Counter Culture

1954 BBC television production reviewed by Anthony C Green

Introduction

A repeat showing of this production in 1977 was almost certainly my first exposure, as a largely apolitical fifteen-year-old, to Orwell’s masterpiece. I watched it with my friend Neil (RIP). I can’t vouch for how much of it we understood, and it would be another three or four years before I first tackled the book.

Though I might not have initially ‘got’ the world of 1984 and its political message during my initial viewing of the recording of this live television production, in murky, spotty, unrestored black and white. But it must have had an impact, because every time I’ve read the book since, perhaps on four occasions all the way through, I’ve pictured Winston Smith as Peter Cushing, who played the lead in the play.

Even the great John Hurt, who did a fine job with the role in the film version that was released, somewhat inevitably in the real 1984, didn’t succeed in separating the two in my mind.

As well as Orwell’s iconic novel itself, this production and the 1984 film, I’ve also read and reviewed  the book Julia by Sandra Newman, a retelling of the story from the point of view of Winston Smith’s eponymous lover rather than that of Winston Review: Julia By Sandra Newman, and   an excellent theatrical production by the Bath Playhouse theatre company here in Liverpool last year, which I also reviewed 1984 Play Review: A Dystopian Masterpiece | Counter Culture

So, I can now justifiably claim a decent grounding in the world and mythos of the story, and having picked up the DVD/Blu Ray physical media combo restoration of this first attempt to bring Orwell’s nightmare vision to life visually for the British public, I thought it would be interesting to take a second look, almost five decades after my first, and more than seven decades since it first aired.

1984 Pre 1954

We should perhaps first remind ourselves that this wasn’t an adaptation of some dusty old classic of English literature. The production took place a mere five years after the novel was first published, and only four after the death of Orwell.

The first radio adaptation of the book was broadcast on American radio in 1949, while the author was still around. I don’t know if he ever got to hear it.

The idea of a television adaptation had been knocking around the BBC before even that. They had been quick to obtain the rights to dramatise the novel from Orwell that year, when it quickly became clear that the book was an instant classic.

As it turned out, the Americans once again got there first with a CBS production in 1953.

A limited amount of the footage from the recording of this has survived. Still, the consensus is that it wasn’t great, and with only fifty minutes of runtime, excluding the advertisements of which we were blessedly free in the UK in those far-off pre-commercial TV days, it’s hard to see how it could have been.

The  BBC production, was always going to be a big deal, what today we would call ‘event TV’, ultimately broadcast less than a year-and-a-half after what was almost inarguably the world’s first ever TV event, the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth 11, for which many British families specifically bought their first television set, with many others crowding the living rooms of the only families in their street who had.

A script had been commissioned in late 1953, written by one Hugh Faulks in consultation with Orwell’s widow Sonia, with the hope of airing in April 1954.

However, when Rudolph Cartier was hired as Director/Producer, he rejected Faulk’s script, pushing back the broadcast by eight months.

Cartier was a German Jew who was already a well-established and successful film director when he fled the Nazi regime for Britain in 1936.

It was his work on the Quatermass Experiment in 1953 that secured him the 1984 job. This had served as the British public’s first introduction to television Science Fiction/Horror, and it had been a massive success.

The character of Professor Quatermass had been the creation of Nigel Kneale, who also wrote the script for the six-part series. He and Cartier had next worked together on an adaptation of Wuthering Heights, and Cartier, a man with a reputation for getting his own way, had made it a precondition for accepting the 1984 job that Kneale write the script.

It’s primarily to these two individuals, to their skill, courage and persistence, who we owe a debt of gratitude for the play being as good as it turned out to be.

The Cast

With the BBC having agreed to his demand to have Kneale on board, Cartier assembled a great team of actors, almost all of whom had experience in both film and theatre work, as well as the new-fangled medium of television, which was crucial given the potential pitfalls of attempting to bring such a dark and complex novel to life on the small screen under the technical and financial limitations of the day.

Peter Cushing was still three years away from The Curse of Frankenstein, the film that made him a household name and would forever associate him in the minds of the viewing public with the Horror genre, as well as launching Hammer Film Studios as the home of great British horror.

But even in 1954, though not quite yet a ‘star’, he would already have been a familiar face to cinema goers and the smaller numbers of television viewers.

Yvonne Mitchell was given the role of Julia. She’d played Cathy in the recent Cartier/Kneale Wuthering Heights, a role for which she’d received criticism for being too tall, and that this had detracted from the essential manliness of a Heathcliffe played by the relatively diminutive Richard Todd.

