The Year of the Sex Olympics
Encyclopedia
The Year of the Sex Olympics is a 1968 television play made by the BBC and first broadcast on BBC2
as part of Theatre 625
. It stars Leonard Rossiter
, Tony Vogel, Suzanne Neve and Brian Cox. It was directed by Michael Elliot. The writer was Nigel Kneale
, best known as the creator of Quatermass
.
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.
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 Deanie (Suzanne Neve) and their daughter Keten (Lesley Roach) are stranded on a remote Scottish island while the low-drive audience watches. Mender's former colleague, Lasar Opie (Brian Cox), realising that “something got to happen”, decides to spice up the show by introducing a psychopath, Grels (George Murcell) to the island. When Grels goes on a murderous rampage, Ugo Priest is horrified when the audience reacts with laughter to the slaughter and The Live Life Show is deemed a triumph.
television playwright who had come to prominence in the nineteen-fifties thanks to his adaptation of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and his three Quatermass
serials, all of which had been made by the BBC. Kneale had since become disenchanted with the BBC, mainly because he had received no extra money when the BBC sold the film rights to The Quatermass Experiment
and had turned to freelance writing, producing scripts for Associated Television
and for Hammer Films. When approached by the BBC for a script for the BBC2
anthology
series Theatre 625
, Kneale, still upset over the sale of the film rights to The Quatermass Experiment turned them down. The Director General of the BBC, Hugh Carleton Greene intervened and arranged a £
3,000 ex gratia
payment to Kneale in recognition of Quatermass' success. Kneale accepted a commission from Theatre 625 producer Michael Bakewell
on Friday, 7 April 1967 for what would become The Year of the Sex Olympics.
Kneale's concept concerned “the world of the future, and a way of keeping the population happy without being active”. 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 nineteen-sixties, 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”. Dissatisfaction with the youth culture of the time was a preoccupation of Kneale's: in the mid-sixties he had worked on an unmade script, The Big, Big, Giggle, about a teenage suicide cult and following The Year of the Sex Olympics, returned to the theme of youth out of control in his 1969 play Bam! Pow! Zapp! and in the fourth and final Quatermass
serial in 1979. Many cultural icons of the youth movement including members of The Beatles
, Pink Floyd
and Monty Python
, were fans of Kneale's work. For The Year of the Sex Olympics Kneale extrapolated the possible consequences of the youth movement's desire for freedom from "traditional" cultural inhibitions, asking as the academic John R. Cook puts it, “In a world of no limits, will the result quickly be apathy if there is nothing any more to get excited about, nothing precious or illicit to fight for in the teeth of the censor?”.
Kneale also sought to make “a comment on television and the idea of the passive audience”, 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. 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”.
to take on the key role of Co-ordinator Ugo Priest but with McKern unavailable he turned to Leonard Rossiter. Writing to Rossiter, offering him the part, Elliot described The Year of the Sex Olympics as “the most important play Nigel Kneale has written since Quatermass”. Cast as Lasar Opie was Brian Cox who would go on to have a distinguished career in film and television.
The Year of the Sex Olympics proved to be a difficult production when television decency campaigner Mary Whitehouse
of the National Viewers and Listeners Association
obtained a copy of the script and attempted to block the production. Her objections were overruled by Hugh Greene. Location filming – for the outdoor scenes set on the island that appears in The Live Life Show – took place on the Isle of Man
between 8 and 10 May 1968. A mishap occurred during the shoot when Tony Vogel slipped and broke his wrist. Filming continued at Ealing Film Studios
between 13 and 15 May covering the elements that would be played into the screens on the set during studio recording such as the Sportsex, Artsex and Foodshow programmes as well as the audience reaction shots. The scene where Kin Hodder falls to his death was also shot at Ealing. Following rehearsals, the production moved to BBC Television Centre
between 12 and 14 June. Industrial action
by BBC electricians interrupted the production and by the end of the recording session, the final ten minutes of the play remained untaped, leading to a remount on 23 June to complete the outstanding scenes.
