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How the ‘unadulterated horror’ of Peter Cushing’s Nineteen Eighty-Four broke the BBC

Bleak vision: Andre Morell and Peter Cushing - TCD/Prod.DB / Alamy Stock Photo
Bleak vision: Andre Morell and Peter Cushing - TCD/Prod.DB / Alamy Stock Photo

“Wife dies as she watches,” wrote the Daily Express in December 1954. Mrs Beryl Mirfin of Herne Bay (a “local beauty queen of 1936”) had keeled over, struck down by a heart attack, while watching the BBC’s Sunday evening teleplay of Nineteen Eighty-Four, adapted from the George Orwell book and starring Peter Cushing. It was perhaps the most sensational, damning headline amidst a furore of controversy over the teleplay.

Newspapers reported that the BBC was inundated with “thousands” of calls, letters, and telegrams. It was called “sheer, stark, unadulterated horror”, “absolutely putrid”, and “shocking bad taste on a Sunday night.” That Nineteen Eighty-Four, broadcast live on December 12 and watched by 7.1 million people, was broadcast on a Sunday – a day of family, rest, and church – and so close to Christmas was especially outrageous.

Not to mention scenes of Peter Cushing being tormented in Room 101 by actual live rats, his character’s greatest fear, in the play’s remorseless, climactic torture sequence – a punishment for daring to rebel (or even just think about rebelling) against the totalitarian rule of Big Brother. At the time, there was no other channel to which horrified viewers could switch over.

So intense was the reaction against Nineteen Eighty-Four that before its repeat performance the following Thursday, which was standard BBC practice for its Sunday night teleplays at the time, there was an almost-debate in parliament about “the tendency, evident in recent BBC television programmes, notably on Sunday evenings, to pander to sexual and sadistic tastes.”

Scripted by visionary writer Nigel Kneale, Nineteen Eighty-Four was an early testament to the power of television – TV’s first moral panic. Nineteen Eighty-Four is now available on DVD and Blu-ray from the British Film Institute – part of its Nigel Kneale centenary season and celebrations.

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four – about a dystopian future controlled by “The Party”, where Big Brother is always watching – was published in 1949. Clearly, the book struck something in the social, political, and cultural moment. Broadcasters were rushing to adapt it. There were several radio versions (including one starring David Niven) and a US television play. A film version was also in the works.

The BBC had also made attempts to adapt it before handing the project to Nigel Kneale and Austrian producer/director Rudolph Cartier. Kneale and Cartier had made the ground-breaking science fiction The Quatermass Experiment in 1953. “You’re supposed to be able to do future things, get on with it!” BBC bosses told them.

“Nineteen Eighty-Four had been around the BBC for some time,” Kneale told his biographer, Andy Murray. “But it didn’t fit in well with the BBC’s safe stage play conception of TV drama, where you’d close a scene by tracking in on a bowl of flowers!” Kneale also recalled being “appalled by the sheer complexity” of Orwell’s story. His script adaptation, said Kneale, was “very complicated, even for me”.

Kneale at the time was disillusioned with the BBC, upset that the Beeb had sold the film rights of Quatermass. When Andy Murray wrote Kneale’s biography, Into the Unknown, just before Kneale’s death in 2006, Kneale was still upset. “He’d never got over that,” says Murray. “To this end of his days, he was very disgruntled about the fact that the BBC had cut him out.” George Orwell had also worked at the BBC under his real name, Eric Blair. BBC bureaucracy may have inspired Nineteen Eighty-Four, both on the page and on screen. “Are Orwell’s feelings about the BBC and about television and broadcasting found in Nineteen Eighty-Four?” asks Murray. “Also, from Kneale himself – some of his feelings about the BBC and broadcasting?”

'Absolutely putrid': the BBC came under fire for its visceral adaptation - TCD/Prod.DB / Alamy Stock Photo
'Absolutely putrid': the BBC came under fire for its visceral adaptation - TCD/Prod.DB / Alamy Stock Photo

The teleplay was expensive (the BBC reluctantly signed off on £3,000) and immensely ambitious, with a big cast and variety of locations. Pre-recorded sequences, shot on film and aired intermittently throughout the live broadcast, were filmed at the BBC’s Alexandra Palace studios in north London and at the site that became Television Center, then a bomb-damaged wasteland. This doubled as the “Prole Sector”, where Cushing’s character, Winston Smith, wanders morosely through the ruins of a pre-totalitarianism world, escaping the constant surveillance of Big Brother, and questioning the power of The Party.

