Maxine Peake
On an isolated English farm in 1657, Fanny lives a quiet life with her oppressive husband John and their young son. One day their life is rocked with the arrival of young couple Thomas and Rebecca who claim to have been robbed and need a place to stay. But are these strangers really who they say they are?
After 6 years of brutal murders the West Yorkshire Police fear that they may have already interviewed The Ripper and let him back into the world to continue his reign of terror upon the citizens of Yorkshire, but things become more difficult for the Police when they discover they not only have The Ripper to catch, but a copycat killer is also at large. Assistant Chief Constable of the Manchester Police, Peter Hunter, is called in to oversee the West Yorkshire Police’s Ripper investigation, with the help of John Nolan and Helen Marshall, both detectives from the Manchester Police, they decide to go back and look at the crime reports from the Rippers victims to see what they could have missed.
A drama about the infamous 1819 Manchester massacre, which killed an estimated 18 protesters and injured up to 700.
David Blair directs this powerful British Drama, loosely inspired by John Steinbeck’s novel ‘Of Mice and Men’. Set in Nottingham, the film revolves around the relationship between the thuggish Danny (Stephen Graham) and Joseph (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), a giant of a man with a mental age of seven. When Danny finds himself in debt to a local crime boss, he feels he is left with no choice but to manipulate Joseph into participating in a series of underground cage fights from which Danny can pay his debts.
Filmedoverthreeyearsthistwo-partdocumentaryfollowstheprogressof6brightteenagersfromdisadvantagedbackgrounds,exploringthechallengesthattheyface.
Amy Dorrit spends her days earning money for the family and looking after her proud father who is a long term inmate of Marshalsea debtors’ prison in London. Amy and her family’s world is transformed when her employer’s son, Arthur Clennam, returns from overseas to solve his family’s mysterious legacy and discovers that their lives are interlinked.
Comedy series examining the life of a woman who dates both men and women.
Documentary which uses the latest, most detailed imagery to reveal the monthly life cycle of the moon. From Wales to Wyoming, Hong Kong to Croydon, the programme finds out how the moon shapes life on Earth, as well as exploring its mysterious dark side and discovering how the moon’s journey around Earth delivers one of nature’s most awe-inspiring events – a total solar eclipse. And at the end of a remarkable year of lunar activity, we find out why so many supermoons have been lighting up the night sky.
A woman who has a funny bone for a backbone, Funny Cow charts the rise of a female stand-up comic who delivers tragedy and comedy in equal measure in the sometimes violent and always macho clubs of Northern England in the ’70s.
The Village is a BBC TV series written by Peter Moffat. The drama is set in a Derbyshire village in the 20th century. The first series of what Moffat hopes will become a 42-hour TV drama was broadcast in spring 2013 and covered the years 1914 to 1920. A second series has been confirmed for 2014 which will continue the story into the 1920s. Future series would be set in the Second World War, post-war Austerity Britain, and so on.
The Village tells the story of life in a Derbyshire village through the eyes of a central character, Bert Middleton. Bert has been portrayed as a boy by Bill Jones, as a teen by Alfie Stewart, and as an old man by David Ryall. John Simm plays Bert’s father John Middleton, an alcoholic Peak District farmer, and Maxine Peake plays Bert’s mother, Grace. Peake is a preferred actress of the writer, who has called her “the best actress of her generation”, and she has featured in two previous Moffat series, Criminal Justice and Silk.
Writer Peter Moffat has spoken of wanting to create ‘a British Heimat’, alluding to Edgar Reitz’s epic German saga Heimat, which followed one extended family in a region of Rhineland from 1919 to 1982. Unlike Downton Abbey, this version of history is a working-class history—”domestics are expected to face the walls when the master walks by”.
The story of three of the children who were victims in the 2012 grooming and sex trafficking case in Rochdale, for which nine men were convicted and sentenced. The drama explores how these girls were groomed, how they were ignored by the authorities directly responsible for protecting them, and how they eventually made themselves heard.
Classic Shakespeare play adapted for television by Russell T Davies. In the tyrannical court of Athens, pitiless dictator Theseus plans his wedding to Hippolyta, a prisoner of war, and young Hermia is sentenced to death by her own father. Meanwhile, in the town below, amateur theatre group the Mechanicals rehearse, with all their comic rivalries. And beyond Athens, in the wild woods, dark forces are stirring…
From its sell-out run at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre comes a film version of this unique and critically acclaimed production of Hamlet with BAFTA-nominee Maxine Peake in the title role. This ground-breaking stage production, directed by Sarah Frankcom, was the Royal Exchange’s fastest-selling show in a decade.
It’s 1969 at an English girls school full of seething hormones and turbulent emotions; Lydia and Abbie are best friends, existing largely in a universe of two. Abbie is the undisputed leader, with natural charisma and magnetism, and Lydia is fixated on her friend, having long been emotionally abandoned by her single mum, an agoraphobe who hasn’t ventured outside for years and who barely acknowledges her daughter’s presence. Lydia’s fragile world starts to unravel when her white magik-obsessed brother and Abbie sleep together, and a tragedy and ensuing mysterious delirium overtake the school.
After a stroke leaves her husband disabled and fundamentally changed, a spirited Irish wife struggles to keep her family members together. All the while they are under the microscope of an American researcher documenting their recovery process.
Set in the fields of Devon and the WW1 battlefields of Flanders, two brothers fall for the same girl while contending with the pressures of their feudal family life, the war, and the price of courage and cowardice.
An underworld drama set in the early 1980s, about a lonely factory worker whose life is transformed when he becomes a nightclub doorman.
Svengali tells the story of Dixie, a postman from South Wales, and a music fanatic. All his life he’s dreamed of discovering a great band and then one day, trawling through YouTube, he finds them… ‘The Premature Congratulations’. He hunts them down and offers them his management services. They are young, arrogant, sexy and utterly magnificent. Putting their demo on a cassette tape, Dixie heads out onto the streets of London…