The Year of the Sex Olympics
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The Year of the Sex Olympics is a BBC television play written by Nigel Kneale and originally broadcast on 29 July 1968. The play was produced in colour – although only a black-and-white copy now exists – for BBC2's Theatre 625 strand, and is now widely regarded as predicting the rise of reality television.
Kneale had 14 years earlier adapted George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four as a classic BBC broadcast, and this later play reflects much of Kneale's assimilation of Orwell's concern about the power of the media and Kneale's experience of the evolving media industry.
[edit] Plot
In a distant future society is divided between 'low-drives' who equate with the laboured classes and 'hi-drives' who control the government and media. The low-drives are controlled by a constant broadcast of pornography that the hi-drives are convinced will pacify them, though one hi-drive, Nat Mender (Tony Vogel), believes that the media should be used to educate the low-drives. After the accidental death of a protester during the Sex Olympics gets a massive audience response, the Co-ordinator Ugo Priest (Leonard Rossiter) decides to commission a new programme. In The Live Life Show Nat Mender, his partner and their daughter are stranded on a remote Scottish Island while the low-drive audience watches. After a period the low-drives begin to lose interest so the programme makers introduce a psychopath who threatens the family.
[edit] Cultural significance
As well as predicting that the television audience would tire of contrived entertainment the play was the first occasion in which the class of people who create popular television was reflected on the BBC. The play also featured Leonard Rossiter and Brian Cox who would enjoy greater success in the following decades.
In 2003, the play was released on DVD by the British Film Institute as part of their Archive Television range of releases.