 There are relatively few speaking roles in the adaptation, and the minimum number of Extras they could get away with while remaining credible. But there are still several faces and names who are still familiar to viewers of a certain generation to this day, including the great Donald Pleasance as Syme, Andre Morell as O’Brien, and Wilfred Bramble who appears first as ‘Old Man’ early in the play, a decade before he became the Dirty Old Man in Steptoe and Son (and the ‘very clean’ old man in the Beatles A Hard Day’s Night), before reappearing towards the end as ‘Thin Prisoner’ following Winston and Julia’s incarnation.

All involved, cast and crew, played their part in creating a dark, sinister tone that was fully in keeping with the spirit of Orwell’s novel.

The Broadcast

The play was first broadcast on December 12^th 1954. As was the norm, the bulk of the production was performed live by the actors, though with some pre-filmed insets. As I mentioned, this was a lavish production by the standards of the time. For one thing, it had a whopping one hour, fifty minutes running time (more than double that of the CBS production), including a five-minute interval, allowing viewers the chance to use the toilet, which in many cases would have involved braving the cold of a British winter in their backyard, or to make a nice cup of tea, the actors an opportunity to catch their breath and perhaps have a quick ciggy, and the crew time to, in the words of Cartier, ‘move the furniture around.’

Although the actors would also have had short breaks during the insets, almost two hours is still a long time for actors to perform with no possibility of a retake, and it took meticulous planning by Cartier and crew to make the whole thing work.

When Mark Gattis produced a live recreation of the Quatermass Experiment on BBC Four in 2005, starring himself and David Tennant, they under-ran by a full twenty minutes, which is an indication of how difficult working in the television medium would have been five decades earlier, when live productions were, by necessity, the norm.

1984 ran to time almost to the second, and, as far as I can tell, nobody once fluffed a line or missed their mark.

The scale of the production is also indicated by the BBC’s agreement to the use of an original musical score, written by John Hotchkis, for which he conducted a 17-piece orchestra in an adjacent studio as the play went out, instead of the customary pre-recorded, canned incidental music.

The composition does its job of enhancing the bleak, sinister nature of the work, and the knowledge that it was being played live by real musicians as the production was being beamed into people’s homes via aerials mounted on chimney pots also adds to our appreciation of how ambitious this project was for the time.

We don’t have precise figures for the cost, but it’s believed the budget rose from an original allocation of around £2000 to an eventual figure closer to £3000.

Credit is due to the BBC  for giving Kneale and Cartier the freedom and the money to do it their way.

The pre-filmed insets include a recreation of Winston visiting the ‘Prole’ sector, where he discovers the antique shop and its owner, which ultimately leads to his downfall. That these were shot on London streets still recovering from the damage inflicted by the Luftwaffe only a decade or so earlier, and the period black and white realist style of the production, plays a big part in establishing an atmosphere in keeping with the book to a degree that has still never been equalled.

It’s also worth noting that wartime rationing had only come to an end in Britain the year before. Viewers would therefore have had direct and recent, and in some cases ongoing, if less severe, experience of the shortages and lack of choice depicted, which can only have added to the play’s powerful impression.

The premise that the nature of the society with which the story is concerned had its origins in the aftermath of a nuclear war would have also been resonant in these early days of the Cold War, only nine years after the atomic bomb was unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It was also, of course, only a year or so since the death of Stalin, upon whom Big Brother was clearly modelled.

The familiar picture of Big Brother (actually a member of the design crew who happened to have the right moustache) continues to stare out from the screen during the Interval, which is included in the physical media version.

This was a clever artistic choice by Cartier that still holds power today, perhaps even more so now than then. Even back in 1954, there were dark rumours that the televisions rapidly becoming commonplace in people’s homes were not simply transmitters but also receivers with the ability to ‘watch the watchers.’

Perhaps, that’s not quite so far-fetched now, in the era of ‘Smart’ TVs.

Big Brother is watching you?

The play was initially shown in the Sunday Night Theatre slot usually reserved for classic adaptations like Wuthering Heights, or genteel so-called ‘Comedies of Manners,’ sometimes broadcast directly from actual theatrical performances.

That 1984 was shown in this slot led to controversy, as we will come to shortly.

As was customary, the cast and crew reconvened for a repeat performance four days later. The reasoning behind this was that the second performance would generally be better than the first, because all concerned would have had the opportunity to learn from mistakes and iron out any logistical problems with the initial production.

Cushing always insisted that the Sunday night version was better, that a certain amount of spontaneity and energy was lost the second time around.

