Damned with faint praise as a flawed remake and regarded now as one of television history’s damp squibs, it’s curious to think that Theatre 625’s 1984 was a major BBC event in 1965. With the TV rights back in its hands, on condition that all recordings be on videotape,1 the corporation was convinced it could catch lightning in a bottle a second time.
By the standards of British TV, its investment in the program was remarkable. Typically, a 90-minute Theatre 625 play merited a budget of £6,150,2 but on this occasion—anxious that this two-hour “revival of a masterpiece” should not be a poor man’s Rudolph Cartier production—producer Cedric Messina asked head of plays Michael Bakewell for £13,390.3 He was equally bold about man hours, audaciously requesting 2,000 and allocating 500 of those to special effects.4
Given its reputation for weighty productions, Theatre 625 could usually rely on 1,200 man hours, which was 300 more than its less prestigious counterparts.5 In asking for more, Messina was pushing his luck; indeed, as BBC2 controller David Attenborough pointed out, he wanted nearly a sixth of BBC TV’s weekly manpower effort. Agreeing to the hours—as an opera on BBC1 had fallen through—Attenborough went on to authorize a one-off payment of £5,000. To achieve the budget he wanted, Messina would have to cut corners on other plays.6
A striking aspect of the new 1984 was its youthful, attractive leads. Jane Merrow, who’d played Lorna Doone in a 1963 BBC serial, was 24, or two years younger than the Julia of the novel. Less expectedly, the role of Winston Smith went to 28-year-old David Buck: “a serious actor, a classical actor,” says director Christopher Morahan now.7 Kim Newman, a film journalist who’d interviewed Nigel Kneale in the nineties, says it was important to the scriptwriter that the two had “only a dim memory of life before ‘the Revolution.’”8 With 1984 just 19 years away, that meant they had to be young.
The play, recorded on 4 June in Television Centre’s main studio, TC1,9 sparked a blaze of publicity as the 28 November air date approached.10 The Radio Times ran a black-and-white photo on its cover, showing Buck with a poster of the trim, bald, clean-shaven Big Brother11 (the actor Ves Delahunt, uncredited), while a feature inside examined Orwell’s motives for writing the novel. Kneale had amended his script, it explained, “to bring the narrative more into line” with the world of 1965.12
Morahan, who was 36 at the time and lauded by Messina as “one of the most socially conscious directors we have,” reminisced in an Observer article about joining the BBC as a floor manager in 1955. The impact of Cartier’s play the previous year, he said, showed him how powerful and exciting TV could be. According to script editor Rosemary Hill, technical advances had enabled the team to include more of Orwell’s novel than ever before: “You don’t need to waste precious seconds tracking in on a telephone while actors move from one set to another. Everything can be so much faster these days, because audiences are so much quicker on the uptake.”13
BBC2 arts show Late-Night Line-up got in on the act too, reliving the uproar of 1954 in its 27 November edition. As well as reading out furious letters and telegrams from the archives,14 it sought the views of Cartier, Kneale, Peter Cushing, Yvonne Mitchell and Andre Morell. Completing the line-up were Buck, Merrow and Morahan (who felt sure that his 1984 would be the last adaptation to be made15).
To some at the BBC, the remake seemed like folly. Irene Shubik, producer of a new science-fiction anthology show, Out of the Unknown, had complained to head of plays Michael Bakewell in July that showing two futuristic dramas in the same week, on the same channel, would “be a bit of a bore for the audience.”16 In the event, they weren’t—but only because they were so wildly different. A day after 1984, BBC2 screened Andover and the Android: a comedy, adapted from a story by Kate Wilhelm, about the boss of an electronics firm who passes off a robot as his wife.
The play is a good deal lavisher than Cartier’s, flaunting its use of a sandy beach17 (for the build-up to nuclear war), a nuclear power plant18 (the Ministry of Truth) and dilapidated terraced housing in London19 (Victory Mansions). The tone is different, too: for the first 90 minutes, certainly, this is a more naturalistic, less austere piece than Cartier’s. The Records Department in 1954 was a shadowy, spartan, oppressive place, staffed by the buttoned-up, nervous Peter Cushing and Donald Pleasence. Here, it’s a spacious, well-lit framework of work cubicles, filing cabinets and gantries, where handsome, likable Buck works with the ever-so-slightly shifty Cyril Shaps.
An ostentatious preamble—in which a soldier drives his all-terrain vehicle into a nuclear minefield, prompting military officers across the globe to reach for their hotlines while oscilloscopes bleep in the background—adds little to our understanding of what’s going on. A British general approves a nuclear first strike “limited to twenty megadeaths”; Kneale (via a narrator) shoehorns in the book’s opening line about clocks striking 13 on an April day; and the setting shifts not to Airstrip One, but to “Pad Three,” presumably inspired by Nasa’s launchpads.
