As part of Birkbeck Arts Week 2017, Jean Seaton, Ben Worthy and Caroline Edwards try to answer the question ‘Will 2017 be 1984?’
1984 was conceived as a warning, not a prophecy. But are we now in Orwell’s dystopia? Decide with our panel of experts from Birkbeck’s Departments of Politics and English & Humanities, who will re-examine Orwell’s novel and its meaning in the brave new world of 2017. Speakers include Professor Jean Seaton (Prof Media History, University of Westminster), Ben Worthy and Caroline Edwards.
.
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.
