BBC100: Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954)

For more on this BBC100 series of posts, read this introduction.

One of my favourite television programmes has a bit of a problem, you know. It doesn’t actually exist any more. What’s more, it never really did, unless you happened to be watching it at the time.

That kind of thing can easily happen when discussing programmes that are nearly 70 years old, like Nineteen Eighty-Four. Because the original version of this production, broadcast on the BBC on the 12th December 1954, wasn’t even wiped: it was never actually recorded in the first place.¹ Down the memory hole, if you will. As per all television drama at the time, it was performed to the nation live, albeit with a few filmed inserts shot on location. And if something wasn’t recorded, it disappeared for good.

Perhaps that sounds puzzling, unless you spend a lot of time deep in the mires of archive television. It’s surely difficult to appreciate the idea that the first episode of Stranger Things might disappear completely. Though maybe not impossible. It’s worth noting exactly how many YouTube videos end up… gone. If television used to be more ephemeral, it’s worth remembering that huge chunks of the internet are exactly that right now. Life changes less than we think over the years.

Still, for our appreciation of this play – a fairly straight adaptation of Orwell’s novel, with a screenplay by Nigel Kneale – we only have its repeat to judge it on, four days later on the 16th December. Well, I say repeat. To do that repeat in 1954, you had to bring back all the cast and crew, and mount the entire production again. Moreover, due to controversy about the initial production’s content, the BBC’s Head of Television Drama Michael Barry ended up having to give a stout defence of the programme… live, on-camera, just before air. I’d like to see them try that these days before a particularly violent EastEnders.

Some people reported at the time that the remount lost a little of the magic of that original broadcast; in 2023, it’s impossible to judge. But enough of the magic was certainly retained to make it a remarkable piece of television. I get the idea that I’m supposed to say that the power of the play has diminished today, with boundaries having been pushed far beyond what was acceptable in 1954. While it’s difficult to imagine politicians being up in arms about it now – they save that for the dangerous and terrifying Joe Lycett on Sunday morning political programmes – Nineteen Eighty-Four really does retain a raw power which makes it unnerving to watch today.

But then, how could it not? Television isn’t purely interesting because of shock value. If that were true, this industry would be a depressing one to work in indeed. There’s far more to the play than that, not least its cast. Peter Cushing is of course excellent as Winston Smith, the man broken by a totalitarian state. But Leonard Sachs as Mr. Charrington, the man who betrays Winston, is possibly my favourite performance: and truly somebody who figured out early that when a television camera gets close, you can afford to underplay things.

For me, the true horror doesn’t come when Winston arrives in Room 101, and faces his greatest fear. It doesn’t even quite come in the dreaded Newspeak, and all the propaganda and revisionism of the Ministry of Truth. It comes in the one, single act of betrayal by Charrington. Just one person not being who you thought they were. And if that isn’t literally the most relatable piece of drama in the world, I don’t know what is.

As well as not having its original performance recorded, Nineteen Eighty-Four suffered from problems at the other end of its life, too. For years, a DVD release was planned and then forbidden, due to rights issues involving Michael Radford’s film version of the novel. There were some TV showings in 1994 and 2003, but you weren’t actually allowed to own it. (The heavy irony here considering the subject matter is almost too much; if you wrote it into your own script, you’d be told off for being too obvious.) Finally, in April 2022, the BBC version got a proper release by the BFI – and on Blu-ray, with the original film sequences rescanned and presented in true HD for the first time.

If you want to dip your toe into archive BBC drama, there is no finer starting point.

UPDATE @3pm: Many thanks to Oliver Wake, who contacted me after this article’s initial publication to point out that I’d unwittingly regurgitated a few myths about the controversy surrounding Nineteen Eighty-Four. In particular, there is no evidence at all that the BBC’s Board of Governors made the decision as to whether the repeat performance would take place, and indeed the assertation that this repeat “very nearly didn’t happen at all” was also false.

I have corrected the above article, and added a footnote on a possible partial recording of the original performance. For more on all this, I highly recommend his article “Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954) – Myth Versus Reality”.

1. At least, not in its entirety. Internal documentation and contemporary reports suggest a 20 minute excerpt may have been recorded “for technical and archive purposes”. This footage almost certainly no longer exists, if it ever did. Regardless, there is no suggestion that the first broadcast of the play was ever recorded in full. ↩

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