In 1979 Clive Sinclair, British inventor of the pocket calculator, frustrated by the lack of home investment in his project,the electric car, also opposes former assistant Chris Curry's belief that he can successfully market a micro-chip for a home computer. A parting of the ways sees Curry, in partnership with the Austrian Hermann Hauser and using whizz kid Cambridge students, set up his own, rival firm to Sinclair Radionics, Acorn. Acorn beat Sinclair to a lucrative contract supplying the BBC with machines for a computer series. From here on it is a battle for supremacy to gain the upper hand in the domestic market.
In the 1930s, Count Almásy is a Hungarian map maker employed by the Royal Geographical Society to chart the vast expanses of the Sahara Desert along with several other prominent explorers. As World War II unfolds, Almásy enters into a world of love, betrayal, and politics.
Amongst Barbarians is set far away from Margaret Thatcher's Britain in Penang, Malaysia, a former British colony, where two young Englishmen have been arrested for drug trafficking. As they both face the death penalty, their relatives travel to Penang to come to their rescue. However, they soon find out that there is nothing they can do to save the boys' lives. In the course of their futile attempts at influencing the authorities, their racism becomes more than apparent. The question which is never made explicit is of course who the real barbarians are. Wall's play is based on a true story and featured David Jason's first straight acting role on TV.
Being accused of child abuse is a nightmare every family dreads. The Taylors are an ordinary happy family, but Paul and Jill are worried about their 11-year-old son Mark, who is not eating. The family GP has diagnosed 'failure to thrive', and Mark is sent to the hospital for a check-up.
Satirical and surreal play by Arthur Ellis, dealing with the manner in which the British police force has been represented on TV for four decades. In 1949 Tom Riley is arrested for the murder of PC George Dixon. As he awaits interrogation at the station he is mysteriously transported into an episode of The Filth - a 1988 police series where the hard men rule, where he is told by the local CID that he'll be confessing to the murder or else his genitals are getting cut off ! This black comedy questions whether the police have changed or is it the way film and television present them.
S.I.S. agent David Callan is brought out of retirement for one last assignment.