book:the year of sex olympic

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 Elliott.
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