Screen Two

A platoon of British soldiers aggressively descend upon a car on a Northern Irish border roadside and promptly execute the driver and apprehend the passenger.

He is a respectable pillar of London society who yearns for an idyllic existence away from the noise and the smoke. She feels hemmed in by the confines of an isolated fishing village and dreams of the bright lights, and even brighter people, of the great metropolis. On a hot August day in 1883, Clement Scott, the writer, and Louie Jermy, the miller's daughter, meet each other for the first time.

Mavis's plight will ring a bell in the heart of anyone who ever felt like murdering a telephone. Is some ghoulish mind behind the increasingly mysterious and sinister calls she gets? Is it madness or the system, or a joke that's bigger than all of us?

In 1965, at the age of 25, Alan Ackland is sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of a business associate. In 1971, Sylvia Barker, lonely and depressed after a failed marriage and with two young children to bring up alone, seeks a new direction in her life and applies to become a voluntary prison visitor. Several years later, their paths cross.

Alan and Sylvia fall in love and Alan gains a renewed sense of purpose. He begins to hope for an eventual release on licence. However both he and Sylvia have to face the fact that, for the foreseeable future, they cannot enjoy any physical intimacy. They decide to treat their affair as a long Victorian courtship.

It is the Easter holidays at Gorse Park Preparatory School. Everyone has gone home except four elderly members of staff and young Paul Blake, the orphaned son of the former headmaster. The weather is beautiful, the countryside is lovely, but all is far from peaceful as the adults quarrel and Paul grows up.