If Kneale’s big challenge in adapting the book was to take the story out of Winston Smith’s head (you have to be careful what you say out loud or even think in Orwell’s future, of course, lest you get your collar felt by the Thought Police) these sumptuous black-and-white sequences are rich with his gloom and broken spirit.

Live scenes were transmitted from Lime Grove studios in west London, with a full orchestra in the next studio – an unnecessary luxury and complication that shows the scale of the ambition. “It’s ambitious in a way that early television wasn’t,” says Andy Murray. “You could call it one of the first landmark water cooler moments in British television.”

Starring alongside Peter Cushing was Yvonne Mitchell, playing Winston’s illicit love and co-rebel Julia; André Morell as sinister party member O’Brien; and Donald Pleasence as Symes, a friend of Winston’s whose job it is to erase parts of the English language in favour of “newspeak”. Big Brother himself, who watches over the action as an ominous still image, was Roy Oxley, a senior designer from Lime Grove, wearing a false moustache. The picture of Oxley was broadcast during the play’s intermission – a genuinely unsettling presence in your living room, even now.

'Peter Cushing has not slept for a while': the broadcast shocked audiences - TCD/Prod.DB / Alamy Stock Photo
'Peter Cushing has not slept for a while': the broadcast shocked audiences - TCD/Prod.DB / Alamy Stock Photo

Ahead of the broadcast, the Daily Herald reported that “Yvonne Mitchell has been having nightmares. Peter Cushing has not slept for a while.” Nigel Kneale confirmed that the production disturbed the actors. “They got very depressed,” he said in a 1965 programme on the controversy. There were other early warnings: the play’s designer, Barry Learoyd, sent a memo saying that the production made him nauseous and suggested the play should be cancelled for ethical reasons.

Nineteen Eighty-Four provoked an intense reaction. “It worked,” Kneale told Andy Murray. “It all worked. It was totally successful. And the next day there were screams of horror in the newspapers: ‘What are they doing to us, making us look at live rats? What are they doing to this poor innocent British audience?’ That was the tone that we got from all the newspaper reaction, whole pages of denunciation. Peter Cushing had to disconnect his telephone. I had to hide. We all had to get out. The BBC said, ‘Don’t answer the phone until further instruction.’”

“One knew it was disturbing because it was the truth,” said Cushing in 1965. “I think that’s what scared people.”

The following day’s papers detailed responses from both critics and readers. TV critic Andre Drucker, writing for the Birmingham Gazette, called it “the most horrifying thing I have ever seen”. The second half of the play – in which Cushing’s character is tortured to the point of emaciation (Cushing even took his teeth out for the shell-of-a-man effect) – was “hardly endurable”, said Drucker. The Leicester Mercury critic was among those alarmed by the play’s timing: “I have always felt Sunday evening to be the night for relaxation and enjoyment.” George Orwell’s widow, Sonia, got calls from journalists, who supposedly asked questions such as: “Why didn’t your husband write a happy ending to the book?”

Even now, almost 70 years on, the final act is stunningly bleak. “It’s no surprise it caused a fuss at the time,” says Andy Murray. “It is grim. Some people were like, ‘What is this coming into our family home?’” As TV historian Dick Fiddy noted in Into the Unknown, Peter Cushing’s performance was a first in TV terror. “The moment when he is confronted with his biggest fears and he screams… that’s a real scream. That’s possibly the first time anyone had a real blood-curdling scream on television.”

No happy ending: Yvonne Mitchell and Peter Cushing - TCD/Prod.DB / Alamy Stock Photo
No happy ending: Yvonne Mitchell and Peter Cushing - TCD/Prod.DB / Alamy Stock Photo

One letter of complaint said that the team behind the play must have been “readers of horror comics”, linking Nineteen Eighty-Four to another moral panic of time – violent comics imported from the United States.

The BBC was already under fire at time for – among other things – unacceptable sex and violence in other dramas and plans to broadcast reminisces of the Hiroshima atomic bomb on Christmas Day.

But like Big Brother, the legend of Nineteen Eighty-Four is not entirely what it seems. While there were letters of complaints – providing the newspapers with their most panic-stricken headlines – newspaper editorials were supportive of the play, and more supporters spoke up as the days rolled on.

