Home > Nineteen Eighty-Four (TV programme)
thumb Peter Cushing played Winston Smith while Donald Pleasence played Syme.Nineteen Eighty-Four was a British television adaptation of the novel of the same name by George Orwell, originally broadcast on BBC Television in the winter of 1954. The production proved to be hugely controversial, with questions asked in Parliament and many viewer complaints over its supposed subversive nature and horrific content. In a 2000 poll of industry experts conducted by the British Film Institute to determine the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes of the 20th century, Nineteen Eighty-Four was ranked in seventy-third position.
1 Background
Orwell's novel was adapted for television by Nigel Kneale, one of the most successful television scriptwriters of the era. The previous year he had created the legendary Professor Bernard Quatermass for the popular science-fiction serial The Quatermass ExperimentThe Quatermass Experiment is a British television science-fiction serial, transmitted by BBC Television in the summer of 1953. Comprised of six half-hour episodes, it was the first science-fiction production to be written especially for an adult televisio. The adaptation was produced and directed by the equally-respected Rudolph CartierRudolph Cartier (born Rudolph Katscher on April 17 1904 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary; died June 8 1994 in London, England, UK) was an Austrian television director, who worked almost exclusively in British television for the BBC. Cartier initially trained as, perhaps the BBCThe British Broadcasting Corporation BBC is primarily a national publicly-funded broadcaster based in the United Kingdom, which also has some international services. Some of the international services (such as BBC cable TV in America, Canada and elsewhere's highest-profile producer/director of the 1950sCenturies: 19th century 20th century 21st century Decades: 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s Years: 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 Events and trends Technology United States tests the first fusion bomb. who was always keen to push the medium and its capabilities right to the limit, both artistically and technically. Cartier, a veteran of the UFAThe Universum Film Archiv UFA or Universe Film Archive was the major commercial German film studio in the early part of the 20th century until the end of the second World War. Subsequently its property became part of the GDR (East Germany) and became the film studios in 1930sCenturies: 19th century 20th century 21st century Decades: 1880s 1890s 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s Years: 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 Events and trends Technology Jet engine invented Link Trainer invented Sc GermanyThe Federal Republic of Germany ( German: Bundesrepublik Deutschland is one of the world's leading industrialized countries, located in the middle of the European Union. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark and the Baltic Sea, to the east who had fled the Nazi regime for Britain in 1936, had worked with Kneale the previous year on The Quatermass Experiment and was already a veteran of many television drama productions – indeed, together Kneale and Cartier formed BBC drama's most successful creative team of the era.
It was his work on Quatermass that had prompted the BBC's Head of Drama, Michael Barry, to ask Cartier to work on an adaptation of the famous novel, having shown his abilities with literary sources having just completed work on a version of Wuthering Heights, again with Kneale handling the scripting. The BBC had purchased the rights to a television version of Nineteen Eighty-Four soon after its publication in 1949, with Kenneth Tynan having apparently originally been keen on adapting the work. The first version of the script, produced in late 1953, was written by Hugh Faulks , in consultation with Orwell's widow Sonia Orwell herself, but when Cartier came aboard in January 1954 he demanded that Kneale be allowed to handle the adaptation. This and other complexities of production meant that the hoped-for April airdate – which would have been more or less exactly thirty years before the novel was set – quickly had to be pushed back.
