Dame Joan Collins takes on all of Gertrude Lawrence's lead roles in rare and entertaining television productions of eight out of the nine thirty-minute playlets by Noël Coward which he and Lawrence performed on-stage in sets of three from 1935 as "Tonight at 8.30". 1: 'Hands Across the Sea' (a light comedy). 2: 'Red Peppers' (an interlude with music). 3: 'The Astonished Heart' (a sad love tale). 4: 'Family Album' (a Victorian vignette). 5: 'Fumed Oak' (an unpleasant comedy). 6: 'Ways and Means' (a light comedy). 7: 'Still Life' (a romantic interlude). 8: 'Shadow Play' (a musical fantasy).
Reiko, a female college student, was looking outside with her newly purchased telescope. She bought it impulsively, but since she had no intention of using it, she looked around the neighborhood.
Carmen, a journalist with two children, is on her third marriage, to Antonio, a record producer. Over the course of a year, we follow her through her discontents: Antonio's lateness, his fatigue when she wants to make love, his insistence on her company when she prefers solitude, his treating her work as less important than his, his casual and cruel dismissal of her opinions, her boss assigning her an incompetent editor, bartenders ignoring her, her passage into middle age.
An elderly Nagasaki hibakusha spends a summer caring for her four grandchildren, whose curiosity about the 1945 bombing stirs buried memories and moral questions.
Claude, a militant anarchist, is caught stealing and is shot by a policeman while fleeing the scene. Dodo, a hairdresser, is hit by one of the stray bullets.
