Like The Crystal Spirit, which aired a month earlier and met with more acclaim, commercial TV’s The Road to 1984 can boast location filming on Jura and a respected leading man. Apart from that, the two have little in common. Rather than present a wistful snapshot of Orwell’s final years, as the BBC chose to do, Granada Television’s biopic looks at his life in a broader context, from his service to the British Empire in Burma to his solitary, blood-soaked demise at University College Hospital, London.
On balance, writer Willis Hall and director David Wheatley have served up a useful primer on Orwell, cramming in most of the life-changing experiences you’d expect from such a venture. Granted, they stumble on occasion—piling flashback upon flashback in the opening 15 minutes and lumbering the actors with more exposition than is credible—but in many ways, their ambition does them credit.
After an attention-grabbing Two Minutes Hate ahead of the titles, the TV movie begins towards the end of his life, in 1949. His young fiancee, Sonia Brownell, is with the hospital chaplain, finalizing the paperwork for their wedding. Looking at the groom’s birth certificate, the cleric is surprised to see the name Blair. Isn’t he George something-or-other, the chap who wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four? “He writes under the name of Orwell,” says Sonia. “His real name’s Eric Arthur Blair.” Orwell, played by James Fox, remains in bed for the ceremony, wearing a red smoking jacket that Sonia’s bought him. A radio bulletin announces their marriage to the nation, with a precis of the novelist’s entire life to date.
As he sleeps restlessly later in the day, a nurse enters his private room and hangs his jacket in a wardrobe. He splutters and turns, and while she’s leaning over him, has a fever dream about Maurice, an Old Etonian homosexual he’d met as he lay in a flophouse one night. Keeping their dormitory awake with a rendition of the Eton Boating Song, Maurice offends Orwell by assuming he’s fallen on hard times. “I’m a writer,” says Orwell peevishly, his mind drifting between the two settings.
Before long, we’re into another flashback. Blair’s on a beach in 1920s Southwold, spelling out his literary ambitions to stuffy parents Richard and Ida. Dressed in a white linen suit and drawing insouciantly on a cigarette, he announces out of the blue that he’s resigned his police job in Burma to become a writer. Horrified, like her husband, at the thought of Eric chasing a pipe dream, his mother berates him. “No one can do just as they please,” she says—a nod, perhaps, to Orwell’s As I Please column in Tribune in the forties.
In 1984, Simon and Schuster Video released the Granada TV movie, starring James Fox, on VHS for an American audience (copyright Granada TV).
Flashback number three dramatizes A Hanging, his 1931 essay about the sordid business of executing a Burmese prisoner. “Oh Ram, oh Ram,” chants the man on the gallows, a noose around his neck and a bag over his head. Strangely enough, this isn’t the last we’ll see of him.
A steam train chugs by, transporting Orwell to Wigan in the thirties. His trip down a mine—presumably too expensive to film—barely gets a look-in, so instead we see boys scrabbling for coal on slag heaps and a dejected, beaten-down woman poking a stick up a pipe. It’s an almost horizontal waste pipe, not a drainpipe, by the way—a discrepancy the script acknowledges by slyly rewriting Orwell’s prose.
Following a commercial break, part two covers Orwell’s first marriage and more. The film is finding its feet by now, eschewing the overdone flashbacks and clumsy infodumps that characterized part one. With credible reconstructions of Spain’s battlefields, it makes a decent job of dramatizing Homage to Catalonia—although when Orwell is shot, the condemned man from A Hanging returns, flashing before his eyes like an angel of death. “Oh Ram, oh Ram,” says the poor soul.
Much better handled are the internecine conflicts of Barcelona in 1937. In a hotel lobby decorated with a mural of Stalin, a recovering Eric learns from his beloved Eileen that their anarchist allegiances have made them targets for the Soviet-backed authorities. While Orwell surveys a ruined church and prepares to take a pew for the night, the secret police turn his wife’s hotel room upside-down in search of evidence. Alone in the darkened chapel, he takes a match to his identification papers and, in voiceover, declares that every serious line he’s written since has been against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism.
Back in London, where the left-wing press isn’t interested in communist atrocities, Orwell takes out his anger on a generic editor figure. “Do you know their latest bit of doublethink?” he rages. “The five-year plan in four years. The Russians are telling their own people that two plus two makes five!” Working at the BBC, he loses his temper again, complaining to his boss that producing poetry for a handful of Asian radio owners is a waste of time.
