Sir Alan Arthur Bates was an English actor who came to prominence in the 1960s, when he appeared in films ranging from the popular children's story Whistle Down the Wind to the "kitchen sink" drama A Kind of Loving.
Sir Ian Holm Cuthbert was an English actor. After beginning his career on the British stage as a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, he became a successful and prolific performer on television and in film. He received numerous accolades including two BAFTA Awards and a Tony Award, along with nominations for an Academy Award. He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1989 by Queen Elizabeth II.
Annette Crosbie is a Scottish actress. She is best known for her role as Margaret Meldrew in the BBC sitcom One Foot in the Grave (1990–2000). She twice won the BAFTA TV Award for Best Actress, for The Six Wives of Henry VIII in 1971 and in 1976 for Edward the Seventh. Also in 1976, she was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for the 1976 film The Slipper and the Rose and she won the award for Best Actress at the Evening Standard British Film Awards for the same role. Her other film appearances include The Pope Must Die (1991), Shooting Fish (1997), The Debt Collector (1999), Calendar Girls (2003) and Into the Woods (2014).
The Mayor of Casterbridge: The Life and Death of a Man of Character is an 1886 novel by the English author Thomas Hardy. One of Hardy's Wessex novels, it is set in a fictional rural England with Casterbridge standing in for Dorchester in Dorset where the author spent his youth. It was first published as a weekly serialisation from January 1886.
Jacqueline Anne Stallybrass was an English actress who trained at the Royal Academy of Music in London. The television roles for which she is best known are Jane Seymour in The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1970) and Anne Onedin in The Onedin Line (1971–1972). In the 1990s, Stallybrass played Dr Kate Rowan's Aunt Eileen in Heartbeat.
Arena is a British television documentary series, made and broadcast by the BBC since 1 October 1975. Voted by TV executives in Broadcast magazine as one of the top 50 most influential programmes of all time, it has produced more than six hundred episodes directed by, among others, Frederick Baker, Jana Boková, Jonathan Demme, Nigel Finch, Mary Harron, Vikram Jayanti, Vivian Kubrick, Paul Lee, Adam Low, Bernard MacMahon, James Marsh, Leslie Megahey, Volker Schlondorff, Martin Scorsese, Julien Temple, Anthony Wall, Leslie Woodhead, and Alan Yentob.
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 handful of these plays, including Rumpole of the Bailey, subsequently became television series in their own right.
The Wednesday Play is an anthology series of British television plays which ran on BBC1 for six seasons from October 1964 to May 1970. The plays were usually original works written for television, although dramatic adaptations of fiction also featured. The series gained a reputation for presenting contemporary social dramas, and for bringing issues to the attention of a mass audience that would not otherwise have been discussed on screen.
Annette Badland is an English actress known for a wide range of roles on television, radio, stage, and film. She is best known for her roles as Charlotte in the BBC crime drama series Bergerac, Margaret Blaine in the BBC science fiction series Doctor Who, Mrs Glenna Fitzgibbons in the first season of Outlander, Babe Smith in the BBC soap opera EastEnders, and as Dr Fleur Perkins on the ITV mystery series Midsomer Murders. She was nominated for the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role in 1993 for her performance as Sadie in Jim Cartwright's play The Rise and Fall of Little Voice; a role she reprised in the 1998 film adaptation Little Voice.
Seatown is a coastal hamlet in Dorset, England, on the English Channel approximately 3 miles (4.8 km) west-southwest of Bridport. It lies within the civil parish of Chideock.
David Ross is an English actor who has worked in theatre, cinema and television. His best-known roles include playing the first Kryten and the second Talkie Toaster in science-fiction comedy Red Dwarf, Elgin Sparrowhawk in the BBC One sitcom The Green Green Grass, and as Mr. Sedley in a 1998 serial adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray's novel Vanity Fair.
Victoria Wicks is a British actress. She is known for her role as Sally Smedley in Channel 4's comedy series Drop the Dead Donkey (1990–1998), Mrs. Gideon in The Mighty Boosh (2004), and the College Director in Skins (2007–08). Her film appearances include The Imitation Game (2014) and High-Rise (2015). She is an associate of Howard Barker's theatre company, The Wrestling School.
Philip Jackson is an English actor. He appeared as Chief Inspector Japp in both the television series Agatha Christie's Poirot and in BBC Radio dramatisations of Poirot stories; as Melvin "Dylan" Bottomley in Porridge; and as Abbot Hugo, one of the recurring adversaries in the 1980s series Robin of Sherwood.
Thomas Hardy's Wessex is the fictional literary landscape created by the English author Thomas Hardy as the setting for his major novels, located in the south and southwest of England. Hardy named the area "Wessex" after the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom that existed in this part of that country prior to the unification of England by Æthelstan. Although the places that appear in his novels actually exist, in many cases he gave the place a fictional name. For example, Hardy's home town of Dorchester is called Casterbridge in his books, notably in The Mayor of Casterbridge. In an 1895 preface to the 1874 novel Far from the Madding Crowd he described Wessex as "a merely realistic dream country".
A Horseman Riding By is a sequence of 3 novels by R. F. Delderfield written between 1966 and 1968. It starts in 1902 at the tail end of the Boer War and is continued in the sequels to end in 1965. The first book is set in Devon in the early 20th century. It was to some extent an elegy for the traditional society which was blown apart by the First World War.
This is a list of British television related events from 1978.
The Mayor of Casterbridge is a 1921 British silent drama film directed by Sidney Morgan and starring Fred Groves, Pauline Peters and Warwick Ward. It was an adaptation of the 1886 novel The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy and was made with Hardy's collaboration.
The Mayor of Casterbridge is a British TV movie, produced by Georgina Lowe for Sally Head Productions and directed by David Thacker, based on the 1886 novel by Thomas Hardy. Appearing in the film are Ciarán Hinds as Henchard, Juliet Aubrey as Susan Henchard, Jodhi May as Elizabeth Jane, James Purefoy as Farfrae, and Polly Walker as Lucetta. The series was released as a two-disc DVD in 2004.
Into the Fire is a British television thriller drama series, written by Tony Marchant, that first broadcast on BBC1 on 14 February 1996, and ran for three consecutive nights. The series, directed by Jane Howell, stars Donal McCann as Frank Cody, a businessman whose struggling leather goods company is thrown a lifeline when it wins a new order from America. But when he re-mortgages his house to finance the project, events take a dramatic turn, and death, deceit and adultery arise from a misguided scheme to commit insurance fraud via arson.
The Les Dawson Show was a variety show that aired on BBC1 intermittently from 1978 through 1989. The show starred comedian Les Dawson (1931–1993), who had previously starred in the ITV sketch comedy programme Sez Les (1969–76), followed by Dawson and Friends (1977). The Les Dawson Show also featured sketch comedy, as well as stand-up comedy, guest appearances, dance numbers, and musical performances.
