A Touch of the Sun - BBC Saturday Night Theater - N. C. Hunter

A Touch of the Sun is a 1958 play by the British writer N.C. Hunter.Show more

It premiered at the Grand Theatre in Blackpool before moving to the West End, initially at the Saville Theatre before transferring to the Princes Theatre. Its original run lasted for 202 performances between 31 January and 26 July 1958. The cast included Michael Redgrave, Diana Wynyard, Vanessa Redgrave and Ronald Squire. Michael Redgrave won the Best Actor award at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards.

Norman Charles Hunter was a British playwright whose plays attracted such notable actors to perform them as John Gielgud, Wendy Hiller, Sybil Thorndike, Ralph Richardson, Vanessa Redgrave, Michael Redgrave, and Ingrid Bergman. His play A Picture of Autumn was revived off-Broadway by the Mint Theater Company in 2013. Hunter's play A Day by the Sea was revived off-Broadway by the Mint Theater Company in 2016. It subsequently had its first major UK revival at London's Southwark Playhouse with John Sackville in the title role of Julian Anson.

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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