The Year of the Sex Olympics
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, and was directed by Michael Elliott. The writer was Nigel Kneale, best known as the creator of Quatermass.
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.
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 controls the mass 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 that 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.
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 pornography that the hi-drives are convinced will pacify them, though one hi-drive, Nat Mender, 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 decides to commission a new programme. In The Live-Life Show, Nat Mender, his partner Deaniel 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, feeling that “something’s got to happen”, decides to spice up the show by introducing a dangerous element to the island, and The Live-Life Show is deemed a triumph.
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