This week we celebrate 50 years of Play For Today. On this day in 1970, the very first play was broadcast – The Long Distance Piano Player, starring Ray Davies. I will be broadcasting this at 9.20, the same time it originally went out (it even went out on a Thursday night, for optimal synchronicity).

In the afternoon we have some schools programming and a CITV block. After Star Trek, we take a dip into the late nineties home improvement craze with Changing Rooms and Ground Force, then some Robot Wars before the evening’s main event. After this, we look at der trubbles with a late news report on the Enniskillen bombing, and a Cook Report focusing on racketeering by paramilitary organisations. We finish off with the sixth episode of Micro Live.

4.00 Ceefax
4.05 The Pink Panther
4.15 ITV Schools: Experiment – Scattering of Alpha Particles
4.30 ITV Schools: Starting Out – Showdown
5.00 BBC Schools: Scene – Faulty Towers
5.20 Thomas the Tank Engine – S01E19 The Flying Kipper
5.25 Thomas the Tank Engine – S01E20 Whistles & Sneezes
5.30 Tugs – S01E08 Quarantine
5.45 CITV: Animaniacs
6.10 CITV: Just Us
6.35 Home and Away
7.00 Star Trek: The Next Generation – S02E05 Loud as a Whisper
7.50 Changing Rooms
8.20 Ground Force
8.50 Robut Wars
9.20 Play For Today: The Long Distance Piano Player (1970)
10.20 BBC1 Late News
10.50 The Cook Report: Worse Than the Mafia
11.15 Micro Live (Episode 6)
12.05 Closedown