It's New Year's Eve in Thatcher's de-industrialising Britain. The scene is set at a seedy bar in Liverpool where a group of Irish Protestant and Irish Catholic pensioners will gather to clash and bash the new year in.

A play by Victoria Wood. Frances is 28, single and happy, despite ritual interrogation from her family as to why she's not married. Then she meets Jim, and finds she has decisions to make.

A TV play by Beryl Bainbridge. Formby. As the family gathers for Grandma's funeral, it seems to Olive that the eccentric old lady they have come to bury is far from dead.

Three boys watch horror films on late night TV and let their imaginations run wild seeing a man in a local cemetery who they believe to be a vampire.

In the days leading up the Queen's Silver Jubilee, Pauline, a recently separated single mother, receives a visit from a bailiff and is given 15 days to address her overdue rent payments. Meanwhile, the local council is under pressure to cut expenditure, and their decisions result in Pauline's mentally handicapped daughter Paula being transferred from a care home for special needs children to an old people's home, where she is all alone.