Jean Taylor Smith

Jake lives in the shadow of his dying grandfather, who was once the town's toughest hard man. Despite their hatred of each other, Jake's sole aim is to be as tough as the old man was. One day in Jake's life, as he drifts, drinks and fights, leads to a bleak realisation.

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Churchill's People is a British anthology series based on A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Winston Churchill's four-volume history of Britain and its former colonies. 26 episodes were produced by the BBC and initially broadcast from 30 December 1974 to 23 June 1975.

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When Jamie's maternal grandmother dies, he and his brother Tommy are separated - Tommy is taken off to a welfare home and Jamie goes to live with his other grandmother and uncle. His life is far from happy, filled with silence, rejection and bouts of violence.

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The first part of Bill Douglas' influential trilogy harks back to his impoverished upbringing in early-'40s Scotland. Cinema was his only escape - he paid for it with the money he made from returning empty jam jars - and this escape is reflected most closely at this time of his life as an eight-year-old living on the breadline with his half-brother and sick grandmother in a poor mining village.

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A salesman learns a few lessons from the locals when he goes to Yorkshire for a business course.

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Three stories reflecting life in the Orkney Islands, two set in the past, and one in the present.

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Stuck in a dead-end job, Graham Merrill adopts an otter, Mij, as a pet and then moves to an isolated village in western Scotland. Together they set out to explore the curious and magnificent natural wonders that surround their seaside home. Soon, Graham finds himself falling in love with the beautiful town doctor, Mary. Before long, the three become inseparable friends.

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Dr Finlay's Casebook is a BBC television series that was broadcast from 1962 until 1971. Based on A. J. Cronin's novella Country Doctor, the storylines centred on a general medical practice in the fictional Scottish town of Tannochbrae during the late 1920s.

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What was the secret of the great deserted house overlooking the sea from the lonely peninsula on the Scottish coast? Why was the house so closely guarded by the silent men who would have no dealings with their neighbours' in the village below? In Judith Kerr's adaptation of John Buchan's most exciting novel Huntingtower you can see how chance brought together strange partners to solve the mystery. A retired grocer, a poet, and a band of tough, ragged Gorbals Boy Scouts combine forces to uncover the secret. Huntingtower by John Buchan was adapted as a six-part BBC Television Children's serial by Judith Kerr and first broadcast on the BBC-tv network on Sundays (5.35–6.05pm) from 16 June to 21 July 1957. It starred James Hayter and Richard Wordsworth.

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To Laura Hammond's large family, she is simply the mother who makes all their lives run more smoothly. But although they don’t know it, she is a very successful novelist and when her screenplay comes to the attention of a Hollywood producer, Laura is suddenly plunged into the big time.

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The first of the seven "Doctor" films, based on Richard Gordon's novels and released between 1954 and 1970. Simon Sparrow is a newly arrived medical student at St Swithin's hospital in London. Falling in with three longer-serving hopefuls he is soon immersed in the wooing, imbibing and fast sports-car driving that constitute 1950s medical training. There is, however, always the looming and formidable figure of chief surgeon Sir Lancelot Spratt to remind them of their real purpose.

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Jean Raymond an upper class woman with a gambling addiction, is given a twelve-month prison sentence resulting from her inability to pay her debts. At first she is overwhelmingly depressed by life in the women's prison; gradually, however, her misery is relieved by the many close friends she makes there. This sympathetic drama traces the contrasting lives and often faltering progress of the inmates of a women's prison.

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After the 1715 defeat of the clans, one of the highland leaders, Rob Roy MacGregor escapes, has lots of adventures, gets married, and eventually becomes enough of a nuisance to George I to be outlawed, and hunted by the English

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