The BBC is planning a film about the last days of Dylan Thomas, to mark the centenary of the poet’s birth. Thomas died in the US aged 39. Some of his last words were said to be: "I have had 18 straight whiskies, I think that's the record", although that is a matter of much debate. A Poet In New York will be a 75-minute film about the time Thomas spent in the US during October and early November 1953. The drama is planned to be screened on BBC2 on 27 October 2014, 100 years after the birth of the writer best known for his radio "play for voices" Under Milk Wood, and his villanelle about mortality, Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night, among many poems.

Swansea-born Thomas’s radio broadcasts for the BBC in the 1940s brought him fame. His stories and radio broadcasts include A Child's Christmas in Wales and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog.

The film will include flashbacks to the poet's earlier life including scenes in Laugharne, his home in Carmarthenshire for the last four years of his life. But the focus will be on his final days, when Thomas left his wife Caitlin to travel to New York to oversee the production of Under Milk Wood at the Poetry Centre in Manhattan. Instead of concentrating on his work, Thomas continued his drinking and revived a love affair with Liz Reitell, the assistant of American poet and Thomas admirer John Brinnin. On 5 November 1953, he fell ill while drinking with Reitell at a Manhattan bar, dying four days later.

Writer Andrew Davies told the Guardian that having read "a number of books" about his last days he believes Thomas "drank himself to death". He said: "The way it looks to me it is as if he was on a half intended self-destruction. He was in a desperate state – he was hugely in debt to the Inland Revenue and he was finding it impossible to do his creative work. I think when he was in Wales he was a fairly moderate drinker – he drank beer but I think when he went away he went wild."