One Summer is a 1983 British television drama serial written by Willy Russell and directed by Gordon Flemyng.

It stars David Morrissey and Spencer Leigh as two 16-year-old Liverpool boys from broken homes who escape from their grim lives by running away to Wales one summer.

Living in abject poverty on a squalid council estate, his father is absent, his older sister despises him, and his mother suffers from depression and is uncaring towards him.

Billy and his slightly dimwitted friend Icky (Leigh) have truanted from school for some time and have fallen into a life of delinquency, regularly stealing, fighting with local gangs, and getting into trouble with the police.

With no direction or prospects in life, the pair decide to run away to Wales by themselves, the last place Billy had any happy memories when he went away on a previous school trip some years earlier.

Though they take pity on the two boys and let them spend the night in the house, in the morning Billy and Icky make a quick getaway from the farmhouse when the police arrive.

Meanwhile, at the market, Billy meets Jo, a pretty and intelligent girl from a middle-class family who only live in Wales during each summer.

Icky later abandons the gang and tries to drive back to Wales, but he is chased by the police and is killed when he crashes the stolen car.

As Billy is hiding from them, he overhears their conversation and learns that Kidder is gay and once had an affair with an 18-year-old male student (a criminal offence at the time) at the school where he worked.

When he later returns to Kidder's house, Billy sees two police officers from Liverpool who have come to take him back home because he has broken the conditions of his probation.

Russell pitched the idea of a six-part series, originally called "Ten Thousand Miles", but later changed to One Summer and condensed to five episodes.

[1] Willy Russell initially had his name removed from the credits for the series' original 1983 transmission after disagreements with the producers and director, particularly taking umbrage to the casting of Morrissey and Leigh whom he considered too old to portray the lead characters.

However, she did agree to some extent with writer Willy Russell's assertion that the actors were perhaps a little too old to be playing 16-year-old boys, commenting on Morrissey's height in particular: "He is taller than most policemen you meet.

She elaborated by saying, "The dialogue of illiterate boys in the mouths of young men implies they are mentally retarded, and that is quite another kind of play.

[3] Writing in the Daily Mirror after watching the first episode, journalist and playwright Mary Kenny also praised Morrissey and Leigh's performances, but disagreed with Russell's stance on their casting.

"[4] Writing in the now-defunct local newspaper, the Liverpool Daily Post, John Williams declared the series as "simultaneously compulsive and depressing" and "grimly authentic".