''Sunday Night Theatre'' was a long-running series of televised live television plays screened by

BBC Television BBC Television is a service of the BBC. The corporation has operated a public broadcast television service in the United Kingdom, under the terms of a royal charter, since 1927. It produced television programmes from its own studios from 193 ...

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 Rudolph Cartier (born Rudolph Kacser, renamed himself in Germany to Rudolph Katscher; 17 April 1904 – 7 June 1994) was an Austrian television director, filmmaker, screenwriter and producer who worked predominantly in British television, excl ...

and

Nigel Kneale Thomas Nigel Kneale (28 April 1922 – 29 October 2006) was a Manx screenwriter who wrote professionally for more than 50 years, was a winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, and was twice nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best British Scr ...

were produced for this series, including '' Arrow to the Heart'' (1952, 1956) and '' Nineteen Eighty-Four'' (1954). 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 1969 and 1974.

Archive status

The overwhelming majority of the run (1950–1959) of 721 plays are missing from television archives; only 27 are believed to still exist as

telerecordings Kinescope , shortened to kine , also known as telerecording in Britain, is a recording of a television program on motion picture film, directly through a lens focused on the screen of a video monitor. The process was pioneered during the 1940s ...

. The Thursday 'repeat performance; of ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'' survives in this form. (See

Wiping Lost television broadcasts are mostly those early television programs which cannot be accounted for in studio archives (or in personal archives) usually because of deliberate destruction or neglect. Common reasons for loss A significant prop ...

.) Also among the surviving episodes are at least two from 1953, ''It Is Midnight, Dr. Schweitzer'' and '' The Lady from the Sea''. A recording of the soundtrack of the production of ''

Requiem for a Heavyweight "Requiem for a Heavyweight" is a teleplay written by Rod Serling and produced for the live television show ''Playhouse 90'' on 11 October 1956. Six years later, it was adapted as a 1962 feature film starring Anthony Quinn, Jackie Gleason, Mickey R ...

'' broadcast in March 1957, which features

Sean Connery Sir Sean Connery (born Thomas Connery; 25 August 1930 – 31 October 2020) was a Scottish actor. He was the first actor to portray fictional British secret agent James Bond on film, starring in seven Bond films between 1962 and 1983. Origina ...

in the lead role, was recovered in 2014.

References

External links

* 1950 British television series debuts 1959 British television series endings BBC Television shows 1950s British anthology television series Lost BBC episodes 1950s British drama television series English-language television shows Black-and-white British television shows {{BBC-tv-prog-stub