BBC2 was the only UK television station broadcasting in colour at the time. The Year of the Sex Olympics presented a production with gaudy sets, costumes and makeup. In a contemporary review of the play for The Sun
newspaper, Nancy Banks-Smith
commented that, “If you didn't see it in colour, you didn't really see it”.
The Year of the Sex Olympics was broadcast at 9:08pm on BBC2 on Monday, 29 July 1968. Appearing on arts programme Late Night Line Up later that night to discuss the play, Kneale said, “You can't write about the future. One can play with the processes that might occur in the future, but one is really always writing about the present because that is what we know. It's largely an image of television as I know it”. Sean Day-Lewis, writing in The Daily Telegraph
hailed the programme as a “highly original play written with great force and making as many valid points about the dangers of the future as any science fiction I can remember – including 1984!”. The Year of the Sex Olympics was watched by 1.5 million viewers. Audience Research Report indicated that many viewers found the play impenetrable. It was repeated on BBC1
in 1970 with 15 minutes cut from the running time, as part of The Wednesday Play
strand.
As often happened in this era, the colour master tapes of The Year of the Sex Olympics were wiped some time after broadcast and the play was believed lost until the nineteen-eighties when a black and white telerecording was discovered. This copy was released on DVD
, with an introduction by film and television historian Kim Newman
, a commentary by actor Brian Cox and a copy of the original script, by the British Film Institute
in 2003.
, 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, 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”. 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?”. 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!”. 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”.
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”. 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” and has concluded that “Nigel Kneale might be quite justified in shouting, “I was right! I was right!””.
BBC Two
BBC Two is the second television channel operated by the British Broadcasting Corporation in the United Kingdom. It covers a wide range of subject matter, but tending towards more 'highbrow' programmes than the more mainstream and popular BBC One. Like the BBC's other domestic TV and radio...
as part of Theatre 625
Theatre 625
Theatre 625 is a British television drama anthology series, produced by the BBC and transmitted on BBC2 from 1964 to 1968. It was one of the first regular programmes in the line-up of the channel, and the title referred to its production and transmission being in the higher-definition 625-line...
. It stars Leonard Rossiter
Leonard Rossiter
Leonard Rossiter was an English actor known for his roles as Rupert Rigsby, in the British comedy television series Rising Damp , and Reginald Iolanthe Perrin, in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin...
, Tony Vogel, Suzanne Neve and Brian Cox. It was directed by Michael Elliot. The writer was Nigel Kneale
Nigel Kneale
Nigel Kneale was a British screenwriter from the Isle of Man. Active in television, film, radio drama and prose fiction, he wrote professionally for over fifty years, was a winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and was twice nominated for the British Film Award for Best Screenplay...
, best known as the creator of Quatermass
Quatermass
Quatermass may best be known as the surname of the title character of a British science fiction franchise of several television serials and films, and a radio production...
.
Influenced by concerns about overpopulation
Overpopulation
Overpopulation is a condition where an organism's numbers exceed the carrying capacity of its habitat. The term often refers to the relationship between the human population and its environment, the Earth...
, the counterculture of the 1960s
Counterculture of the 1960s
The counterculture of the 1960s refers to a cultural movement that mainly developed in the United States and spread throughout much of the western world between 1960 and 1973. The movement gained momentum during the U.S. government's extensive military intervention in Vietnam...
and the societal effects of television, the play depicts a world of the future where a small elite control the media
Mass media
Mass media refers collectively to all media technologies which are intended to reach a large audience via mass communication. Broadcast media transmit their information electronically and comprise of television, film and radio, movies, CDs, DVDs and some other gadgets like cameras or video consoles...