In London, even the graffiti artists are loyal to the Party: someone has daubed LONG LIVE BB on a corrugated iron fence. Elsewhere, WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH show up as banners draped across housing developments. Scooting by in a jeep, the Thought Police arrive at a squat, boxy building marked MINISTRY OF TRUTH. It’s supposedly in the middle of the city, though viewers who know what nuclear power stations look like won’t be fooled.
The establishing scene from 1954, of a telescreen chastising Smith, is present and correct, and Winston’s costume has barely changed.20 Neither have Bernard Wilkie’s telescreens—though the actual screen, instead of being circular, is a rectangular TV monitor that broadcasts charcoal sketches of actions going on around it.21
Moments lifted from the novel include Goldstein—all wild, silvery hair, jutting goatee and granny specs—talking like a sheep during the Two Minutes Hate (“The revolution has been betra-a-a-a-yed”). Occasionally, it feels as if Kneale is being gratuitously unpleasant because he can: he extends Syme’s lunchtime discussion of a hanging, for instance, with Orwell’s lines about the prisoners kicking their feet and sticking out their bright blue tongues.22
Here and there, the production looks slipshod. Actors stumble over their lines and at one point, the door to Parsons’ apartment swings open and stands ajar, revealing an uncomfortable-looking man standing just off set. The performances vary in quality too, ranging from the terrific (Sally Thomsett as Parsons’ odious daughter, five years before her role as Jenny Agutter’s adorable sister in The Railway Children) to the abysmal (John Garrie, playing Charrington like a slavering, snaggle-toothed sex offender).
Kneale isn’t shy about the story’s emphasis on carnality. “You’re only a rebel from the waist downwards,” Winston tells Julia at Charrington’s place—it’s a line from the book, making its screen debut—and in no time, she’s showing him her cleavage. Hitting just the right balance of cynicism, seductiveness, recklessness and naivety, Merrow is exceptional as FM-2869 Bowman J (note the new surname). Buck is no slouch either, it has to be said: when Winston fights back tears of shame over what rats did to his little sister, it’s one of the play’s strongest, most affecting moments.
The spirit of Swinging London, never far from the program’s surface, is probably most blatant when O’Brien shows a dignitary around the Ministry of Truth. In Cartier’s production, the mass-produced ditty It Was Only a Hopeless Fancy—later sung by a prole woman hanging out her washing—was the work of a sentimental crooner. Here, it’s a full-blown pop record.23 In the Ministry of Love as well, real-world permissiveness seeps through, as a surveillance photo shows our heroes naked in bed. By the time he’s been beaten by Thought Police in black leather24 (and interrogated by four nightmarish medics, dressed for the operating theater), Smith is willing to admit to homosexual tendencies and bestiality.
It’s a slow-burner, for sure, but the play distinguishes itself in the end. Aided by Tony Abbott’s warped designs and a haunting, understated performance by the actor, playwright and novelist Joseph O’Conor—a colorless, terrifying bureaucrat, “a fallen priest,” as Kneale was to call the Irishman’s O’Brien25—the torture scenes are truly squirm-inducing. Encased in a metallic coffin, his skull clenched in a shock device, Smith gradually succumbs to torment. A small, rectangular distorting mirror reflects his fear and despair back at him; and when a cage is strapped to his face, we see his terror from the rats’ perspective.
