In 1954, the BBC’s Sunday Night Theatre televised a production of George Orwell’s famous 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. The BBC had purchased the television rights almost as soon as the novel was published.

Although a British Film Institute poll conducted in the year 2000 ranked Nineteen Eighty-Four among the 100 greatest British television programs of the 20th century, the 1954 production—faithful to Orwell’s novelistic vision and still from the era of black-and-white TV—stirred up considerable controversy at the time. Its depiction of unbridled totalitarianism reportedly shocked many viewers, who decried the production’s “sheer, stark, unadulterated horror” as a “debasement” of the BBC’s television service. Proponents, on the other hand, argued that it was important to share Orwell’s concerns that “human freedom was in grave danger.”

In 1937, Orwell spent six months in Spain as a volunteer against Franco, where he received a near-fatal bullet wound; biographers describe that period as the experience that shaped his “enduring hatred of totalitarian political systems.”

Ironically, in a 2019 article titled “Why Orwell’s 1984 could be about now,” the BBC described the novel as “more relevant than ever before.” On the cusp of the Covid pandemic operation, the BBC writer cheerfully characterized Orwell’s novel as a useful tool for measuring “where we, our nations and the world have got to on the road map to a hell Orwell described.” Meanwhile, as Catherine and John Titus discussed on Solari’s January 9 episode of Money & Markets, the British news outlet, self-described as “the world’s most trusted international news provider,” regularly spikes stories that are inconvenient to powerful people and institutions, practicing the kind of “memory hole” censorship that Orwell warned about.

Interestingly, our British New Media ally John Stone recently drew our attention to the Royal Mint’s decision to create a £2 coin celebrating George Orwell. As the Mint explains, coinage artist Henry Gray “created a design based on the theme of totalitarianism.” The coin features the inscription, “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU” inside an eye that is, according to Gray, “almost like a camera lens staring at you all the time, unblinking.” Another quote from Orwell’s famous novel, “THERE WAS TRUTH AND THERE WAS UNTRUTH,” is inscribed on the coin’s outer edge.