Eric Thompson

An anthology series of television plays which aired on BBC1 from October 1964 to May 1970. The plays were usually written for television, although adaptations from other sources also featured.

Z-Cars or Z Cars is a British television drama series centred on the work of mobile uniformed police in the fictional town of Newtown, based on Kirkby, Merseyside. Produced by the BBC, it debuted in January 1962 and ran until September 1978.

Dr Finlay's Casebook is a BBC television series that was broadcast from 1962 until 1971. Based on A. J. Cronin's novella Country Doctor, the storylines centred on a general medical practice in the fictional Scottish town of Tannochbrae during the late 1920s.

Sunday Night Theatre was a long-running series of televised live television plays screened by BBC Television from early 1950 until 1959. The productions for the first five years or so of the run were re-staged live the following Thursday, partly because of technical limitations in this era, and the theatrical basis of early television drama. Some of the earliest collaborations between Rudolph Cartier and Nigel Neale were produced for this series, including Arrow to the Heart and Nineteen Eighty-Four. The Sunday night drama slot was subsequently renamed The Sunday-Night Play which ran for four seasons between 1960 and 1963. ITV transmitted its own unrelated run of Sunday Night Theatre between 1971 and 1974.

BBC series based on the novels by Georges Simenon which starred Rupert Davies as Inspector Maigret, a French police detective who preferred to watch and listen in order to solve crimes. The series ran from 1960-63 on British television.

Pulled from actual case histories and utilizing newsreel and documented narratives, the activities of spies from various countries are depicted as far back as the American Revolution and as recent as the Cold War.

An anthology of single plays offering up adaptations of either of prominent stage plays or novels.

Anthology series telling suspenseful tales.

Accused of treason, a former U.S. intelligence officer based in London tries to clear his name, taking on freelance jobs around Europe as he searches for answers.

The Man in Room 17 is a British television series which ran for two seasons in the mid-1960s, produced by the Northern ITV franchise, Granada Television. Key to the series' success was the involvement of writer/producer Robin Chapman. The show was set in Room 17 of the Department of Social Research, where former wartime agent-turned-criminologist Edwin Oldenshaw solved difficult police cases through theory and discussions with his assistants. The novelty of the series was that Oldenshaw and his colleagues never needed to leave their office in order to resolve cases, preferring to spend their time playing the Japanese board game of Go. They simply provided their prognosis and left the police to do the cleaning up. Different directors were often appointed to film the Room 17 and outside-world scenes independently, to maintain a sense of distance between the two worlds.

The Magic Roundabout is a French-British children's television programme created in France in 1963 by Serge Danot, with the help of Ivor Wood and Wood's French wife, Josiane. The series was originally broadcast between 1964 and 1971 on ORTF, originally in black-and-white. Having originally rejected the series as "charming... but difficult to dub into English", the BBC later produced a version of the series using the original stop motion animation footage with new English-language scripts, written and performed by Eric Thompson, which bore little relation to the original storylines. This version, broadcast in 441 five-minute-long episodes from 18 October 1965 to 25 January 1977, was a great success and attained cult status, and when in 1967 it was moved from the slot just before the evening news to an earlier children's viewing time, adult viewers complained to the BBC.

A series of contemporary television dramas by new writers.

Jewel thieves, murder, and a manhunt swirl around a sailor off a cargo ship in post-war London.

Brothers Michael and David Tremayne decide to steal the Crown Jewels from the Tower of London, not for criminal purposes, but to make themselves famous.

The TARDIS materialises in Paris in the year 1572 and the Doctor decides to visit the famous apothecary Charles Preslin. Steven, meanwhile, is befriended by a group of Huguenots from the household of the Protestant Admiral de Coligny. Having rescued a young serving girl, Anne Chaplet, from some pursuing guards, the Huguenots gain their first inkling of a heinous plan being hatched at the command of the Catholic Queen Mother, Catherine de Medici.

Mr. Figg, the barber, is fond of telling customers about his family, but he hasn’t really got one – he’s a bachelor quite alone in the world. But that may change.

Henry Wilkes cultivates rare tropical plants as a hobby, with an attention to detail closer to obsession. The length to which he goes to propagate and nurture new hybrids alarms his wife. Is there more going on in the greenhouse than could safely be exhibited at the next Battersea Flower Show?

Eames is a middle aged man, with a boring, routine job. His life changes when he meets a young girl and a painter. This rekindles his youthful artistic leanings, which he blames his father for stopping.

A soldier faces a court-martial for killing his friend.

A thousand years of the gossip, scandals, successes, disasters, eccentricities and cupidity that lie behind the facades of a great city.