The Manchester Guardian, for instance, came out in defence of the BBC. “It is the BBC’s duty” to point out that horrifying things happen in this world. “Not too often but now and then.” It continued: “People who dislike hearing about such things have a simple remedy to hand: they can switch off.” And not everyone agreed that Sunday was a bad time to schedule the play: “As for complaints of the timing of the production,” said the Birmingham Post. “Sunday is surely the best time if any hard thinking is to be done.” (Socialist newspaper the Daily Worker held firm, however, and called the story a “Tory guttersnipe’s view of socialism”.)

As noted by media researcher Oliver Wake, sources report that some calls to the BBC were made before the horrific scenes had begun, suggesting they were complaining for the sake of it. Even Mrs Beryl Mirfin’s sudden death was apparently coincidental. Several paragraphs below the “Wife dies as she watches” headline, Mr Mirfin confirmed that he didn’t think Nineteen Eighty-Four had killed her. “My wife enjoyed TV,” he said.

His master's voice: Orwell criticised BBC bureaucracy - Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo
His master's voice: Orwell criticised BBC bureaucracy - Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

Stories about Nineteen Eighty-Four may have been embellished, partly by Nigel Kneale himself – “Certainly, Kneale liked to spin a yarn,” says Andy Murray – but the response to Nineteen Eighty-Four was real. “I’m wary about being too revisionist about it,” says Murray. “Because it clearly was controversial. Maybe the idea that the whole country was in uproar the next morning isn’t quite true. It’s been embellished. It’s important to get a handle on that, but people were appalled by it.”

On December 14, two days after the broadcast, five Tory MPs signed the motion for a potential debate about “sexual and sadistic” BBC drama. Nineteen Eighty-Four wasn’t named in the motion, but one of the MPs who signed the motion, W.A. Steward, told reporters: “As far as I’m concerned, the motion is aimed at the TV play, Nineteen Eighty-Four, broadcast on Sunday night. I thought it was a shocking display of bad taste.”

Hours later, four Labour MPs and a Tory tabled an amendment, defending “the courage and enterprise of the British Broadcasting Corporation in presenting plays and programmes capable of appreciation by adult minds on Sunday evenings and other occasions.” Two more amendments and motions were tabled in support of the BBC.

On December 15, Michael Barry, the BBC’s head of drama, appeared on Panorama to debate the play, while The Guardian reported that the BBC was “reconsidering its policy” on Sunday night plays. Nineteen Eighty-Four did have two unlikely fans: The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. The Duke told a BBC liaison officer at a function that both he and the Queen had watched and admired it.

Letters of complaint called for the BBC to cancel its Thursday night repeat performance, but the decision to press ahead was already made. “We see no reason to take the play off,” said a BBC spokesman. Head of drama Michael Barry introduced the repeat, warning viewers that “it is grim, frightening, and at times shocking – shocking in the sense that we are all shocked when we are brought face to face with a picture of man’s inhumanity to man, or worse, his inhumanity to the spirit of man.”

One man's struggle: Cushing wrestled with his portrayal of Winston Smith - TCD/Prod.DB / Alamy Stock Photo
One man's struggle: Cushing wrestled with his portrayal of Winston Smith - TCD/Prod.DB / Alamy Stock Photo

Extra muscle was brought to guard the studio and ensure the repeat wasn’t disrupted. The second version was also recorded – the version that exists to this day. Peter Cushing, writing in his autobiography, thought the second recording “lacked the spontaneity and inspiration of the first, suffering from the furore provoked during those three intervening days”.

“There a lot of stories about how everyone involved felt a bit under pressure for the second one,” says Andy Murray. “They were a bit more self-conscious and felt the second one wasn’t quite as satisfying.”

The repeat drew fewer viewers – around 2.6 million – but a better approval rating, according to the BBC’s Audience Research Report.

Nineteen Eighty-Four demonstrated TV’s power beyond frothy entertainment – to provoke, steer, and respond to the national debate. Ironically appropriate considering the story's “tellyscreens”, which loom over the oppressed Party members to watch and enslave them. The teleplay was also crucial in popularising Orwell’s novel.

“It taps into that thing of, ‘What’s television for?’” says Murray. “Is it just to switch it on so we have a nice fluffy family time, or is it to challenge us? The BBC has always been quite concerned with that idea – is broadcasting just a diversion? Or is it to enlighten and to give people something they don’t know or expect? You see how the whole Mary Whitehouse generation grows out of this. ‘This is terrible! What’s this coming into our home!’”

Murray says that Nigel Kneale “didn’t give much away” but he was a fan of Nineteen Eighty-Four. “I think he knew how good it was,” says Murray. “He knew they’d pulled this off.”


Nineteen Eighty-Four is available on DVD and Blu-ray from the BFI