With comparisons between the present day and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four dystopia at an all time high, Rick and Michael delve into the 1949 classic in search of answers. Are humans fatally vulnerable to authority? Does our behaviour change when we think we’re being watched? And are we currently living in 1984? Uplifting stuff.
Featuring: Serbulent Turan, Dr Sander van der Linden, Professor Jean Seaton, Dr Simon Kaye, and Dr Daniel J. Levitin.
Produced By: Max Sanderson
Assistant Producers: Cormac McAuliffe
Sound Designer: Ivor Manley
Jean Seaton is Professor of Media History and the Official Historian of the BBC. She will publish in the Autumn of 2024 the next volume of the Corporations story, Holding the Line: the BBC and the Nation, taking Lord Asa Briggs work forward for Profile Books. This involves everything the BBC did in a tumultuous decade from the conflict in Northern Ireland, to the invasion of the Falklands, to Not the Nine O'Clock News, the Proms, the early music revolution, devolution, Dennis Potter's greatest plays, Attenborough's revolutionary series Life on Earth, and Radio 1s most influential moment, as well as the role of women in the Corporation, programmes for children and a tense and complicated relationship with the government. The historian was given privileged access to BBC archives, but also gained privileged access to state papers. For the first time the Corporation's history is seen in the round. It has depended on several hundred interviews, and explores both the programme making decision that go into the making of an iconic Television series like John le Carre's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but also the high politics around the imposition of the broadcasting ban.
