Michael Colgan

Follows the "Beckett on Film" project, which produced film adaptations of writer Samuel Beckett's nineteen stage plays. The documentary features excerpts from the "Beckett on Film" versions of "Not I", "Krapp's Last Tape", "Endgame", "What Where", and "Waiting for Godot".

In the Korean war, the commander of an Air Rescue helicopter team must show a hot-shot former jet pilot how important helicopter rescue work is and turn him into a team player.

During the run of a particularly awful interpretation of Richard III, the star, Anthony O'Malley, begins to frequent a rough pub to develop his character. He meets Barreller who he discovers owes someone he's never met a considerable sum of money. Seeing an opportunity to make some fast money, O'Malley convinces hapless extra, Tom, to meet Barreller as the debt collector.

Vigilante Terror was one of the last of the "Wild Bill" Elliot westerns for Columbia. This time, Elliot comes to rescue an imperiled storekeeper. A band of masked vigilantes is laying waste to the countryside, and the storekeeper is blamed. Wild Bill saves the day by going undercover -- or under hood, as it were

A scientist takes the brain of dead man and revives it via electrodes as it lays suspended in a tank of liquid. Soon, the brain grows to possess enormous psychic powers and inflicts its personality upon the doctor who saved it, creating a "Jekyll and Hyde" paradigm.

An autocratic Director (Harold Pinter) and his Assistant (Rebecca Pidgeon) put the final touches to the last scene of some kind of dramatic presentation, which consists entirely of a man (John Gielgud) standing still onstage.

In Krapp's Last Tape, which was written in English in 1958, an old man reviews his life and assesses his predicament. We learn about him not from the 69-year-old man on stage, but from his 39-year-old self on the tape he chooses to listen to. On the 'awful occasion' of his birthday, Krapp was then and is now in the habit of reviewing the past year and 'separating the grain from the husks'. He isolates memories of value, fertility and nourishment to set against creeping death 'when all my dust has settled'. One part of 19 parts for series "Beckett on Film" featuring filmed versions of Beckett plays, some screened at the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival and some on Channel 4 television in the UK in June 2001.

A reader tells a sad story to a listener, who only knocks in response.

The land is filled with people in urns chattering at top speed, but only to themselves, not to one another. The focus goes to three people: a man, his mistress and his wife.

All the action takes place in a swish London restaurant where two coarse-grained strategy consultants are dining with their respective wives. At an adjacent table a banker and his wife banter over his recently discovered affair. But while Pinter gets a lot of laughs out of these gold-plated philistines, he also suggests they are displaced people. Shorn of any inherited values, they live in an eternal present of sex, food and conspicuous consumption. - Michael Billington, Guardian