responsibilities were divided amongst most of the regional ITV franchise holders. Thus, each episode was in practice a one-off production with its own cast and crew, up to and including the executive producer.
Dramarama was largely a place for new talent to prove themselves and was a launching pad for the likes of Anthony Horowitz, Paul Abbott, Kay Mellor, Janice Hally, Tony Kearney, David Tennant and Ann Marie Di Mambro. It was one of Dennis Spooner's last credits.
One of Dramarama's episodes, "Dodger, Bonzo And The Rest", gained so much popularity that it was turned in to its own series the following year. It starred Lee Ross and was based around a large foster home. The episode "Blackbird Singing In The Dead of Night" was developed by Granada into the TV series Children's Ward. It was also repeated for the first time since its original broadcast on 5 January 2013, during CITV's 30th anniversary Old Skool Weekend. The Series 7 episode "Back To Front" – notable for featuring a mirror image of the Yorkshire Television logo card at the end – was repeated on 6 January 2013, again as part of CITV's 30th anniversary Old Skool Weekend.
Allsorts · 1987Allsorts
1987
SeriesKidsFamily
Allsorts is British children's television series that was produced by Granada Television for nine series, which aired from 8 January 1986 to 12 December 1995 on CITV.
Children's Ward · 1989Children's Ward
★ 5.31989
SeriesDramaKids
Children's Ward is a British children's television drama series produced by Granada Television and broadcast on the ITV network as part of its Children's ITV strand on weekday afternoons. The programme was set – as the title suggests – in Ward B1, the children's ward of the fictitious South Park Hospital, and told the stories of the young patients and the staff present there. Aimed at older children and teenagers, Children's Ward was a long-lived series for a children's drama, starting life in 1988 as a contribution to the Dramarama anthology strand, "Blackbird Singing In The Dead of Night", then first broadcast as a series 1989 and running from then until 2000.
The series was conceived by Granada staff writers Paul Abbott and Kay Mellor, both of whom went on to enjoy successful careers as award-winning writers of adult television drama. At the time, they were both working on the soap opera Coronation Street, and had recently collaborated on a script for Dramarama.
Abbott, who had been through a troubled childhood himself, had initially wanted to set the series in a children's care home rather than a hospital, but this was vetoed by Granada executives. During the course of its run, however, Children's Ward won many plaudits for covering difficult issues such as cancer, alcoholism, drug addiction and child abuse in a sensitive manner. The programme won many awards, including in 1996 a BAFTA Children's Award for Best Drama, won by an episode in which a serial killer lures children to him via the internet and is – highly unusually for children's television – not eventually caught.
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