Blue Remembered Hills

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Blue Remembered Hills is a television play by Dennis Potter, originally broadcast in 1979 as part of the BBC's Play for Today series.

It is about a group of seven seven year olds playing in the woods one summer afternoon during the war. It displays how victimisation and stereotypical views occur even in young children. The play eventually ends in tragedy when a 'game' gets out of hand.

The most striking feature about the play was that the characters were children, but were played by adult actors and actresses. The stars of the original production included Robin Ellis and Helen Mirren.

The script has also been adapted for the theatre and, as such, remains one of Dennis Potter's best known and most successful plays.

The title comes from the poem 'XL' in A.E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad.

In the UK, the stage version of the play is now studied as a text for GCSE Drama exams (as the final examination in year 11- performed to an external examiner) in which students can either act scenes and/or create improvisations around it. Some schools also act out the whole play, seeing as it isn't very long, for their final marks.