On a trip to the movies one night, he and Eileen see a newsreel promoting Churchill and Stalin’s friendship in the war against Hitler. This sets in motion his next project, Animal Farm, which he reads to his wife in bed every evening. In parallel, Wheatley’s film brings the animals’ rebellion, the seven commandments, pigs sleeping in beds and “some animals are more equal than others” to life, with real livestock.
The Blairs adopt a baby, Richard, and while Orwell is reporting from what’s left of Germany, Eileen dies unexpectedly in surgery. As he stares in shock at the suitcase on her hospital bed, a matron tells him she was a wonderful person. Yes, he replies stiffly, “She was a good old stick.” In Islington, he hires Susan Watson as a live-in housekeeper and children’s nurse, asking: “You will let him play with his thingummy, won’t you?” as she’s bathing Richard.1 But to her alarm, Orwell wakes in the middle of the night, coughing up blood. “Oh Ram, oh Ram,” says the Burmese man.
Visiting the offices of Horizon magazine, Blair, who has taken to calling himself George Orwell in everyday life, tells editor Cyril Connolly about his plans to write a novel on Jura. Subsequently, over tea at his flat, he lunges like an adolescent at the assistant editor, Sonia. Kissing her on the mouth, he invites her to join him in the Hebrides, adding a marriage proposal for good measure.
Part three, set mostly on Jura, differs markedly from The Crystal Spirit, finding different points of interest in Bernard Crick’s biography. Here, for instance, there’s room for David Holbrook, an ex-army officer and communist who locked horns with Orwell during his stay at Barnhill as Susan’s guest.2
Scenes alternate between Jura and the fictional Oceania, where Fox plays a bespectacled, clean-shaven Winston Smith, Julia looks like Sonia with an eighties hairstyle, and the Stalin mural from Barcelona provides the template of sorts for “Big Brother is watching you.” Admiring a framed photo of Sonia on his bedroom mantelpiece, Orwell imagines her naked in the room above Charrington’s shop, in an arrest scene that prefigures Michael Radford’s unashamedly sexual Nineteen Eighty-Four movie. It’s jarring and gratuitous, to put it mildly.
In a more intelligent juxtaposition, Donald McKillop doubles as O’Brien and the doctor who treats Orwell’s tubercular condition. One minute he’s pushing a long, metal implement down the writer’s throat in a Scottish hospital; the next, he’s interrogating Winston about how many fingers he’s holding up. Back in the operating room, the kindly medic finishes up. “Sorry I had to put you through that torture,” he says.
Finally, in Orwell’s London hospital room, he and his new wife plan a sojourn in a Swiss sanitarium. The socialist author, who’s now wealthy, gripes about American critics mistaking Nineteen Eighty-Four for an attack on the Soviet Union alone. Once Sonia has left, the “oh Ram” flashback returns. A trapdoor in Burma opens, the prisoner drops through it … and in London, a nurse finds Orwell dead, his chin and pajamas red with blood.
A BBC news report from 1950 (also remounted for the end of The Crystal Spirit) and an extract from one of Orwell’s letters about totalitarianism—“don’t let it happen,” essentially3—bring the TV movie to a natural end. Except that after the credits have rolled, there’s a coda set in Blair’s down-and-out days.
As he and a gray-haired tramp sit around a brazier, the old man points at Aldebaran. It must be difficult, says Blair, to take an interest in astronomy when you’re living rough. Not at all, says the man, tapping his forehead and insisting that his mind is still free. Blair, lost in thought, nods. The seed of his magnum opus has been planted.
