Oktober is a three-part British television psychological thriller, written and directed by Stephen Gallagher, that first broadcast on ITV on 2 April 1998.

Based upon Gallagher's 1988 novel of the same name,[1] the series stars Stephen Tompkinson as Jim Harper, a schoolteacher who finds himself drawn into an international conspiracy when a pharmaceutical company eyeball him to be the human guinea pig in a new, state-of-the-art medical trial.

[2][3] Tompkinson told the Daily Mirror that he was keen to take on the more active role of Jim Harper, commenting; “I grabbed this project because I’d never been asked to do anything like this before, and the chance to do stunts was one reason it was so appealing.

[1] The series was initially developed for producer Kevin Loader as a BBC2 drama, but when the channel commissioner declined to greenlight the project writer Stephen Gallagher took it to Carnival Films.

Though photographed by feature cinematographer Bruce McGowan[6] on Super-16 negative in a 16x9 format, ITV Drama's then-reluctance to commit fully to widescreen broadcasting resulted in the episodes and subsequent DVD releases being cropped to suit the older screen size.