How the ‘unadulterated horror’ of Orwell created TV’s first moral panic
In the mid-1950s, the BBC’s adaptation of ‘Nineteen EightyFour’ was launched on an unsuspecting public. By Tom Fordy
‘The day after broadcast, Peter Cushing had to disconnect his telephone’
‘Wife dies as she watches,” announced the Daily Express in December 1954. Mrs Beryl Mirfin of Herne Bay, a “local beauty queen of 1936”, had apparently been struck down by a heart attack while watching the BBC’s Sundayevening teleplay of Nineteen EightyFour, adapted from the George Orwell novel and starring Peter Cushing in the lead role.
It was one of many sensational headlines. Nineteen Eighty-Four was broadcast live on December 12 that year and watched by 7.1million people; in the aftermath, newspapers reported that the BBC was inundated with “thousands” of calls, letters and telegrams calling the broadcast “sheer, stark, unadulterated horror”, “absolutely putrid” and (worst of all) “shocking bad taste on a Sunday night”. Among the chief issues was the remorseless climactic sequence, in which Cushing’s Winston Smith is tormented in Room 101 by actual live rats – a punishment for daring to rebel (or just consider rebelling) against the totalitarian rule of Big Brother in Oceania.
Over the years, there have been numerous adaptations (the most high profile of which, starring John Hurt as Winston Smith, actually came out in 1984). But nothing is as chilling as this first TV play, scripted by the great Nigel Kneale. It is an early testament to the power of television – and has a claim to be the cause of TV’s first moral panic. (A filmed view of its repeat performance, days later, is now available on DVD and Blu-ray from the British Film Institute.)
“Nineteen Eighty-Four had been around the BBC for some time,” Kneale told his biographer, Andy Murray, in 2003. “But it didn’t fit in well with the BBC’s safe stage-play conception of TV drama, where you’d close a scene by tracking in on a bowl of flowers.” Kneale also recalled being “appalled by the sheer complexity” of Orwell’s story, as well as already being upset that the Corporation had sold the film rights to his other great creation, Quatermass. (George Orwell had also worked at the Corporation under his real name, Eric Blair. BBC bureaucracy, then, may have inspired Nineteen Eighty-Four both on the page and on the small screen.)
The teleplay was expensive for the time, at £3,000 (£60,000 today), and featured a large cast and variety of locations. Pre-recorded sequences, shot on film and aired intermittently throughout the live broadcast, were filmed in London at the Alexandra Palace studios and the site that became Television Centre, then a bombdamaged zone. This doubled as the “Prole Sector”, in which Winston wanders morosely through the ruins of a pre-totalitarian world, escaping the surveillance of Big Brother and questioning the power of the Party. Live scenes were transmitted from Lime Grove studios in west London, with a full orchestra in the next studio – a complicating luxury. “It’s ambitious in a way that early television wasn’t,” says Murray. “You could call it one of the first landmark watercooler moments in British TV.”
Starring alongside Cushing was Yvonne Mitchell, playing Winston’s illicit lover and co-rebel, Julia; André Morell as the sinister party member, O’Brien; and Donald Pleasence as Symes, a friend of Winston’s whose job it is to erase parts of the English language in favour of “Newspeak”. Big Brother himself, who watches over the action as an ominous still image, was Roy Oxley, a senior designer from Lime Grove, wearing a false moustache. The picture of Oxley was broadcast during the play’s intermission – he’s a genuinely unsettling presence in your living room, even now.
The set sounded unsettled, too. The Daily Herald reported at one point that “Yvonne Mitchell has been having nightmares. Peter Cushing has not slept for a while”. The play’s designer, Barry Learoyd, sent a memo upstairs saying that the production made him nauseous and should be cancelled on ethical grounds. And when it appeared, Nineteen Eighty-Four provoked as intense a reaction as hoped. “It worked,” Kneale told Murray. “The next day there were screams of horror in the newspapers: ‘What are they doing to us, making us look at live rats? What are they doing to this poor innocent British audience?’ Peter Cushing had to disconnect his telephone. I had to hide… The BBC said, ‘Don’t answer the phone until further instruction.’”
One letter of complaint said that the team behind the play must have been “readers of horror comics”, linking Nineteen Eighty-Four to another moral panic of the era: violent comics imported from America. The BBC was already under fire for, among other things, unacceptable sex and violence in its dramas, and plans to broadcast reminiscences of the Hiroshima atomic bomb (which took place less than a decade earlier) on Christmas Day.
But like Big Brother, the legend of Nineteen Eighty-Four is not entirely what it seems. While there were letters of complaint, newspaper editorials were supportive of the teleplay. And as for Mrs Beryl Mirfin’s sudden death, it was probably a coincidence. Deep in the text below that shocking “Wife dies as she watches” headline, the bereft Mr Mirfin confirmed that he didn’t think
Nineteen Eighty-Four had killed her. “My wife enjoyed TV,” he said.
Still, the furore remembered by history was, to some degree, real. “I’m wary about being too revisionist,” says Murray. “It clearly was controversial. Maybe the idea that the whole country was in uproar the next morning isn’t quite true – but people were appalled.” As proof, on December 14, two days after the broadcast, five Tory MPs signed a motion for a potential debate about “sexual and sadistic” BBC drama. Nineteen Eighty-Four wasn’t named in the motion, but one MP who signed it, William Steward, told reporters: “As far as I’m concerned, the motion is aimed at the TV play, Nineteen Eighty-Four … I thought it was a shocking display of bad taste.” (He had some unlikely bedfellows: the socialist newspaper the Daily Worker diverged from other editorials, branding Orwell’s tale a “Tory guttersnipe’s view of socialism”.)
Hours later, four Labour MPs and a Tory tabled an amendment defending “the courage and enterprise of the British Broadcasting Corporation in presenting plays and programmes capable of appreciation by adult minds”. Two more amendments and motions were tabled in support of the teleplay. On December 15, Michael Barry, the BBC’s head of drama, appeared on Panorama to debate the affair. And amid all this, it turned out that Nineteen Eighty-Four had won two unlikely fans: the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. The Duke told a BBC liaison officer at a function that both he and the Queen had watched and admired it.
Ahead of the Thursday-night repeat performance, many a letter of complaint called for the BBC to cancel, but the decision to press ahead was made. Michael Barry introduced the repeat, warning viewers that it was “grim, frightening and at times shocking – shocking in the sense that we are all shocked when we are brought face-to-face with a picture of man’s inhumanity to man, or worse, his inhumanity to the spirit of man”.
The second version was recorded, and this is the version that exists today. But Cushing saw it as less successful, writing in his 1986 autobiography that it “lacked the spontaneity and inspiration of the first [broadcast], suffering from the furore provoked during those three intervening days”. Murray concurs: “There are a lot of stories about how everyone involved felt under pressure for the second one. They were more self-conscious.” The repeat drew fewer viewers – around 2.6million – but a better approval rating, according to the BBC’s Audience Research Report.
Across its broadcasts, Nineteen Eighty-Four demonstrated TV’s power beyond frothy entertainment – that it could provoke, steer and respond to political and philosophical debates. This was ironically appropriate considering the story’s “telescreens”, which loom over the oppressed Party members and constantly monitor them.
“It taps into that thing of, ‘What’s television for?’” Murray says. “Is it just for a nice fluffy family time, or is it to challenge us? The BBC has always been concerned with that idea – is broadcasting just a diversion? Or is it to enlighten and give people something they don’t know or expect?”
Cushing would have agreed. As he put it, looking back in 1965: “One knew it was disturbing because it was the truth. I think that’s what scared people.”
‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ is now available on DVD and Blu-ray from the BFI