Second City Firsts (1973-78 TV Anthology series) (Incomplete)

About

Second City Firsts is a British drama anthology series of single plays, broadcast by the BBC, all lasting thirty minutes. Recorded at BBC Pebble Mill in Birmingham, or sometimes filmed on location, the series was broadcast between 15 October 1973 and 13 May 1978. The series title referred both to Pebble Mill's location in England's Second City, and the fact that the series commissioned an unprecedented amount of first-time writers. Among the up and coming writers were Willy Russell, Alan Bleasdale, Mike Leigh and former wrestler cum actor Brian Glover, while among the early appearances of future up and coming stars were Alison Steadman, Michael Gambon, Philip Jackson. Toyah Wilcox, Paul Shane, Phil Daniels, Julie Walters, Richard Griffiths, Elizabeth Spriggs, Jack Shepherd, Alun Armstrong, Bob Peck, Pete Postlethwaite, Gwen Taylor and George Costigan to name but a few. There were a few notable episodes in the series, such as "Early To Bed", which saw an 18 year old student having an affair with a young married woman next door (Alison Steadman). The 1974 episode "Girl", about a homosexual relationship between two members in the Women's Royal Army Corps, featured the first lesbian (and same-sex) kiss on British television, between Alison Steadman (as Jackie) and Myra Frances (as Harvey). The recording of the episode was discovered in the Thames Television archives decades later, and digitised by the BBC. The 1975 episode "Club Havana" featured actress Julie Walters in her first television role. The transmission tape for the episode is missing, however unedited studio footage survives containing the entire play, but without the opening titles. The 1976 episode "Jack Flea's Birthday Celebration" was written by Ian McEwan, his screen debut, while the final episode "Rotten" told the story of a teenager who lives a fantasy life inspired by The Beatles.

Of the 53 plays in the series, only 19 episodes survive in broadcast quality, a further 11 episodes exist in various domestic videotape formats and sequences exist from 3 partially lost episodes, while a total of 19 episodes are currently entirely missing from the archives. These surviving episodes are listed here, though there may be more found later floating about. Apart from the episode "Girl" (1974) (which I have already uploaded on Internet Archive), the rest of these videos you have Adam (Paul) Adamant to thank for these. He has a channel on here called Paul's Family TV Archive and can be found here: https://archive.org/details/@paul_in_newfoundland. As he is concentrating on uploading Family or Children's TV series, he has given me permission to upload some of his non family series to ease some of his workload, and as I know these anthology series are often sought after - and at serious risk from being lost, as some of these missing episodes from this series highlight - I thought I would upload these to preserve them. Copyright belongs to the creator and no offence or infringement is intended with these uploads. My only reason is to preserve thee episodes so that they are not lost forever, because some only survive via people's recordings and it would be a shame if these works from TV's past disappear forever.

Human-made No record of this work says a model made it. What this means.

Archive

Internet Archive, in The VHS Vault

Licence or status

The Internet Archive states none for this item.

Language

English

Who can watch

The archive gives no rating. Invisible Network shows it to Teens profiles and older, judged from its collection and subjects. How films are placed