, keeping the lower classes docile by serving them an endless diet of lowest common denominator
Lowest common denominator
In mathematics, the lowest common denominator or least common denominator is the least common multiple of the denominators of a set of vulgar fractions...
programmes and pornography
Pornography
Pornography or porn is the explicit portrayal of sexual subject matter for the purposes of sexual arousal and erotic satisfaction.Pornography may use any of a variety of media, ranging from books, magazines, postcards, photos, sculpture, drawing, painting, animation, sound recording, film, video,...
. 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
Reality television
Reality television is a genre of television programming that presents purportedly unscripted dramatic or humorous situations, documents actual events, and usually features ordinary people instead of professional actors, sometimes in a contest or other situation where a prize is awarded...
.
Kneale had fourteen years earlier adapted George Orwell
George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair , better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist...
's Nineteen Eighty-Four
Nineteen Eighty-Four (TV programme)
Nineteen Eighty-Four is a British television adaptation of the novel of the same name by George Orwell, originally broadcast on BBC Television in December 1954. The production proved to be hugely controversial, with questions asked in Parliament and many viewer complaints over its supposed...
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.
Plot summary
In the future, society is divided between 'low-drives' that equate with the labouring classes and 'hi-drives' who control the government and media. The low-drives are controlled by a constant broadcast of pornographyPornography
Pornography or porn is the explicit portrayal of sexual subject matter for the purposes of sexual arousal and erotic satisfaction.Pornography may use any of a variety of media, ranging from books, magazines, postcards, photos, sculpture, drawing, painting, animation, sound recording, film, video,...
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
Leonard Rossiter
Leonard Rossiter was an English actor known for his roles as Rupert Rigsby, in the British comedy television series Rising Damp , and Reginald Iolanthe Perrin, in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin...
) decides to commission a new programme. In The Live Life Show Nat Mender, his partner Deanie (Suzanne Neve) and their daughter Keten (Lesley Roach) are stranded on a remote Scottish island while the low-drive audience watches. Mender's former colleague, Lasar Opie (Brian Cox), realising that “something got to happen”, decides to spice up the show by introducing a psychopath, Grels (George Murcell) to the island. When Grels goes on a murderous rampage, Ugo Priest is horrified when the audience reacts with laughter to the slaughter and The Live Life Show is deemed a triumph.
Origins
Nigel Kneale was a ManxIsle of Man
The Isle of Man , otherwise known simply as Mann , is a self-governing British Crown Dependency, located in the Irish Sea between the islands of Great Britain and Ireland, within the British Isles. The head of state is Queen Elizabeth II, who holds the title of Lord of Mann. The Lord of Mann is...
television playwright who had come to prominence in the nineteen-fifties thanks to his adaptation of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and his three Quatermass
Quatermass
Quatermass may best be known as the surname of the title character of a British science fiction franchise of several television serials and films, and a radio production...
serials, all of which had been made by the BBC. Kneale had since become disenchanted with the BBC, mainly because he had received no extra money when the BBC sold the film rights to The Quatermass Experiment
The Quatermass Experiment
The Quatermass Experiment is a British science-fiction serial broadcast by BBC Television in the summer of 1953 and re-staged by BBC Four in 2005. Set in the near future against the background of a British space programme, it tells the story of the first manned flight into space, overseen by...
and had turned to freelance writing, producing scripts for Associated Television
Associated TeleVision
Associated Television, often referred to as ATV, was a British television company, holder of various licences to broadcast on the ITV network from 24 September 1955 until 00:34 on 1 January 1982...
and for Hammer Films. When approached by the BBC for a script for the BBC2
BBC Two
BBC Two is the second television channel operated by the British Broadcasting Corporation in the United Kingdom. It covers a wide range of subject matter, but tending towards more 'highbrow' programmes than the more mainstream and popular BBC One. Like the BBC's other domestic TV and radio...
anthology
Anthology
An anthology is a collection of literary works chosen by the compiler. It may be a collection of poems, short stories, plays, songs, or excerpts...
series Theatre 625
Theatre 625
Theatre 625 is a British television drama anthology series, produced by the BBC and transmitted on BBC2 from 1964 to 1968. It was one of the first regular programmes in the line-up of the channel, and the title referred to its production and transmission being in the higher-definition 625-line...
