Play for Today Season 14, Episode 6: Desert of Lies

Stan's Last Game

James Grout and Bert Parnaby are rival chairmen of a northern football club in the run-up to an important cup match. As tempers fray, retiring president Charles Lamb provides a calming voice of sanity.

75 min

Young Shoulders

Cynical teenager Andrew Groves re-evaluates his attitude to life and his parents after his sister dies in a plane crash.

75 min

A Coming to Terms for Billy

When his father comes home to Belfast after more than 2 years in England, conflicts arise with Billy

75 min

Z for Zachariah

After a nuclear holocaust, only a man and a woman survive in a Welsh valley.

75 min

Moving on the Edge

A woman in a state of personal crisis finds it hard to communicate with her husband and family.

75 min

Hard Feelings

A group of unemployed Oxford drop-outs living in a Brixton commune get their come-uppance by one of them.

75 min

Under the Hammer

Concerning the life of the artist Vincent Van Gogh

75 min

King

A man who has had a good life in England wants to retire to Jamaica, but the celebration with his daughters doesn't go as expected.

75 min

Rainy Day Women

In 1940, during World War II, an officer is sent to investigate rumors of German spies in a sleepy village where various people are the victims of war hysteria

75 min

Dog Ends

In a future society where euthansia is common, a man signs papers to have his father put down

75 min

The Groundling and the Kite

Peter is a songwriter, while his old friend Jimmy is an A and R (Artists and Repertoire) man. But when Jimmy tries to sell one of Peter's songs, Peter is furious. Can the friendship survive?

75 min

The Cry

In 1959 Ulster, a journalist witnesses the beating of a youth

75 min

It Could Happen to Anybody

A long-suffering Glasgow housewife puts up with years of her husband's violence and drunkenness - and then something happens which makes her snap and fight back.

75 min

Only Children

A young woman's comfortable life is turned upside down when she has a baby.

75 min

The Amazing Miss Stella Estelle

Miss Stella Estelle is a cabaret singer in working men's clubs, and she sings songs from the 1960s to support a large and difficult family. But how long can it go on? The backdrop is a family in decay: husband out of work, wife working and still doing the domestics, daughter the singer and hopeful star, son her "manager" but in reality going nowhere. Stella plays a crummy club circuit, singing songs for oldies for £50 a night - She's never going to be a star because of her parents' short-sighted greed.

75 min

The Long March

A woman returns to Belfast after ten years in England and becomes involved in the Maze prison protest.

90 min

Punters

What is the secret of Joey and Spansky's success at the races?

75 min

Talk To Me

Matthew and his wife are deeply suspicious of psychoanalysis. It's not their sort of thing at all.

75 min

Bird Fancier

75 min

Brigadista

When best-selling author James Fuller Hayes comes to Glasgow to publicise his personal account of the Spanish Civil War, a surprise reunion with two of his old comrades from the Int Brigade reveals contradictory & devastating information.

75 min