Posted by:
Russ Brando
(
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Date: June 22, 2019 12:56PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Year_of_the_Sex_OlympicsThe Year of the Sex Olympics is a 1968 television play made by the BBC and first broadcast on BBC2...
Influenced by concerns about overpopulation, the counterculture of the 1960s and the societal effects of television, the play depicts a world of the future where a small elite control the media, keeping the lower classes docile by serving them an endless diet of lowest common denominator programmes and pornography. The play concentrates on an idea the programme controllers have for a new programme which will follow the trials and tribulations of a group of people left to fend for themselves on a remote island. In this respect, the play is often cited as having anticipated the craze for reality television.
Kneale had fourteen years earlier adapted George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four as a classic and controversial BBC broadcast and the 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...
According to Kneale, the notion for the play came from the "worldwide dread of populations exploding out of all control" leading him to devise a world where pornography hooks the population "on a substitute for sex rather than the real thing and so keeping the population down".
Kneale was also influenced by the dropout counterculture of the late 1960s, recalling "I didn't like the Sixties at all because of the whole thing of 'let it all hang out' and let's stop thinking [...] which was the all too frequent theme of the Sixties which I hated...
Kneale also sought to make "a comment on television and the idea of the passive audience",[9] depicting a world where the media is controlled by an elite who feed the population with a diet of low-quality programmes and echoing the Orwellian concept of language reduction, where vocabulary has been eroded through exposure to advertising slogans, mediaspeak and predominantly visual media.[5][10][11] He later recalled, "I thought people in those conditions would have very, very, reduced language—they wouldn't be really a verbal society any more, and I think we're heading towards that. Television is mainly responsible for it, the fact that people are now conditioned to image. The pictures they see on television screens more and more dominate their thinking, as far as people do a lot of thinking, and if you had a verbally reduced society, you would get the kind of language—possibly—that you did get in the play".[12]..
One of the first to draw comparisons with The Year of the Sex Olympics and the rise of reality television programmes (soap operas without professional actors), such as Big Brother, Castaway 2000 and Survivor, was the journalist Nancy Banks-Smith in a review of the first series of the UK version of Big Brother for The Guardian in 2000,[22] a theme she later expounded upon in 2003, writing that the play "foretold the reality show and, in the scramble for greater sensation, its logical outcome".[23] Banks-Smith had long been an admirer of The Year of the Sex Olympics, having written in The Sun following its original broadcast in 1968: "Quite apart from the excellent script and the 'big big' treatment, the play radiated ripples. Is television a substitute for living? Does the spectacle of pain at a distance atrophy sympathy? Can this coffin with knobs on furnish all we need to ask?".[24] Another admirer, the writer and actor Mark Gatiss, has said that upon seeing Big Brother he yelled at the television, "Don't they know what they're doing? [...] It's The Year of the Sex Olympics! Nigel Kneale was right!".[25] When The Year of the Sex Olympics was repeated on BBC Four on 22 May 2003, Paul Hoggart in The Times noted that "in many respects Kneale was right on the money [...] when you consider that nothing gets contemporary reality show audiences more excited than an emotional train-wreck on live TV".[26]
Although the reality television of The Live Life Show is the aspect most commentators pick up on, The Year of the Sex Olympics is also a wider satire on sensationalist television and the media in general. Mark Gatiss has noted that the Artsex and Foodshow programmes that also appear in the play "ingeniously depicted the future of lowest common denominator TV".[25] This view is echoed by the writer and critic Kim Newman, who has said that "as an extreme exercise in revolutionary self-criticism on the part of television professionals, who also lampoon their own world of chattering commentators and ratings-chasing sensationalism, the play [...] is a trenchant contribution to a series of debates that is still raging"[27] and has concluded that "Nigel Kneale might be quite justified in shouting, 'I was right! I was right!'"