Saturday Playhouse was a 60-minute UK anthology television series produced by and airing on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) from 4 January 1958 until 1 April 1961. There were sixty-eight episodes, among them adaptations of the plays The Man Who Came to Dinner and The Cat and the Canary. One of the episodes, Alex Atkinson’s classic thriller Design for Murder, was featured twice on the BBC: first on Saturday Playhouse (Saturday, 15 March 1958; S1/Ep.6) and again from the BBC's own theatre in Bristol (Thursday, 6 July 1961).
Episode 1
An anthology series of dramatisations of plays.
Episode 2
An upper middle-class family is ruled by the ancient and churlish matriarch. Her daughters' marriages are all in jeopardy, with affairs and communions with the dead. It's difficult to find any solitude or sanity in the family.
Episode 3
No overview available.
Episode 4
No overview available.
Episode 5
A spinster schoolteacher arrives in a Welsh mining valley and discovers a boy genius in her class.
Episode 6
No overview available.
Episode 7
No overview available.
Episode 8
Ellen Creed struggles to hold down her job as housekeeper-companion to the retired actress Leonora Fiske whilst trying to protect her two disturbed sisters from the threat of incarceration.
Episode 9
A dying old man changes his will to leave everything to the new housemaid who has caught his eye, much to the alarm of his three grown up children and grandson.
Episode 10
No overview available.
Episode 11
The action takes place in a bedroom in a Portsmouth hotel, the wardroom of H.M.S. Sherwood, and the living-room at Admiralty House.
Episode 12
The love affairs of three young Englishmen at a language cramming school in the south of France. Diana, the sister of one of the boys, arrives in town to flirt with all of her brothers' schoolmates.
Episode 13
No overview available.
Episode 14
A financier is accused of murder when his brother-in-law is found dead in his garden pond. After winning the court case he returns home to find that his lawyer has romantic inclinations towards his wife.
Episode 15
The host of a dinner party is murdered.
Episode 16
No overview available.
Episode 17
No overview available.
Episode 18
A wealthy man lives on the Dover Road, a traditional path of elopers. His practice of forcing such couples to see one another in the sober light of home life in his house leads to a personal involvement for him.
Episode 19
No overview available.
Episode 20
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Episode 21
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Episode 22
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Episode 23
A duke imprisoned for 15 years in a castle in France feigns blindness for five years to lull the suspicions of his captors in order to plan his escape.
Episode 24
A widow weds a magistrate and makes her 19-year-old son act as a boy.
Episode 25
No overview available.
Episode 26
in 19th-century Paris, a sinister hypnotist tries to turn a simple Irish girl into an opera star.
Episode 27
Eynon Evans plays the part of Inspector Probert George, who was tortured in a prisoner-of-war camp when his plans for escape were discovered, is dead after five years in a mental home. His five fellow prisoners had sworn that if George died they would kill the man who had betrayed him to the Germans. But which of them was to do the killing? And how?
Episode 28
No overview available.
Episode 29
No overview available.
Episode 30
At an old, dark house, on a dark and stormy night, an ill-assorted group of people meet for the reading of a millionaire's will. But there's a madman on the loose.
Episode 31
The story of a young boxer's rise to fame.
Episode 32
A woman who has an absolutely untarnished reputation unaccountably steals a black-chiffon nightgown days before her son's wedding.
Episode 33
No overview available.
Episode 34
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Episode 35
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Episode 36
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Episode 37
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Episode 38
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Episode 39
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Episode 40
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Episode 41
After his daughter weds, a middle-aged widower with a profitable farm decides to remarry but finds choosing a suitable mate a problematic process.
Episode 42
No overview available.
Episode 43
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Episode 44
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Episode 45
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Episode 46
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Episode 47
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Episode 48
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Episode 49
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Episode 50
No overview available.
Episode 51
Sheridan Whiteside, famous as an author, broadcaster and expert on just about everything, is invited to dinner by a pompous small-town businessman - and stays rather longer than anyone anticipated.
Episode 52
No overview available.
Episode 53
A working-class boy gets a scholarship to a public school.
Episode 54
No overview available.
Episode 55
No overview available.
Episode 56
A young lady is filled with daydreams until she meets her reality man.
Episode 57
Descius Heiss is a French expatriate, and former Devil's Island prisoner, with two passions; driving shrewd bargains in antiques at his Sly Corner Shop, and the care of his motherless, violin-playing daughter, Margaret. But, his comfortable wealth comes more from being a fence for stolen goods than it does buying-and-selling antiques. His secret is discovered by his shop assistant Archie Fellowes, a nasty, sniveling young rat, and he begins blackmailing Heiss. Heiss employs the usual solution to blackmailers, and the film ends in a London concert-hall where Margaret is playing the Mendelssohm Violin Concerto.
Episode 58
What is Margaret hiding from the rest of the family when they arrive for their father's funeral?
Episode 59
No overview available.
Episode 60
No overview available.
Episode 61
An embittered professor comes near to wrecking the lives of a young man and young woman whose love for each other has been accidentally revealed to him through a letter written by the boy to the girl.
Episode 62
No overview available.
Episode 63
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Episode 64
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Episode 65
The up-and-down lives of a married couple over decades, depicted as a series of bedroom scenes.
Episode 66
No overview available.
Episode 67
No overview available.
Episode 68
A Navy lieutenant is borrowed by the British to supervise torpedo experiments after one of their scientists is killed.
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