We’ll never be able to assess the validity of this because, as was also customary, only the second performance was recorded for posterity.

Given the common practice at the BBC of reusing tapes for other shows, a practice that continued into the 1970s (and of which Johnny-Come-Lately ITV was also guilty), we are fortunate that this recording survived to be enjoyed by viewers today.

Controversy and Mythology

This controversy arose in the four-day gap between the two performances.

It was real enough, but it has been rather exaggerated over the years, largely through later interviews with both Cartier and Kneale, especially the latter, who became skilled in the art of enhancing reality through the judicious use of embellishment.

The mythologised version of what happened is that the first showing was immediately followed by an outcry in the press at such horrors being inflicted on the viewing public, especially on a Sunday, and in the run-up to Christmas, with questions raised in parliament, and consideration given to cancelling the second performance completely.

The mood changed, so the story goes, when Prince Philip made an offhand comment at some function or other about how much he and his wife, our young and popular new Queen, had enjoyed the production.

The reality is that the critical reaction in the newspapers had been almost wholly positive. The exception was the Daily Worker, the paper of the Communist Party of Great Britain (forerunner of today’s Morning Star), which had long denounced Orwell as a Trotskyist and his works as anti-Soviet propaganda. Their cultural critic attacked the play as portraying a ‘Tory guttersnipe version of socialism.’

There were, however, and this is where the kernel of truth in the myth lies, plenty of letters to the press by outraged viewers, which were duly reported by the newspapers. Most of these did indeed cite the sanctity of Sundays as a day of religious observance, or at least of wholesome family relaxation, not a day for infesting their living rooms with dystopian visions of a nightmare future, especially in the run-up to Christmas.

A small number of MPs questioned whether such horror was in keeping with the ‘Educate, Entertain and Inform’ Reithian values on which the BBC had been founded. But the issue wasn’t formally debated in parliament.

The Daily Express, perhaps sensing an opportunity to capitalise on the response of some of its readers, ran with a sensationalist headline concerning a woman dying whilst watching the play. She had suffered a fatal heart attack while doing the ironing, but it seems unlikely there was any connection between this and what she happened to be watching on TV at the time.

Prince Philip’s remark concerning him and the Queen having watched and enjoyed the play seems to be true, but this had no great impact on how it was regarded.

Certainly, the BBC never seriously considered cancelling the second performance.

However, they did begin the second airing with a few minutes of what we would today call a ‘trigger-warning,’ in which the head of BBC drama, Michael Barry warned that some viewers may find some of what they were about to see disturbing, and concluded with hope that they would retain more hope for the future than was to found in the play. Thankfully, this has also been retained in the physical media release.

1984 After 1954

A film version, also with Donald Pleasence in the cast, but with no involvement from Kneale and Cartier, was released in 1956. That’s available on YouTube. It clearly owes much to its predecessor, but lacks its power and authenticity, and somewhat misses the point of the novel by implying a happy ending for Winston and Julia.

In 1965, the BBC attempted to repeat the 1954 experience with another theatrical TV production, not performed live, but using Kneale’s original script with a few changes.

This was part of a three-play series produced under the umbrella title of The World Of George Orwell. Sadly,1984 is the only adaptation that survives. You can also watch this free online, but again this doesn’t quite hit the mark, and is ruined, for me, early on by making the Goldstein character on the telescreen during the ‘Two-Minute Hate’ look and sound more like a comedic parody than a sinister, counter-revolutionary receptacle for the repressed frustrations of the Party rank and file.

In addition to the version that was released in 1984 itself, there’s also a joint Russian/Finnish film production made in 2023, which I’ve just become aware of, and will be renting on Amazon soon.

Conclusion

The 1954 production is a historical television landmark that, unlike so much vintage television, we are fortunate to have survived for us to view and enjoy today.

I still regard it as the definitive adaptation, with a great script, great acting, and an atmosphere fully in keeping with the original novel.

It is available to rent or buy on Amazon. But I highly recommend the relatively inexpensive DVD/Blu-ray set for its excellent Special Features, from which I gained most of my information for this article.

In whatever form you choose to watch it, watch it you should.

Anthony C Green, August 2025

PS This satire of the production from January 1955 is worth a listen. The popularity and importance of The Goons, and their influence on artists such as John Lennon and the Mony Python team, is hard to understand today. Their humour hasn’t dated well, but this works well as an entertaining and affectionate dig at the BBC itself, and it adds a little more to our knowledge and understanding of how the Cartier/Kneale play was regarded at the time.