Howard Brenton (Writer)

Play for Today

Play for Today is a British television anthology drama series, produced by the BBC and transmitted on BBC1 from 1970 to 1984. During the run, more than three hundred programmes, featuring original television plays, and adaptations of stage plays and novels, were transmitted. The individual episodes were between fifty and a hundred minutes in duration.

Release Date1970-10-15

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

Episode Count2

Vote Count10

Spooks

Tense drama series about the different challenges faced by the British Security Service as they work against the clock to safeguard the nation. The title is a popular colloquialism for spies, and the series follows the work of a group of MI5 officers based at the service's Thames House headquarters, in a highly secure suite of offices known as The Grid.

Release Date2002-05-13

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

Episode Count14

Vote Count141

Thirty-Minute Theatre

An anthology of short plays shown on BBC Television between 1965 and 1973, used in part at least as a training ground for new writers, on account of its short length, and which therefore attracted many writers who later became well known.

Release Date1965-10-07

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

Episode Count1

Vote Count8

Centre Play

Anthology series of half hour plays produced in BBC's Television Centre's studios.

Release Date1973-07-19

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

Episode Count1

Vote Count1

Plays for Britain

An anthology series of six contemporary plays from writers at relatively early stages in their careers.

Release Date1976-04-06

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

Episode Count1

Vote Count1

Dead Head

London based petty crook Eddie Cass agrees to pick up a package and courier it across the capital. When nobody answers the door at the drop-off, Eddie opens the package and finds a woman’s severed head in a hatbox. He panics and dumps it in the River Thames. Returning home, Cass is kidnapped by the mysterious Eldridge and his heavies who inform Eddie that he has been framed for the murder.

Release Date1986-01-15

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

Episode Count4

Vote Count6

#aiww: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei

On 3 April 2011, as he was boarding a flight to Taipei, the Chinese Artist Ai Weiwei was arrested at Beijing Airport. Advised merely that his travel “could damage state security”, he was escorted to a van by officials after which he disappeared for 81 days. On his release, the government claimed that his imprisonment related to tax evasion.

Release Date2013-04-11

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

Vote Count2

The Saliva Milkshake

Howard Brenton's play, written for television, examines terrorism and the state's complex relationship with it and language surrounding it.

Release Date1975-01-06

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

Vote Count1

Brassneck

Through the story of a single family, Brassneck traces a history that parallels the Labour Party's advent to power in 1945 through to the property speculation of the 1960s and the disillusionment with the Labour government in the early 1970s. Like most of the early work of the writers, David Hare and Howard Brenton, committed radical (if not revolutionary) socialists throughout the 1970s, it is a satirical attack on capitalist greed and corruption, full of savage, and often disturbing, humour.

Release Date1975-05-22

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

Vote Count1

Creditors

Nobody enjoys being in debt, financial or otherwise, but August Strindberg’s 1888 play – which the author ranked as his finest achievement – plays with masterly skill on the themes of emotional debit and credit to create a situation as painfully enjoyable for the audience as it is nightmarish for the protagonists.

Release Date2025-09-14

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

The Paradise Run

Johnny has joined the army because he likes canoeing, but ends up in a war-torn city and is compromised into helping the enemy. However, desertion will not be a solution, and he finds himself more distressed than ever.

Release Date1976-04-05

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

Desert of Lies

The fortunes of two expeditions a century and a half apart become mysteriously linked in the same desolate stretch of Kalahari Desert. In 1848 the Broon family are sent by the London Missionary Society to look for and convert a legendary race of strangely deformed savages. In 1983, a team of three people go off in search of what really happened.

Release Date1984-03-13

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

Vote Count1

Journey of a Freedom Fighter

A freedom fighter's journey from armed resistance to cultural resistance.

Release Date2014-11-15

DepartmentProduction

JobAssociate Producer

Iranian Nights

A Channel Four special presentation of the Royal Court Theatre 1989 production, London. with Paul Bhattacharjee, Nabil Shaban and Fiona Victory. "Iranian Nights" was a play written and produced as a direct response by writers and artists to the notorious Feb 14 1989 Fatwa (a sentence of death) from Iran's leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, placed on Salman Rushdie for his novel "The Satanic Verses", regarded by fundamentalist Muslims as blasphemous.

Release Date1989-01-01

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

Vote Count2

Skinflicker

This chilling and provocative faux home movie presents the story of three dissidents and their plan to commit a revolutionary act on film. Bicât and scriptwriter Howard Brenton explore the consequences and co-option of political violence with hard, grubby directness and a pre-punk, semi-nihilistic attack on bourgeois values.

Release Date1972-01-01

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

Vote Count1

Hampstead Theatre At Home: Drawing The Line

London, 1947. Summoned by the Prime Minister from the Court where he is presiding judge, Cyril Radcliffe is given an unlikely mission. He is to travel to India, a country he has never visited, and, with limited survey information, no expert support and no knowledge of cartography, he is to draw the border which will divide the Indian sub-continent into two new Sovereign Dominions. To make matters even more challenging, he has only six weeks to complete the task. Wholly unsuited to his role, Radcliffe is unprepared for the dangerous whirlpool of political intrigue and passion into which he is plunged – untold consequences may even result from the illicit liaison between the Leader of the Congress Party and the Viceroy’s wife… As he begins to break under the pressure he comes to realise that he holds in his hands the fate of millions of people.

Release Date2020-04-13

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter