The Year of the Sex Olympics

Nigel Kneale was a Manx television playwright who had come to prominence in the 1950s 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 it sold the film rights to The Quatermass Experiment, and had turned to freelance writing, producing scripts for Associated Television and for Hammer Films.[1] 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, Sir Hugh Greene, intervened and arranged a £3,000 ex gratia payment to Kneale in recognition of the Quatermass success.[2] 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.[3]

Kneale's concept concerned "the world of the future, and a way of keeping the population happy without being active".[3] According to Kneale, the notion for the play came from the "worldwide dread of populations exploding out of all control"[4] 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".[5] Kneale was also influenced by the dropout counterculture of the late 1960s; he later recalled, "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".[6] Dissatisfaction with the youth culture of the time was a preoccupation of Kneale's—in the mid-sixties he had worked on The Big, Big, Giggle, an unmade script about a teenage suicide cult, and following The Year of the Sex Olympics he 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.[1] Many cultural icons of the youth movement, including members of the Beatles, Pink Floyd and Monty Python, were fans of Kneale's work.[7] 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?".[8]

Kneale also sought to make "a comment on television and the idea of the passive audience",[9] 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.[5][10][11] 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".[12]

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 McKern 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".[13] Cast as Lasar Opie was Brian Cox, who would go on to have a distinguished career in film and television.[14]

The Year of the Sex Olympics met with obstruction when the 'Clean-Up TV' 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.[15] 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.[16]

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".[17]

The Year of the Sex Olympics was broadcast at 9:08 pm 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".[18] 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!".[19] 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.[18]

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 1980s when a black-and-white telerecording was discovered.[18] 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.[20] It is due to be reissued again on DVD by the BFI in April 2020.[21]