Saturday Playhouse was a 60-minute UK anthology television series produced by and airing on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) from 4 January 1958 until 1 April 1961. [1] There were sixty-eight episodes, among them adaptations of the plays The Man Who Came to Dinner and The Cat and the Canary . [1] One of the episodes, Alex Atkinson’s classic thriller Design for Murder, was featured twice on the BBC: first on Saturday Playhouse (Saturday, 15 March 1958; S1/Ep.6) and again from the BBC’s own theatre in Bristol (Thursday, 6 July 1961). [2]
Many actors performed for Saturday Playhouse, including: Maxine Audley, John Barrie, Michael Bates, Brian Blessed, Jeremy Brett, Michael Crawford, Anton Diffring, Paul Eddington, Denholm Elliott, Thora Hird, Desmond Llewelyn, Margaret Lockwood, Leo McKern, Bob Monkhouse, Leslie Phillips, Prunella Scales and Elizabeth Shepherd, among others. [3]
Only a single episode is believed to have survived. [4]
Warren Mitchell was a British actor, best known for playing bigoted cockney Alf Garnett in television, film and stage productions from the 1960s to the 1990s. He was a BAFTA TV Award winner and twice a Laurence Olivier Award winner.
Doris May Roberts was an American actress whose career spanned seven decades of television and film. She received five Emmy Awards and a Screen Actors Guild award during her acting career, which began in 1951.
Patrick Joseph McGoohan was an American and Irish actor, director, screenwriter, and producer of film, television, and theatre. Born in New York City to Irish parents, he was raised in Ireland and England, began his career in England during the 1950s and became well known for the titular role, secret agent John Drake in the ITC espionage programme Danger Man (1960–1968). He then produced and created The Prisoner (1967–1968), a surrealistic television series in which he featured as Number Six, an unnamed British intelligence agent who is abducted and imprisoned in a mysterious coastal village.
Bernard Lawson, better known as Bernard Fox, was a Welsh actor. He is remembered for his roles as Dr. Bombay in the comedy fantasy series Bewitched (1964–1972) of which he was the last surviving adult cast member, Colonel Crittendon in the comedy series Hogan's Heroes (1965–1971), Malcolm Merriweather in The Andy Griffith Show (1963–1965), Colonel Redford in Barnaby Jones (1975), Max in Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo (1977), and Archibald Gracie IV in the film Titanic (1997).
Nicholas Anthony Phillip Clay was an English actor.
Robert Alan Morse was an American actor. Morse, known for his gap-toothed boyishness, started his career as a star on Broadway acting in musicals and plays before expanding into film and television. He earned numerous accolades including two Tony Awards, two Drama Desk Awards, a Primetime Emmy Award, and a Screen Actors Guild Award.
Luther Adler was an American actor who worked in theatre, film, television, and directed plays on Broadway.
Gene Barry was an American stage, screen, and television actor and singer. Barry is best remembered for his leading roles in the films The Atomic City (1952) and The War of The Worlds (1953) and for his portrayal of the title characters in the TV series Bat Masterson and Burke's Law, among many roles.
Everett H. Sloane was an American character actor who worked in radio, theatre, films, and television.
Clifford George Evans was a Welsh actor.
An anthology series is a written series, radio, television, film, or video game series that presents a different story and a different set of characters in each different episode, season, segment, or short. These usually have a different cast in each episode, but several series in the past, such as Four Star Playhouse, employed a permanent troupe of character actors who would appear in a different drama each week. Some anthology series, such as Studio One, began on radio and then expanded to television.
Jeffery Kissoon is an actor with credits in British theatre, television, film and radio. He has performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company at venues such as the Royal National Theatre, under directors including Peter Brook, Peter Hall, Robert Lepage, Janet Suzman, Calixto Bieito and Nicholas Hytner. He has acted in genres from Shakespeare and modern theatre to television drama and science fiction, playing a range of both leading and supporting roles, from Mark Antony in Antony and Cleopatra and Prospero and Caliban in The Tempest, to Malcolm X in The Meeting and Mr Kennedy in the children's TV series Grange Hill.
Lee Montague is an English actor noted for his roles in film and television, usually playing tough guys.
Susan Watson is an American actress and singer best known for her roles in musical theatre.
Malcolm MacLeod Atterbury was an American stage, film, and television actor, and vaudevillian.
Patricia Helen Mary Jessel was an English actress of stage, film and television.
Lillian Gertrude Michael, sometimes nicknamed Beck Michael, was an American film, stage and television actress.
Sally Smith is a British actress born in Godalming, Surrey. Although primarily a star of both dramatic and musical theatre she appeared in several films and dozens of television shows.
Hugh Vincent Moxey, was a British film and television actor. Moxey spanned his career for 40 years, where he was best remembered in supporting roles in 1950s British war films, including classics such as The Dambusters and Sink the Bismarck!.
Roger Lloyd Milner was a British actor, author and dramatist who is probably best remembered today for appearing in two of the BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas dramas in the 1970s. His "outrageous comedy" How's the World Treating You? (1965) gave Patricia Routledge her West End début and her Broadway début when it transferred there in 1966.