Laidlaw Dalling

The final days in the Bunker, with Hitler becoming more and more paranoid, plumbing the depths of his madness and reaching his well deserved fate.

Ken Loach's first production for ITV, shown under the 'Sunday Night Theatre' strand (originally broadcast 18th July 1971). After a Lifetime is something of a neglected, social realist masterpiece that focuses on two brothers, brought together by the death of their father, reflecting on his life of militancy and political activism. At the time critic Nancy Banks Smith called it ‘brilliantly funny, and moving with a sort of subterranean rage’. Smith himself plays the older brother with a brilliant, raw emotion.

Dr Max Harrow is awakened from a re-current nightmare in which he is pursued by a barbaric accusing figures, to find a tramp collapsed on his doorstep, The tramp is suffering from a genetic radiation disorder that should killed him in infancy as it did Harrow's baby son. The man is the living image of Harrow's nightmare figures, Clutched in his hand is a human finger bone and he speaks a strange, unknown tongue,

The TARDIS materialises not far from Paris in 1794 — one of the bloodiest years following the French Revolution of 1789. The travellers become involved with an escape chain rescuing prisoners from the guillotine and get caught up in the machinations of an English undercover spy, James Stirling — alias Lemaitre, governor of the Conciergerie prison.