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.

Grand Challenge pie-eating contest : ' Winner finishes most whole pies off the belt in half-an-hour. Ties decided on a raw cabbage '. The Bedworth Hog faces tough competition.

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.

Wilkinsons glass-works dominates a Staffordshire town. After a small walkout over pay discrepancies, the workers of the factory vote to go on strike, but they are denied support by their trade union.