, Kneale, still upset over the sale of the film rights to The Quatermass Experiment turned them down. The Director General of the BBC, Hugh Carleton Greene intervened and arranged a £
Pound sterling
The pound sterling , commonly called the pound, is the official currency of the United Kingdom, its Crown Dependencies and the British Overseas Territories of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, British Antarctic Territory and Tristan da Cunha. It is subdivided into 100 pence...
3,000 ex gratia
Ex gratia
Ex gratia is Latin for "by favour", and is most often used in a legal context. When something has been done ex gratia, it has been done voluntarily, out of kindness or grace...
payment to Kneale in recognition of Quatermass' success. Kneale accepted a commission from Theatre 625 producer Michael Bakewell
Michael Bakewell
Michael Bakewell is a British television producer. He is best known for his work during the 1960s, when he was the first Head of Plays at the BBC after Sydney Newman divided the drama department into separate series, serials and plays divisions in 1963...
on Friday, 7 April 1967 for what would become The Year of the Sex Olympics.
Kneale's concept concerned “the world of the future, and a way of keeping the population happy without being active”. 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
Dropping out
Dropping out means leaving a group for either practical reasons, necessities or disillusionment with the system from which the individual in question leaves....
counterculture
Counterculture
Counterculture is a sociological term used to describe the values and norms of behavior of a cultural group, or subculture, that run counter to those of the social mainstream of the day, the cultural equivalent of political opposition. Counterculture can also be described as a group whose behavior...
of the late nineteen-sixties, 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”. Dissatisfaction with the youth culture of the time was a preoccupation of Kneale's: in the mid-sixties he had worked on an unmade script, The Big, Big, Giggle, about a teenage suicide cult and following The Year of the Sex Olympics, returned to the theme of youth out of control in his 1969 play Bam! Pow! Zapp! and in the fourth and final Quatermass
Quatermass (TV serial)
Quatermass is a British television science fiction serial produced by Euston Films for Thames Television and broadcast on the ITV network in October and November 1979. Like its three predecessors, Quatermass was written by Nigel Kneale...
serial in 1979. Many cultural icons of the youth movement including members of The Beatles
The Beatles
The Beatles were an English rock band, active throughout the 1960s and one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music. Formed in Liverpool, by 1962 the group consisted of John Lennon , Paul McCartney , George Harrison and Ringo Starr...
, Pink Floyd
Pink Floyd
Pink Floyd were an English rock band that achieved worldwide success with their progressive and psychedelic rock music. Their work is marked by the use of philosophical lyrics, sonic experimentation, innovative album art, and elaborate live shows. Pink Floyd are one of the most commercially...
and Monty Python
Monty Python
Monty Python was a British surreal comedy group who created their influential Monty Python's Flying Circus, a British television comedy sketch show that first aired on the BBC on 5 October 1969. Forty-five episodes were made over four series...
, were fans of Kneale's work. For The Year of the Sex Olympics Kneale extrapolated the possible consequences of the youth movement's desire for freedom from "traditional" cultural inhibitions, asking as the academic John R. Cook puts it, “In a world of no limits, will the result quickly be apathy if there is nothing any more to get excited about, nothing precious or illicit to fight for in the teeth of the censor?”.
Kneale also sought to make “a comment on television and the idea of the passive audience”, 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
Newspeak
Newspeak is a fictional language in George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the novel, it refers to the deliberately impoverished language promoted by the state. Orwell included an essay about it in the form of an appendix in which the basic principles of the language are explained...
, where vocabulary has been eroded through exposure to advertising slogans, mediaspeak and predominantly visual media. 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”.
