ITV Saturday Night Theatre/ITV Sunday Night Theatre

1 9 6 9 – 1 9 7 4 (UK)
200 x 60 minute episodes

Originally titled ITV Saturday Night Theatre, this long-running dramatic anthology series from ITV debuted on 11 January 1969 with the play “Park People” by Alun Owen.

Among the 200 plays aired during its five-year run were productions of “Long Day’s Journey into Night” by Eugene O’Neill, “A Doll’s House” by Henrik Ibsen, “Arms and the Man” by George Bernard Shaw and adaptions of works by William Shakespeare, James Joyce, Wilkie Collins, Simon Gray, Sam Shepard, Israel Horovitz, Arthur Miller, August Strindberg, JB Priestley, Lanford Wilson, and John Mortimer.

Dennis Potter used his own background as a Russian language clerk in the War Office when writing “Lay Down Your Arms”, which was set during the 1956 Suez Crisis and the Russian invasion of Hungary – a scenario he later developed into the 1993 series Lipstick On Your Collar.

Actor Frank Finlay won a British Academy Television Award as Best Actor for his performance in the title role in “The Death of Adolf Hitler” (7/1/73). Set entirely in the Berlin bunker, Vincent Tilsley’s play moved through the last ten days of Hitler’s life as his dream of a thousand-year Reich became a drugged and paranoid nightmare.

The six-part series Wicked Women aired as part of Sunday Night Theatre in 1970 (the title changed when ITV moved the series from Saturday to Sunday). The episodes were produced by London Weekend Television and based on true-life cases of women who made the headlines of Victorian newspapers.

Actors who appeared in the series included Laurence Olivier, Sean Connery, Michael Caine, Anthony Hopkins, George C. Scott, Telly Savalas, Ralph Richardson, John Gielgud, Robert Culp, Richard Chamberlain, Ian McKellen, Stanley Baker, Martin Sheen, Michael Gambon, John Hurt, Glenda Jackson, Diane Cilento, Hannah Gordon, Denholm Elliott, Adrienne Corri, John Thaw, Ian Hendry, Helen Mirren, Michael Craig, Tommy Steele, Alfred Burke, Diana Rigg, Jim Dale, June Brown, Patricia Routledge, Robin Askwith, Leonard Rossiter, Liz Fraser,  Brian Blessed, Norman Rossington, Geoffrey Bayldon and Maureen Lipman.