Mickey Almon is a sports star turned reporter covering the athletics in Moscow. Framed by the KGB and forced to confess that he was spying for America, he is sentenced to detention in a Gulag, a barbaric prison camp in the wilds of Siberia. Unable to prove his innocence, Mickey must either put up with the inhuman conditions or engineer an escape.

James Shelley, an educated, sardonic, permanently unemployed "professional freelance layabout," has many battles with authority, the tax-man, his landlady, and his girlfriend Fran.

An ex-robber reluctantly agrees to do one last job in order to protect his family.

Lee Remick stars as Jennie Jerome, born in the United States in 1845, who eventually became Lady Randolph Churchill, and gave birth to Sir Winston Churchill in this seven-part, seven-hour biographical mini-series.