Having cut his teeth on arts documentaries at the BBC (he directed Arena’s title shot of a bottle floating on water, still in use more than 40 years later4), the late David Wheatley, then aged 33,5 pitched The Road to 1984 as a project he could write, direct and produce. When this proved too demanding—he’d only recently turned to drama, after all—Granada suggested that playwright Willis Hall, best known for the 1963 movie Billy Liar,6 help with the scripting chores in return for the writer’s credit.7 Steve Morrison, Granada’s head of features, would produce.8
In an interview with The Stage and Television Today six weeks before the film aired, Wheatley discussed the merits of the drama-documentary format, which he felt offered far more scope than traditional factual programs. Used with imagination, he said, it could convey inner feelings and show how earlier events had influenced a person’s behavior.9 In Broadcast magazine, he went further: “To make a profile of a person, the secret is to find out what made them what they were. You research the facts so you know every detail, revisit their life and then, and only then, can you try to get inside that person.”10
“My goodness, the detail with which David went into everything,” says Julia Goodman, who played Sonia. “We had to do all the history, the politics, everything. We had a lot of rehearsal and it was very much about mining the whole of the Orwell back story. This is a very interesting thing for an actor.”11
For Janet Dale, assuming the role of Eileen held a more personal significance. “I was a great fan of Orwell’s,” she says. “I lived in a rented place in Hampstead and I used to do a little mini-pilgrimage to Parliament Hill, where he lodged for a time. I did a lot of research even before I went to the interview. But of course, there was a set script, as you know.”12
Goodman remembers Wheatley with affection and a few reservations. “He had such extraordinary energy but at the same time you felt, how authentic and how good are you actually? I was never quite sure. He was unlike any director I’ve ever worked with. He seemed to know a lot about film but I felt he was a bit of a fake. He was quite pretentious. I think his approach was very intense but I kind of wondered how much he really knew. How good he actually was. I didn’t feel entirely safe in his hands and when I see the film, I think, ‘Yeah, I was right. You weren’t as good as I thought. Or you weren’t what I thought you should have been.’”
Filming commenced on 8 August 1983, with five weeks’ location work in Manchester, North Wales, Cheshire and the Severn Valley.13 “The point of the piece,” explained producer Morrison, “is to show that Nineteen Eighty-Four was not a leap into the future but came out of the things which had happened to Orwell and which he saw in the 1930s and forties.”14
James Fox, playing his first major TV role in a decade, had only recently resumed his acting career. Having shot to fame opposite Mick Jagger in 1970’s Performance, he’d been an evangelist for Christian group the Navigators all through the seventies.15 “I took the role because I admire Orwell,” the 44-year-old explained, shooting the Southwold beach scenes in the Welsh town of Anglesey. “I can identify with anyone who has gone off in a totally different direction to find a new spiritual dimension.”16
Unlike smoker Ronald Pickup, Fox insisted on herbal cigarettes while in character. Shaken by his father’s death from lung cancer, the one-time 40-a-day man had given up tobacco for good.17 “Sometimes there’s one knock too many in life for even the most resilient,” he said. “I think, in fact, that we’re all immensely frail. Orwell wrote terribly frankly about his life at the end. He just wanted someone to look after him and love him.”18
Three decades on, Goodman’s principal memory is of going topless with next to no warning. “We were, very often as you are, in one of these tiny little rooms with an entire film crew in there. David came up and said: ‘Now, dear, I want you to do this naked.’ I thought, ‘Oh, yes?’
“I said: ‘You never said this. I wasn’t warned about it.’ I’m actually quite tough on things like that. I’ve gone on strike in theaters and all sorts of things if people aren’t treated properly. So I said: ‘No, you didn’t warn me of this. I’m not going to do that. Why should I do that? It’s ridiculous.’ He said: ‘You did it in Equus.’ I said: ‘Yes, because that had been part of the play and it was all upfront and I’d agreed to do it. You don’t just spring it on somebody just as you’re going to film, with an entire film crew with you.’
“I went up to James and I said: ‘James, I’ve got this problem. What do you think I should do?’ I was thinking, ‘I will actually get some support. He’s the lead actor on it.’ And he said: ‘I don’t know.’” She laughs. “Oh, great. He said: ‘You’ll have to make your own mind up.’ Anyway, needless to say I did do it, with all the camera crew and everything else. So, that was a bit of a naughty one.”
The wedding scene, filmed in a disused hospital in Manchester, also affected her. “By then we’d really got into the characters and it was very moving to think that she was marrying him on his deathbed. It was sad. And I just really found it very interesting, getting to know a little bit about George and the magazine [Horizon]. You always get these enclaves of highly avant-garde and interesting intellectual ideas coming together. They were fairly communist-minded, I suppose.”
