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Nineteen Eighty-Four is a British television adaptation of the 1949 novel of the same name by George Orwell, originally broadcast on BBC Television as part of BBC Sunday-Night The…
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Investigate this subjectNineteen Eighty-Four is a British television adaptation of the 1949 novel of the same name by George Orwell, originally broadcast on BBC Television as part of BBC Sunday-Night Theatre on 12 December 1954. The production proved to be hugely controversial, with questions asked in Parliament and many viewer complaints over its supposed subversive nature and its graphic depiction of totalitarianism.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is a British television adaptation of the 1949 novel of the same name by George Orwell, originally broadcast on BBC Television as part of BBC Sunday-Night Theatre on 12 December 1954. The production proved to be hugely controversial, with questions asked in Parliament and many viewer complaints over its supposed subversive nature and its graphic depiction of totalitarianism. It starred Peter Cushing (as Winston Smith), Yvonne Mitchell, Donald Pleasence and André Morell.
Described as television's first "watercooler moment" by The Telegraph, the adaptation was watched by seven million people in the UK. In a 2000 poll of industry experts conducted by the British Film Institute to determine the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes of the 20th century, Nineteen Eighty-Four was ranked in seventy-third position.
Orwell's novel was adapted for television by Nigel Kneale. The previous year he had created the character of Professor Bernard Quatermass for the science-fiction serial The Quatermass Experiment. The adaptation was produced and directed by the Rudolph Cartier, perhaps the BBC's best producer-director of the 1950s who was always adventurous artistically and technically. Cartier, a veteran of the UFA film studios in 1930s Germany who had fled the Nazi regime for Britain in 1936, had worked with Kneale the previous year on The Quatermass Experiment and was a veteran of many television drama productions.
It was Cartier's work on Quatermass that had prompted the BBC's Head of Drama, Michael Barry, to ask him to work on an adaptation of the novel, having shown his abilities with literary sources in a version of Wuthering Heights, again with Kneale handling the scripting. The BBC had purchased the rights to a television version of Nineteen Eighty-Four soon after its publication in 1949, with Kenneth Tynan having apparently originally been keen on adapting the work. The first version of the script, produced in late 1953, was written by Hugh Faulks, in consultation with Orwell's widow Sonia Brownell, but when Cartier joined in January 1954 he demanded that Kneale be allowed to handle the adaptation. This and other complexities of production meant that the April airdate – which would have been about 30 years before the novel was set – had to be postponed.
The role of Winston Smith was taken by Peter Cushing, one of his first major roles. Cartier cast him after having been impressed with his performance in a BBC production of Anastasia the previous year. Cushing went on to become a film star, as would his co-star Donald Pleasence, who played Syme. Pleasence was the only member of the cast present in the 1956 feature film adaptation of the story, playing an amalgamation of Syme and Parsons with the latter's name.
Other cast members included Yvonne Mitchell, who had starred in the Kneale/Cartier Wuthering Heights, as Julia, and André Morell as O'Brien. Wilfrid Brambell, later known for his roles in Steptoe and Son and as Paul McCartney's grandfather in A Hard Day's Night, appeared in two roles, as the old man Winston speaks with in the pub and as a prisoner later on when Winston is incarcerated. Nigel Kneale, who had briefly acted in the 1940s before turning to scriptwriting, had a small voice-over role as an announcer. The face of Big Brother was Roy Oxley, a member of the BBC design department whose inclusion was something of an in-joke on the part of the production team.
The composer of the incidental music for the programme was John Hotchkis, who insisted on a larger than usual orchestra to perform the piece.
Until the early 1960s, the vast majority of the BBC's television was performed live. Nonetheless, there was a certain degree of pre-shooting in the form of inserts on film, which could be played into the studio and broadcast as part of the play to cover changes of scene or show location material which would have been impossible to mount live in the studio. Initial filming for Nineteen Eighty-Four took place on 10 November 1954 in Studio B of Alexandra Palace (even by then all but abandoned as a venue for shooting drama, although it housed the news and later the Open University for the next thirty years), with footage of the Two Minutes' Hate and some of the canteen scenes being filmed there.
Further location shooting took place on 18 November which were exterior scenes featuring Smith's travels in the proletarian sector. According to Peter Cushing, speaking on Late Night Line-Up in 1965, these scenes were filmed on the demolition site that became BBC Television Centre. Following the filming, rehearsals for the cast began at Mary Ward Settlement, Tavistock Place from 22 November (moving to 60 Paddington Street from 29 November). During these rehearsals, the cast memorised their lines and cues as important in a live television production as in a stage play.
The cast and crew moved to Studio D at the BBC's Lime Grove Studios on Saturday, 11 December 1954, for a full camera rehearsal and run-through. Rehearsals continued the following day until shortly before transmission, which began at 20:37 Sunday, 12 December, and continued for the best part of two hours.
Kneale's script was a largely faithful adaptation of the novel as far as was practical. The writer made some small additions, the most notable being the creation of a sequence in which O'Brien observes Julia at work in PornoSec and reads a small segment from one of the erotic novels being written by the machines.
The play provoked something of an upset to a fledgling television audience. There were complaints about the "horrific" content (particularly the Room 101 scene where Smith is threatened with torture by rats for daring to rebel) and the "subversive" nature of the play. Most were worried by the depiction of a totalitarian regime controlling the population's freedom of thought with Big Brother looking directly into the camera. There was also a report in the Daily Express newspaper of 42-year-old Beryl Merfin of
Source: Nineteen Eighty-Four (British TV programme) (CC BY-SA)
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