Production
Kneale's script was accepted on 25 October 1967 by Ronald Travers, who had taken over as producer from Michael Bakewell on Theatre 625. Production began in early 1968 with Michael Elliot as director. Elliot initially asked Leo McKernLeo McKern
Reginald "Leo" McKern, AO was an Australian-born British actor who appeared in numerous British and Australian television programmes and movies, and more than 200 stage roles.-Early life:...
to take on the key role of Co-ordinator Ugo Priest but with McKern unavailable he turned to Leonard Rossiter. Writing to Rossiter, offering him the part, Elliot described The Year of the Sex Olympics as “the most important play Nigel Kneale has written since Quatermass”. Cast as Lasar Opie was Brian Cox who would go on to have a distinguished career in film and television.
The Year of the Sex Olympics proved to be a difficult production when television decency campaigner Mary Whitehouse
Mary Whitehouse
Mary Whitehouse, CBE was a British campaigner against the permissive society particularly as the media portrayed and reflected it...
of the National Viewers and Listeners Association
Mediawatch-uk
Mediawatch-uk, formerly known as the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association, is a pressure group in the United Kingdom, which campaigns against the publication and broadcast of media content that it views as harmful and offensive, such as violence, profanity, sex, homosexuality and...
obtained a copy of the script and attempted to block the production. Her objections were overruled by Hugh Greene. Location filming – for the outdoor scenes set on the island that appears in The Live Life Show – took place on the Isle of Man
Isle of Man
The Isle of Man , otherwise known simply as Mann , is a self-governing British Crown Dependency, located in the Irish Sea between the islands of Great Britain and Ireland, within the British Isles. The head of state is Queen Elizabeth II, who holds the title of Lord of Mann. The Lord of Mann is...
between 8 and 10 May 1968. A mishap occurred during the shoot when Tony Vogel slipped and broke his wrist. Filming continued at Ealing Film Studios
Ealing Studios
Ealing Studios is a television and film production company and facilities provider at Ealing Green in West London. Will Barker bought the White Lodge on Ealing Green in 1902 as a base for film making, and films have been made on the site ever since...
between 13 and 15 May covering the elements that would be played into the screens on the set during studio recording such as the Sportsex, Artsex and Foodshow programmes as well as the audience reaction shots. The scene where Kin Hodder falls to his death was also shot at Ealing. Following rehearsals, the production moved to BBC Television Centre
BBC Television Centre
BBC Television Centre at White City in West London is the headquarters of BBC Television. Officially opened on 29 June 1960, it remains one of the largest to this day; having featured over the years as backdrop to many BBC programmes, it is one of the most readily recognisable such facilities...
between 12 and 14 June. Industrial action
Industrial action
Industrial action or job action refers collectively to any measure taken by trade unions or other organised labour meant to reduce productivity in a workplace. Quite often it is used and interpreted as a euphemism for strike, but the scope is much wider...
by BBC electricians interrupted the production and by the end of the recording session, the final ten minutes of the play remained untaped, leading to a remount on 23 June to complete the outstanding scenes.
BBC2 was the only UK television station broadcasting in colour at the time. The Year of the Sex Olympics presented a production with gaudy sets, costumes and makeup. In a contemporary review of the play for The Sun
The Sun (newspaper)
The Sun is a daily national tabloid newspaper published in the United Kingdom and owned by News Corporation. Sister editions are published in Glasgow and Dublin...
newspaper, Nancy Banks-Smith
Nancy Banks-Smith
Nancy Banks-Smith is a British television critic; she began writing for The Guardian in 1969. In 1970 she was recommended for the Order of the British Empire, which she declined.*1951- 1955: Northern Daily Telegraph, reporter...
commented that, “If you didn't see it in colour, you didn't really see it”.
