Armchair Theatre was a British television drama anthology series, which ran on the ITV network from 1956 until 1969 in its original form, and was intermittently resurrected at various points during the 1970s. It was produced initially by ABC Television, and in the 1970s by ABC's successor company Thames Television, which had been created when ABC merged with Associated-Rediffusion in 1968.

Each play would typically last an hour in length - fifty minutes, plus adverts. Many different subjects would be covered and plays could be set in a variety of locations, although contemporary dramas were the most common. The most successful era of Armchair Theatre is generally regarded as being that overseen by the Canadian producer Sydney Newman, who was ABC's Head of Drama from 1958 to 1962, and who personally produced over forty episodes of the programme during this period. Newman had a passion for socially-relevant, challenging drama that tackled sensitive issues, and turned Armchair Theatre into a vehicle for the generation of 'Angry Young Men' who were coming to prominence in the late 1950s and early 60s. The programme was networked nationally on ITV on Sunday evenings, and often drew large audiences. Among the best-known plays to have been screened were No Trams to Lime Street (1959) by Alun Owen and A Night Out (1960) by Harold Pinter.

One particularly notable play was Underground, a science-fiction story transmitted on November 28 1958. A little over halfway through the live broadcast, actor Gareth Jones complained of feeling unwell while off-set in make-up between two of his scenes, and then suddenly collapsed and died. Sydney Newman ordered director William Kotcheff to carry on with the play and "shoot it like a football match", meaning to follow the characters around as they improvised a way of coping with the missing cast member. While Kotcheff hurriedly re-structured the story to be able to bring the play to an end without the missing character, production assistant Verity Lambert took over control of directing the cameras. Live transmission of Armchair Theatre plays ceased soon after this incident, and pre-recording on videotape began to be employed.

After the 1968 ITV franchise overhauls and ABC's metamorphosis into Thames, the programme was dropped until 1974, when a new version was produced under the title Armchair Cinema, effectively a series of short TV movies. In 1978 a final version, Armchair Thriller was produced, and this ran for two years until 1980, when the programme ended for good.

The programme occasionally spun-off ideas into full-blown series. A 1962 adaptation of the John Wyndham short story Dumb Martian, scripted by Clive Exton , was a deliberate showcase for the spin-off science-fiction anthology Out of this World. A 1967 episode, Magnum and Schneider, became the pilot for the hugely popular crime series Callan . One of Thames' 1974 Armchair Cinema entries, a one-off detective drama entitled Reagan by Ian Kennedy Martin, successfully spun-off into the immensely popular series The Sweeney.

Hugely popular at its peak, with audiences occasionally touching an astounding twenty million, Armchair Theatre was an important influence over later similar programmes such as the BBC's The Wednesday Play (1964-1970). This latter programme was initiated by Sydney Newman as a deliberate attempt to echo the success of Armchair Theatre after he had moved to the BBC in 1963.

Overall, four hundred and fifty-seven plays were made and broadcast under the Armchair... banner from 1956 to 1980. Sadly, as is common with much early British television, not all of the plays from the original ABC series survive in the archives.

External links

• Page on the series at the Television Heaven website http://www.televisionheaven.co.uk/at.htm
• Internet Movie Database entry http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0161126/