6.8 /10 1 Votes
5.5/10 TV Network BBC Writers Ken Taylor | 8/10 IMDb First episode date 1964 Cast David Andrews | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Awards British Academy Television Writer Award, British Academy Television Award for Best Design Nominations British Academy Television Award for Best Actress Similar The Wednesday Play, Armchair Theatre, Play of the Month, Z‑Cars, Play for Today | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Theatre 625 is a British television drama anthology series, produced by the BBC and transmitted on BBC2 from 1964 to 1968. It was one of the first regular programmes in the line-up of the channel, and the title referred to its production and transmission being in the higher-definition 625-line format, which only BBC2 used at the time.
Contents
Overview
Overall, about 110 plays were produced with a duration of usually between 75 and 90 minutes during the series' four-year run, and for its final year from 1967 the series was produced in colour, BBC2 being the first channel in Europe to convert from black and white. Some of the best-known productions made for the series include a new version of Nigel Kneale's 1954 adaptation of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1965); the four-part Talking to a Stranger by John Hopkins (1966) which told the same story from four different viewpoints, and features Judi Dench; and 1968's science-fiction allegory The Year of the Sex Olympics, again by Kneale.
In a 2000 poll of industry experts conducted by the British Film Institute to find the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes of the 20th century, Talking to a Stranger was placed seventy-eighth.
As with much British television output of the 1960s, many editions of Theatre 625 no longer exist, see Wiping. Some episodes, previously thought lost, were discovered in Washington D.C. in 2010. These recoveries included the remake of 1984.
List of episodes
The main source for compiling this list was the BFI Film & TV database. The website's master list is here. With a certain irregularity in transmission, breaking this list down into specific seasons is likely to arbitrary, with variants between sources; the BFI website has been followed, except (as noted) where the lostshows website diverged in a few instances. IMDb has also been used as a check, and occasionally as the main source where a substitute is lacking. Some details have proved extremely elusive, these are indicated. The information about the episodes survival status in the last column is taken from the lostshows website and The Kaleidoscope BBC Television Drama Research Guide, 1936-2011, and are correct as of 15 May 2014. A handful of the surviving episodes have been commercially released on DVD; these are footnoted. Several episodes have their own articles on Wikipedia, as opposed to the source text, these are indicated by an asterisk (*).
Legend: Se = Season; Ep = Episode; AS/A = Archive status/Availability
Abbreviations: tr =Telerecording; seq = sequence(s)); VT = video tape
All known copies are black & white, except where stated otherwise.