[2] Armchair Theatre filled a Sunday-evening slot on ITV, Britain's only commercial network at the time, in which contemporary dramas were the most common form, though this was not immediately apparent.

Such nightmare situations could be handled more easily when Armchair Theatre was able to benefit from prerecording on videotape, after production of the series moved from Manchester to Teddington Studios near London in the summer of 1959.

Migrating from his native Canada to take up his responsibilities with ABC, Sydney Newman objected to the basis of British television drama at the time he arrived:"The only legitimate theatre was of the 'anyone for tennis' variety, which, on the whole, presented a condescending view of working-class people.

'"[11]He converted Armchair Theatre into a vehicle for the generation of "Angry Young Men" that was emerging after John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger (1956) had become a great success,[12] although older writers such as Ted Willis were not excluded.

Willis' 1958 play Hot Summer Night (1 February 1959) was adapted to shift its focus, from an unhappy marriage of parents in the original stage version, onto their daughter's mixed-race relationship with a Jamaican man and the problems they might face if they got married.

[17] Even so, Pinter once estimated that his stage play The Caretaker, enjoying its first run at the time, would have to be performed for thirty years before matching A Night Out's audience of 6,380,000.

[18] The German Jewish dramatist Robert Muller, who had arrived in Britain as a refugee in 1938,[19] contributed seven plays to the series, three being transmitted in 1962 and directed by Philip Saville, including Afternoon of a Nymph.

A holdover from the Newman era, Clive Exton's legal satire The Trial of Dr Fancy (13 September 1964), was among the first television plays on ITV to be suppressed.

Although the Independent Television Authority (ITA), the regulator of the commercial channel at the time, had not objected to the production, Howard Thomas of ABC[23] feared that it would give offence to viewers.

A 1962 adaptation of John Wyndham's short story Dumb Martian, scripted by Clive Exton, was a deliberate showcase for the spin-off science fiction anthology Out of This World.