The play ends as its progenitor did, with a broken Winston and Julia meeting in the cafe—and one last shot of Big Brother’s portrait. The credits roll, and in the final few seconds, a caption fills the screen:
BIG BROTHER
is watching you
Few people noticed. As Peter Cushing wrote in his 1986 autobiography: “It is a sad reflection upon the times we live in that, when another excellent presentation of this play with a splendid cast was given in 1965, it caused not a ripple, so immune have we become to violence and terrorism.”26
“It didn’t work,” Kneale admitted four decades later. “It was a perfectly good production by Chris Morahan, but for the first one the audience had got very upset by all these dreadful images. Ten years later, they were much more sophisticated. It just didn’t have anything like the same impact. It came and went.”27
Instead of throwing up its hands like it had in the days of prime minister Churchill, Fleet Street yawned. The threat of a British police state had faded since Orwell’s day, wrote Peter Black of the Daily Mail, robbing an “impeccably turned out” drama of its power.28 The Sunday Telegraph’s Philip Purser felt the same way, calling such a prospect “cosily remote.”29 The Daily Telegraph’s “LL” thought the play was “on the lengthy side,” with too few sparks until the last 30 minutes30; while the Daily Express, with a swipe at Buck’s “cherubic innocence” and a suggestion that Doctor Who might be scarier, pointed out that by 10:10 p.m., the BBC had received only one phone complaint.31 To The Observer’s Maurice Richardson, the torture scenes were labored and “the rats underacted.”32 Only Mary Crozier at The Guardian could rouse much enthusiasm for the production, calling it “immensely hard and gripping.”33
The BBC’s audience research report, based on the reactions of 76 viewers, suggests that the public enjoyed Morahan’s version a great deal more than Cartier’s, or at any rate were less divided about it. It scored 75 on the reaction index, compared to 39 for the 1954 play and an average of 58 for TV drama in the third quarter of 1965. Most of the viewers on the panel suggested it had made a profound impression on them, with one from the education sector calling it “absorbing and absolutely horrifying.” Though a handful were repelled by its unpleasantness, the sample as a whole found it powerful and disturbing, and the acting “grippingly realistic.” Buck was “particularly fine” and his final conflict with the “most impressive” O’Conor was “brilliantly done.” Though one or two viewers were critical of Merrow, the performances on the whole were warmly praised.34
Still, the master tape was wiped. “At the time,” Morahan explains, “the BBC did documentaries on film and studio work for drama with huge television cameras, not at all portable. They were recorded on videotape, probably the size of a motorcycle wheel. When they were finished with, they were piled up in the basement of the BBC and you couldn’t get through the basement for them. So they started to wipe them and record again. They just threw the past away.”
In 2010, as part of a haul of more than 60 BBC shows screened by New York public TV station WNET,35 a copy turned up in the U.S. Library of Congress. Regrettably, a seven-minute segment in the middle of the tape was damaged beyond repair. “I’m sad about that,” says Morahan. “It’s the section where he and the girl go out into the countryside and make love.”
Months later, he and Merrow were guests at a British Film Institute screening in London, where he thought the play was “very powerful indeed. As I never saw Rudi Cartier’s production, I suspect that the effect [of that version] on an innocent London audience [in 1954] was far greater than the one I made. People had become more sophisticated.”
Buck died of cancer in 1989. “I remember him fondly,” says Merrow. Their chemistry, she says, was “pretty good—that was really important, because it’s sort of the last love story of the 20th century before Big Brother swallowed up society.”36
The World of George Orwell: 1984
Winston Smith: David Buck
Julia: Jane Merrow
O’Brien: Joseph O’Conor
Syme: Cyril Shaps
Charrington: John Garrie
Scout car driver: Tony Cyrus
Arab colonel: Mohammed Shamsi
Russian marshal: Alexis Chesnakov
French general: Hugo de Vernier
American general: John Brandon
British general: Tom Macauley
Telescreen announcers: Brian Badcoe, Raymond Mason
Goldstein: Vernon Dobtcheff
Prole in canteen: Marjorie Gresley
Parsons: Norman Chappell
Mrs. Parsons: Sally Lahee
Parsons girl: Sally Thomsett
Parsons boy: Frank Summerscales
Pedlar: Henry Kay
Blind man: Eric Francis
Proles: Anthony Blackshaw, Edwin Brown
Old man: Sydney Arnold
Prole youths: John Lyons, David Baxter, Patrick Ellis
Barman: Fred Hugh
Waiter: John Barrett
Jones: John Mincer
Aaronson: Eden Fox
Rutherford: George Wilder
Foster: Peter Bathurst
Singing Prole woman: Julie May
Orator: John Moore
Martin: Paul Phillips
Thin man: William Lyon Brown
Men in white coats: Norman Scace, David Grey, John Abineri, Michael Sheard
Supervisors: Marcia Mansfield, Donald Groves, Joe Tregonino (uncredited)
Technician: Bill Gosling (uncredited)
Woman in cell: Kathleen Heath (uncredited)
Guard in cell: Fred Powell (uncredited)
Withers: John Scripps (uncredited)
Guard: Bernard Egan (uncredited)
Man with bread: Raymond Graham (uncredited)
Outer Party workers: Ann Marzell, Ursula Granville, Renee Roberts, David J. Grahame, Leon Broder, Patrick Gorman, Bill Howes, Peter Whittaker, Maxwell Foster, Derek Chaffer, Philip Moore, Anthony Gilby, Robin Burns, Fred Davies, Ricky Lansing, Bill Beasley, Sylvia Lane, Laura Deane, Jill Marlow (uncredited)
Adapted by: Nigel Kneale
Directed by: Christopher Morahan
Producer: Cedric Messina
Designer: Tony Abbott
Music composed by: Wilfred Josephs
Visual effects: Bernard Wilkie