Name: Iron Duchess - BBC Saturday Night Theater - William Douglas-Home
Uploaded: 2020-09-10T12:37:05+00:00
Duration: 1 h 26 min 30 s
Description: William Douglas Home was a British dramatist and politician. He wrote some 50 plays, most of them comedies in an upper class setting. "In the space of a month or two after his release he wrote two pla

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3 years ago

William Douglas Home was a British dramatist and politician. He wrote some 50 plays, most of them comedies in an upper class setting. "In the space of a month or two after his release he wrote two plays which were successful in London in 1947. The first, Now Barabbas, was based on his experience in gaol and in the latter some of the characters were drawn from his family."

Although Douglas-Home was a prolific playwright, his works have neither the depth nor the durability of such near contemporaries as Rattigan or Coward. However, his play The Reluctant Debutante (1955) has been adapted twice into film. The first film, called The Reluctant Debutante, released in 1958, featured Rex Harrison and Sandra Dee, with a screenplay by the playwright himself. The second was released in 2003, under the title What a Girl Wants, starring Amanda Bynes, Colin Firth, and Kelly Preston. The remake features a hereditary peer in the House of Lords who disclaims his title to stand for election to the House of Commons. Douglas-Home's brother Alec was one of the first to do so after the Peerage Act 1963.

As part of the 1975 centennial season of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, Douglas-Home wrote a curtain raiser called Dramatic Licence, in which Richard D'Oyly Carte, W. S. Gilbert, and Arthur Sullivan plan the birth of Trial by Jury in 1875. Peter Pratt played Carte, Kenneth Sandford played Gilbert, and John Ayldon played Sullivan

Saturday Night Theatre was a long-running radio drama strand on BBC Radio 4. The strand showcased feature-length, middle-brow single plays on Saturday evenings for more than 50 years, having been launched in April 1943. The plays featured in the strand included stage plays, book adaptations and original dramatisations. For most of its history, programmes ran for 90 minutes and were largely entertainment-centred, such as thrillers, comedies and mysteries.

Saturday Night Theatre was noted as the major drama of the week on BBC Radio 4, until it was scrapped as a programme strand in 1996. Shorter plays continued to be broadcast on Radio 4 on Saturday evenings from 1996 until the relaunch of the channel's schedule in April 1998 by James Boyle, when single dramas were removed from the Saturday evening schedule. Since 1998, the main weekly play on the station has been The Saturday Play, a daytime programme that runs for 60–90 minutes.

There have since been campaigns to bring back Saturday Night Theatre, but in the context of BBC budget cuts, that have included the 2010 axing of Radio 4's Friday Play (established in 1998, when Saturday Night Theatre was abolished), any return looks unlikely.

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