The early films of the production company Woodfall, which include most of the key titles in the British ‘New Wave’ of the early 1960s, are coming to Talking Pictures TV from 7 November.
Co-founded by director Tony Richardson, writer John Osborne and producer Harry Saltzman, Woodfall Film Productions was responsible for a total of twenty films, most of them directed by Richardson himself. It has been more than three decades since the last Woodfall production, but the company still exists as the copyright-holder for its first seven pictures: Look Back in Anger (1959), The Entertainer (1960), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), A Taste of Honey (1961), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), Tom Jones (1963) and Girl with Green Eyes (1964).
These films have now been licensed for broadcast by Talking Pictures TV. Most of them were first transmitted on ITV between 1965 and 1973 before subsequently passing to the BBC and then to Channel Four in the 1980s. The exception was Girl with Green Eyes, the least well-known and least-often revived of the group, which premiered on BBC2 in 1971 and has not been on free-to-air television since 1996.
We will also have to wait a little longer to see it on Talking Pictures TV. The first four titles to be shown are as follows:
Look Back in Anger: 7.30pm Mon 7 Nov; 8.0pm Sat 12 Nov; 11.25pm Wed 16 Nov; 10.45pm Sun 20 Nov
A Taste of Honey: 9.20pm Fri 11 Nov; 9.20pm Sun 13 Nov; 9.35pm Mon 14 Nov; 8.40pm Sun 20 Nov
The Entertainer: 9.20pm Tue 15 Nov; 9.0pm Sat 19 Nov; 9.30pm Wed 23 Nov; 9.0pm Sun 27 Nov
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner: 10.40pm Mon 21 Nov; 8.20pm Sat 26 Nov; 11.40pm Thu 1 Dec; 9.05pm Sun 4 Dec
You can see a trailer for the Woodfall collection here: http://talkingpicturestv.co.uk/video/woodfall-films-collection/