Oxbridge Blues: Living or Dead?

About Oxbridge Blues

Oxbridge Blues is a 1984 British television mini-series, produced and broadcast in the UK by the BBC. It is an anthology of seven unrelated 75-minute teleplays, most of which focus on relationships of one kind or another. Most of the teleplays except one take place in England; "He'll See You Now" takes place in the U.S., and "Sleeps Six" takes place in England and France. The series was broadcast in the U.S. on A&E in 1986 and on PBS in 1988. In Australia, the series was broadcast on ABC in 1987.

The series won the 1987 CableACE Award for Best Dramatic Series. The eponymous first teleplay in the series, "Oxbridge Blues", was nominated for a BAFTA television award for Best Single Drama, and other individual episodes garnered several other awards and nominations.

The seven teleplays were dramatized by the novelist Frederic Raphael from short stories from his own collections Sleeps Six and other stories (1979) and Oxbridge Blues and other stories (1980). He described the television series as "mostly kind of chamber pieces – modest dramas about love and sex and honour and marriage". Raphael directed one episode, James Cellan Jones directed four, and Richard Stroud directed two.

In December 1984, the BBC published the seven teleplays together in book form, entitled Oxbridge Blues and Other Plays for Television.