George Orwell’s cautionary tale about the insidious creep of authoritarianism into British political and social life is often held up as a nightmarish vision of the near future, though we know of course that Orwell was extrapolating ideas from the world around him in 1948 (he simply swapped around the last two digits to arrive at his futuristic setting). Although the dread year has come and long since gone, its warnings are still sadly all too pertinent, its influence on dystopian fiction still as acute as it ever was, and its real-world relevance should still be worryingly clear to anyone who’s kept even half an eye on global politics in the past few years. The first television adaptation of the novel had come from the States, as a 1953 episode of the Studio One drama anthology from CBS, starring Eddie Albert as Winston Smith and Lorne Greene as O’Brien.

The BBC staged their own version the following year, fairly faithfully adapted by Nigel Kneale who was still riding high on the success of The Quatermass Experiment (1953) and directed by Quatermass director Rudolph Cartier. At the time, it was the BBC’s practice to broadcast much of its drama live (these shows were never even recorded so the issue of them being junked, as so many recordings were, in later years never arose) but with Nineteen Eighty-Four, the realisation of Airstrip One, the future of Great Britain, required insert shots and effects that would have been impossible to create in a studio so several scenes were shot in advance to be fed into the live broadcast at the relevant moment. The production was first mounted on 12 December 1954 as part of the BBC’s Sunday Night Theatre strand, and, despite a quite extraordinarily negative reaction from some quarters of British society, a second live-with-filmed-inserts broadcast went out on 16 December and this version was “telerecorded” (a film camera pointed at a monitor screen to capture the sound and images) and it’s version that has, against all the odds, survived to this day.

With so much early British television lost forever, either never recorded or cruelly wiped by the BBC and ITV who saw little value in their output for so long, the fact that this masterpiece lived on is cause for the loudest of celebrations. It made a star of Peter Cushing, 41 at the time of the first broadcast, for his remarkable turn as Winston Smith, a member of the Outer Party of Airstrip One, part of the super-state of Oceania, ruled by a largely faceless authoritarian leadership under the ideology of “Ingsoc” (“English Socialism” in the future’s “Newspeak”). The public face of the party Is the mysterious Big Brother (an uncredited Roy Oxley), worshipped by the masses who are kept under constant surveillance (“Big Brother is watching you”) and kept in check by the Thought Police. Smith works at the Ministry of Truth, helping to rewrite history as and when the ruling Party demand it, but secretly has doubts not only about what he’s doing but about the society he lives in. On a visit to a “prole” (proletariat) neighbourhood, he buys an old diary from antiques dealer Mr Charrington (Leonard Sachs) and uses it to record his criticisms of the Party. He develops a simmering resentment of fellow worker Julia (Yvonne Mitchell) who operates the novel-writing machines at the ministry and who he comes to suspect may be a spy, while also becoming paranoid about his Inner Party superior, O’Brien (André Morell), who he believes to be a member of an underground resistance movement formed by Big Brother’s hated political rival Emmanuel Goldstein (Arnold Diamond). But things change when Winston and Julia fall in love, and she reveals that she too has a deep-rooted hatred of the Party. But Charrington turns out to be a Thought Police agent and O’Brien an interrogator for the Party and the couple are captured. Smith is tortured over several months, learning terrible truths about the Party and the nature of his world. Finally, after being exposed to rats, his greatest fear, in the dreaded Room 101, he betrays Julia and is released, finally accepting that he, like everyone else, loves Big Brother.

When it was first broadcast, Nineteen Eighty-Four caused a storm of protest and revulsion. The Room 101 sequence caused particular distress, and some of the more reactionary members of the press accused it of being subversive (some things never change…). Some decried the supposed “dumbing down” of the novel, the blunting of its satire, which seems at odds with some of the complaints being made elsewhere. The outcry made it all the way to Parliament where Conservative MPs Kenneth Thompson, Eveline Hill, Dudley Williams, William Steward and Austen Hudson signed a motion condemning “the tendency, evident in recent British Broadcasting Corporation television programmes, notably on Sunday evenings, to pander to sexual and sadistic tastes” (again, little seems to have changed – it often feels like we’re closer to Orwell’s future now than we were in 1948, 1954 or 1984…)

All of which is testament to just what a remarkable piece of television it is. Cushing’s performance is marvellous, his panic at realising what it is that’s waiting for him in Room 101 a far cry from the measured and composed men of science he would generally play in his Hammer films starting later in the decade. He’s matched perfectly by Morell, quietly terrifying as O’Brien, Mitchell and Donald Pleasance as Symes (he’d also appear in the big screen adaptation two years later). They’re all outstanding but the final emotional punch is delivered by Cushing and Mitchell, briefly reunited as the broken and almost unrecognisable Winston and Julia at the climax.

Thanks to Kneale’s exceptional script (you’d expect nothing less) which takes a few diversions and liberties but is otherwise commendably faithful to the original and the inventive and assured direction of Cartier, this remains the definitive adaptation of the book. The occasional crudity of the production, by modern standards, actually works in its favour, giving it a strange feeling of being an artefact from another time and place. The script was so well regarded, that the BBC used it for a third time, in slightly modified form, in 1965 as part of Theatre 625 on BBC Two. David Buck, Joseph O’Conor, Jane Merrow and Cyril Shaps took over the main roles and, good though it is (it was believed lost for many years until an almost complete copy was found in the American Library of Congress in 2010) it lacks the claustrophobic and unsettling ambience that Cartier brought to his version.

All the outcry in December 1954 backfired, as these things often do, and the second screening, the one we’re all familiar with, attracted the largest viewing audience since the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in June 1953. An added irony is that during all the pearl-clutching by the press and Parliament, Prince Philip told a BBC liaison officer that he and the Queen had watched the first broadcast and had “thoroughly enjoyed” it. The telerecording was repeated 1977, 1994 and 2003 (a planned 1984 repeat had been blocked by the producers of the big screen adaptation of that year) and a blu-ray was released by the BFI in April 2020.