1 9 7 7 (UK)
16 x 60 minute episodes
Great Britain, 1990. A dystopian future (at the time) in which Britain is under the grip of the Home Office’s Department of Public Control (PCD), a tyrannically oppressive bureaucracy riding roughshod over the population’s civil liberties.
The all-powerful PCD have done away with the rights of the individual and maintains control through ID cards, rationing, censorship and electronic and physical surveillance.
Food and alcohol are strictly rationed (except for bureaucrats who know how to bend the rules) and independent thought is ruthless suppressed in special state-controlled brainwashing units cunningly disguised as humane rest-homes. Free speech is forbidden and the rule of law no longer protects the weak and defenceless.
Journalist Jim Kyle (Edward Woodward) – who works for The Star, the last of the independent newspapers – is a secret dissident who battles the forces of the establishment, facing imprisonment or death (or worse) at the hands of the PCD and its ruthless controller Herbert Skardon (Robert Lang).
Precariously, Kyle is a bit too keen for his own good on the lovely but lethal Delly Lomas (Barbara Kellerman), Deputy Controller in the PCD
Jim Kyle
Edward Woodward
Herbert Skardon
Robert Lang
Dave Brett
Tony Doyle
Faceless
Paul Hardwick
Delly Lomas
Barbara Kellerman
Marly
Honor Shepherd
Lynn Blake
Lisa Harrow
Kate Smith
Yvonne Mitchell