The film, which runs for 86 minutes without its commercial breaks, aired on Thursday, 19 January—two days before the anniversary of Orwell’s death—at 9:30 p.m. on Channel Four.19 Christopher Dunkley of the Financial Times called it “superb,” adding: “If you had to choose just one Orwell programme for a time capsule this would surely be it.” Fox seemed “absolutely right as the complex, idealistic, paternalistic, anxious intellectual,” while Hall and Wheatley had “managed the difficult trick of depicting not just the writer but the writing.”20
Judith Simons in the Daily Express thought its fine prose, idealism and drama made it “a treat,” while the Daily Mirror’s Hilary Kingsley labeled it “a disturbing drama only a fool could switch off.”21To Sight & Sound’s Jill Forbes, however, the film was too uneven, with Orwell “woodenly written” and Hall taking “too many short cuts for his account to be convincing.”22
At The Times, Dennis Hackett found Fox “robust-looking” and “very effective,” but on balance preferred the “snapshot” approach of The Crystal Spirit. “This biography, with its dramatised sketches of the major incidents in Orwell’s life, did not give the cast a lot of scope—though, within its constraints, it was excellently acted—and lacked a sense of continuing drama.”23
As Janet Dale remembers it, the film was overlooked “because it was 1984 itself and ‘would it all come true’ and so forth—after all that work and really, I thought, a good script, and James Fox was terrific. He was ever so sweet, a lovely person to work with, and he did a lot of research. We thoroughly, thoroughly got into making that. Sometimes now you do things and they’re done so quickly, there’s no chance to get deeply involved and care about it very much.
“It was a very significant thing for me, because I really love [Orwell’s] work, but I don’t think I’d been quite as aware before I did it that he wasn’t a desperately nice man. I’m not saying he was horrible, but he wasn’t the nicest and I didn’t feel he was a good husband to Eileen. He probably would admit it himself. These great men often aren’t good at that sort of thing, are they? I don’t think it came out in the film, but recently they’ve realized she was quite an academic in her own right.”
Watching her dusty VHS recording in 2015, Julia Goodman was disappointed in the film, “because I thought David was a better director than that film seemed to show. I didn’t know his work before and I didn’t know much about him, but I got the sense that he had a real vision for this, and it was episodic. They dumped bits of information, trying to get it all in.”
Nonetheless, she was left with a certain regard for Sonia. “I think she was ambitious, I think she was a bit of an opportunist and I never quite knew whether she genuinely loved him. I think she felt sorry for him, and the kind of man that he was then—you know, women go for power and he had a huge intellectual reputation and he was quite famous, and I think that’s always a hugely attractive quality. But he wanted her to just go off into the country and there’s no way Sonia was going to do that. She wasn’t that kind of woman. And the first Mrs. Orwell, played by Janet—they had such a loving relationship. You couldn’t quite see what he saw in Sonia, to be honest.”
In Goodman’s estimation, Sonia “was flying a bit on the tails of a famous man, which was common practice, in a way, but also highly ambitious for herself—and, I suspect, like a lot of women, frustrated that their intelligence and ability was repressed a great deal of the time.” At the same time, “she was passionately protective of what she felt Orwell meant and what he would have wanted. It’s quite an interesting dynamic, isn’t it?
“Looking at it from a feminist perspective and what I’ve gone through in my own life, having to make my own way and start up my own business, having originally started off as an actor—that fight as a woman is pretty tough…. We have moved on a lot, but not as much as people really think. It just makes me put Sonia into a perspective that, boy, did she have to fight.”
There’s one last twist to the story, however. In June 2017, Dale was visiting Sutton Courtenay churchyard when members of the Orwell Society paid their yearly visit to the author’s grave.24 Among them was the society’s patron, Richard Blair. “I ended up telling him I’d played his adoptive mum,” says the former Eileen. “In the film there was a baby, and that was Richard … and there he was, in the flesh.”
The Road to 1984
George Orwell: James Fox
Eileen Blair: Janet Dale
Sonia Brownell: Julia Goodman
Avril Blair: Amanda Murray
Susan Watson: Judy Holt
O’Brien/Doctor: Donald McKillop
Goldstein: David Hirsch
Richard Blair (Snr): Hugh Cross
Ida Blair: Pauline Jefferson
David Holbrook: Mark Jax
Cyril Connolly: Michael Wynne
Bozo: Jack Walters
Refined tramp (Maurice): Bryan Coleman
Hospital chaplain: Stuart Richman
POUM soldier: Derek Harman
Magazine editor: David Webb
Department head (BBC): Brian Spink
Matron: Olive Pendleton
Indian actor (BBC): Madhav Sharma
Spanish police officer: Robin Hayter
Condemned prisoner: Jimmy Fung
Shop manager: Bernard Atha
Superintendent: Geoffrey Annis
Missionary: Carl Sheppard
Working class woman: Brigid Mackay
1st nurse: Lesley E. Bennett
2nd nurse: Delia Corrie
3rd nurse: Christine Lohr
Spaniard: Jose Miguel Mendoza
1st tramp: Leslie Clark
Written by: Willis Hall in association with David Wheatley
Director: David Wheatley
Producer: Steve Morrison
Production designer: Stephen Fineren
Music: Bill Connor