Dennis Potter's fictional account of an event that happened in the Forest of Dean in the 1890s when four Frenchmen came over the border from Gloucester with dancing bears, who were subsequently killed by miners coming off the late shift in retaliation for an unrelated attack on a young local girl.

Leo McKern and Michele Dotrice star in the first of David Mercer's trilogy of plays charting the dissolution of Robert Kelvin. An illustrious, ageing and consciously socialist novelist, his memories are triggered by his love for Emma - a woman forty years his junior. His inability to respond to her any more than to the other two women in his life heightens the agony of the play's climax. Also starring Thorley Walters and Rosalind Knight. Directed by Alan Bridges.