A teacher at an Edinburgh girls' school in the 1930s tries to impose her unconventional views on the pupils. She exhorts them to never lose their idealism, but her lurid accounts of her sex life and admiration for Mussolini and Franco create controversy - especially when one of the students takes the lessons to heart. Drama, based on Muriel Spark's novel, starring an Oscar-winning Maggie Smith alongside Robert Stephens, Celia Johnson and Gordon Jackson.

A headstrong young teacher in a private school in 1930s Edinburgh ignores the curriculum and influences her impressionable 12-year-old charges with her over-romanticized worldview.