Play for Today is a British television strand, produced by the BBC and transmitted on BBC1 from 1970 to 1984. During the run, more than three hundred programmes, featuring original television plays, and adaptations of stage plays and novels, were transmitted. The individual episodes were (with a few exceptions noted below) between fifty and a hundred minutes in duration. A handful of these plays, including Rumpole of the Bailey, subsequently became television series in their own right. In 2025, Channel 5 announced they would revive the series towards the end of that year for a new audience.

The strand was a successor to The Wednesday Play, the 1960s anthology series, the title being changed when the day of transmission moved to Thursday to make way for a sport programme. Some works, screened in anthology series on BBC2, like Willy Russell's Our Day Out (1977), were repeated on BBC1 in the series. The producers of The Wednesday Play, Graeme MacDonald and Irene Shubik, transferred to the new series. Shubik continued with the series until 1973 while MacDonald remained with the series until 1977 when he was promoted. Later producers included Kenith Trodd (1973–1982), David Rose (1972–1980), Innes Lloyd (1975–1982), Margaret Matheson (1977–1979), Richard Eyre (1978–1980), and Pharic MacLaren (1974–1982).

Plays covered all genres. In its time, Play for Today featured contemporary social realist dramas, historical pieces, fantasies, biopics and occasionally science-fiction (The Flipside of Dominick Hide, 1980). Most pieces were written directly for television, but there were also occasional adaptations from other narrative forms, such as novels and stage plays.

Writers who contributed plays to the series included Ian McEwan, John Osborne, Dennis Potter, Stephen Poliakoff, Sir David Hare, Willy Russell, Alan Bleasdale, Arthur Hopcraft, Alan Plater, Graham Reid, David Storey, Andrew Davies, Rhys Adrian and John Hopkins.

Several prominent directors also featured, including Stephen Frears, Alan Clarke, Michael Apted, Mike Newell, Roland Joffé, Ken Loach, Lindsay Anderson, and Mike Leigh. Some of the best remembered plays broadcast in the strand include Edna, the Inebriate Woman (1971), The Foxtrot (1971), Home (1972), The Fishing Party (1972), Bar Mitzvah Boy (1976), The Other Woman (1976), Abigail's Party (1977), Blue Remembered Hills (1979) and Just a Boys' Game (1979). Certain other plays, including Penda's Fen (1974) and Nuts in May (1976), were commissioned by David Rose of the BBC's English Regions Drama department based in Pebble Mill Studios in Birmingham.

Some installments in the series were spun off into full-blown series, including Rumpole of the Bailey, which was produced as a one-off in the Play for Today strand in 1975 and three years later became a series for Thames Television, again with Leo McKern. Alan Bleasdale's The Black Stuff, was a single play broadcast on BBC2 in January 1980, which was developed into Boys from the Blackstuff. It was never part of the Play For Today strand, although it was repeated on BBC1 later that year as a single play.

Other offshoots were Gangsters, Headmaster, and a single series of science fiction-based plays styled as Play for Tomorrow. Towards the end of the run, three plays set in Northern Ireland were written by Graham Reid. Known as the Billy Plays, they starred Kenneth Branagh as Billy Martin in his first acting role following his graduation from RADA.

There were also some groups of plays transmitted that – for various reasons – did not go out under the Play for Today banner, but which were funded from the same department, used much the same production team and are generally regarded in episode guides and analysis as being part of the Play for Today canon.