The Year of the Sex Olympics was broadcast at 9:08pm on BBC2 on Monday, 29 July 1968. Appearing on arts programme Late Night Line Up later that night to discuss the play, Kneale said, “You can't write about the future. One can play with the processes that might occur in the future, but one is really always writing about the present because that is what we know. It's largely an image of television as I know it”. Sean Day-Lewis, writing in The Daily Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph is a daily morning broadsheet newspaper distributed throughout the United Kingdom and internationally. The newspaper was founded by Arthur B...
hailed the programme as a “highly original play written with great force and making as many valid points about the dangers of the future as any science fiction I can remember – including 1984!”. The Year of the Sex Olympics was watched by 1.5 million viewers. Audience Research Report indicated that many viewers found the play impenetrable. It was repeated on BBC1
BBC One
BBC One is the flagship television channel of the British Broadcasting Corporation in the United Kingdom. It was launched on 2 November 1936 as the BBC Television Service, and was the world's first regular television service with a high level of image resolution...
in 1970 with 15 minutes cut from the running time, as part of The Wednesday Play
The Wednesday Play
The Wednesday Play was an anthology series of British television plays which ran on BBC1 from October 1964 to May 1970. Every week's play was usually written for television, although adaptations from other sources also featured...
strand.
As often happened in this era, the colour master tapes of The Year of the Sex Olympics were wiped some time after broadcast and the play was believed lost until the nineteen-eighties when a black and white telerecording was discovered. This copy was released on DVD
DVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
, with an introduction by film and television historian Kim Newman
Kim Newman
Kim Newman is an English journalist, film critic, and fiction writer. Recurring interests visible in his work include film history and horror fiction—both of which he attributes to seeing Tod Browning's Dracula at the age of eleven—and alternate fictional versions of history...
, a commentary by actor Brian Cox and a copy of the original script, by the British Film Institute
British Film Institute
The British Film Institute is a charitable organisation established by Royal Charter to:-Cinemas:The BFI runs the BFI Southbank and IMAX theatre, both located on the south bank of the River Thames in London...
in 2003.
Cultural significance
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 BrotherBig Brother (TV series)
Big Brother is a television show in which a group of people live together in a large house, isolated from the outside world but continuously watched by television cameras. Each series lasts for around three months, and there are usually fewer than 15 participants. The housemates try to win a cash...
, Castaway 2000
Castaway 2000
Castaway 2000 was a reality TV programme commissioned by the BBC in 2000.-The Concept:Castaway 2000 is a successful British television show that, because it was aired in the same year that Survivor first aired in the United States and Big Brother first aired in Great Britain, is often regarded as a...
and Survivor
Survivor (TV series)
Survivor is a reality television game show format produced in many countries throughout the world. In the show, contestants are isolated in the wilderness and compete for cash and other prizes. The show uses a system of progressive elimination, allowing the contestants to vote off other tribe...
, was the journalist Nancy Banks-Smith in a review of the first series of the UK version of Big Brother
Big Brother (UK)
Big Brother UK is the British version of the Dutch Big Brother television format, which takes its name from the character in George Orwell's 1948 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four...
for The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
in 2000, 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”. 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?”. Another admirer, the writer and actor Mark Gatiss
Mark Gatiss
Mark Gatiss is an English actor, screenwriter and novelist. He is best known as a member of the comedy team The League of Gentlemen, and has both written for and acted in the TV series Doctor Who and Sherlock....
, 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!”. When The Year of the Sex Olympics was repeated on BBC Four
BBC Four
BBC Four is a British television network operated by the British Broadcasting Corporation and available to digital television viewers on Freeview, IPTV, satellite and cable....
on 22 May 2003, Paul Hoggart
Paul Hoggart
Paul Hoggart is an English television critic and columnist. He is the youngest son of Richard Hoggart and brother of political journalist Simon Hoggart. His sister, Nicola, is a teacher.-Early life and Career:...
in The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
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”.
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”. This view is echoed by the writer and critic Kim Newman
Kim Newman
Kim Newman is an English journalist, film critic, and fiction writer. Recurring interests visible in his work include film history and horror fiction—both of which he attributes to seeing Tod Browning's Dracula at the age of eleven—and alternate fictional versions of history...
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” and has concluded that “Nigel Kneale might be quite justified in shouting, “I was right! I was right!””.