Director – Michael Elliott, Teleplay – Nigel Kneale, Producer – Ronald Travers, Designer – Roger Andrews. Production Company – BBC tv.
Tony Vogel (Nat Mender), Leonard Rossiter (Co-Ordinator Ugo Priest), Suzanne Neve (Deanie Webb), Vickery Turner (Misch), Brian Cox (Lasar Opie), Martin Potter (Kin Hodder), Lesley Roach (Keten Webb), George Murcell (Grels)
In the future, watching competitive sex on television has become a substitute for the real thing and a form of population control. At the central broadcasting studio, director Nat Mender is producing the latest Sex Olympics. Nat is visited by his ex-wife Deanie Wenn with whom he shares a daughter Keten. Deanie is now involved with the artist Kin Hodder who protests against computer-generated video art by exhibiting static paintings, although these prove shocking to people raised on video art. Kin is killed while trying to climb the studio scaffolding to hang a painting. Seeing the audience reaction to the death, Nat comes up with the idea of a tv show in which he and Deanie retreat to an island to live in the wild without technology.
Nigel Kneale (1922-2006) is a writer who has a cult reputation, primarily for his work in British television. Kneale is best known for his Quartermass trilogy of tv plays – The Quatermass Experiment (1953), Quatermass II (1955) and Quatermass and the Pit (1958-9), which were later made into films by Hammer Films. Kneale worked on a great many other tv plays, tv series and film scripts throughout his career. (A full list of Kneale’s other genre works is at the bottom of the page).
The Year of the Sex Olympics was a tv play that aired on the BBC series Theatre 625 (1964-8), which showcased plays adapted from classic works alongside original pieces. (The Year of the Sex Olympics was incidentally the second-to-last of these to be aired before the cancellation of the series). The play aired the same year as the 1968 Mexico Olympics. Almost certainly, the title would have been quite a provocative one, coming at a time when film and tv censorship was only starting to open up and permit nudity on the screen.
Kneale creates a work that was well ahead of his time. Indeed, The Year of the Sex Olympics has been cited as the work that predicted reality television – to which one can say maybe. It does however predict other things – like cable and streaming sex channels or places like RedTube, where Kneale makes the assumption that audiences will want to see couples having sex broadcast live. Although for all its depiction of live sex being performed on tv, the film is not adventurous enough to go beyond depicting only hetero couples together – no gay/bi combinations and no group performances.
Similar to the subsequent Rollerball (1975), Kneale also makes the argument that sex and violence will be broadcast by the state as a means of quelling the population. The film makes potent and ahead of their time points about how television programming makes a play for lowest common denominator audience reactions. The issue about real vs computer generated art seems a very apt in 2023. The scenes on the island in the latter third of the show take on something of the Savage Reservation scenes in Brave New World (1932) – where a primitive, non-technological lifestyle becomes of fascination to people from the city. There is also something of Newspeak from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) in the scenes with people wondering about obsolete words like pornography and in the introduction of some of the new slang of the future.
The show was apparently originally filmed in colour but the only existing prints today are in black-and-white. I would have loved to have seen the original print as the costumes and makeup are eye-popping enough even when see in black-and-white. The men wear paisley shirts so outrageously loud (even when seen in black-and-white) they should be classified as assault weapons, along with ridiculous little ponytails. Even more vivid is Vickery Turner’s makeup, which consists of thickly caked glitter eyeshadow and massive fake lashes, while it looks as though her skin that has been made up in a different colour and her hair done up to resemble a Christmas tree on her head.
I recommend The Year of the Sex Olympics with caution. It is a more interesting a film than necessarily a dramatically captivating one. Most of the drama is exactly like the tv play series it was intended as being – a series of contained locations and actors standing around reciting lines as opposed to a series of dramatic happenings that move a story forward. It’s nevertheless a captivating future world that Nigel Kneale creates. On the other hand, this is a film better viewed as an historical curiosity than as a work of entertainment.
The film has an interesting cast of later-to-be famous names. Playing the studio producer is Leonard Rossiter, later to gain fame in 1970s tv comedy roles such as Rising Damp (1974-8) and The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (1976-9). The most famous name since is Brian Cox who has gone on to become a major international actor including playing the first screen Hannibal Lecter in Manhunter (1986) to more recent works like tv’s Succession (2018-23).
Nigel Kneale’s other teleplays were:– The Quatermass Experiment (1953); 1984 (1954) from the George Orwell novel; The Creature (1955); Quatermass II (1955); Quatermass and the Pit (1958-9); The Road (1963) about a haunting that may in fact be an example of time travel; Wine of India (1970) about a future society that enforces euthanasia; The Stone Tape (1972) about the investigation of ghostly phenomena; the anthology tv series Beasts (1976); Quatermass/The Quatermass Conclusion (1979); the comedy series Kinvig (1981) about an SF fans who has an encounter with aliens; and the ghost story tv movie The Woman in Black (1989). The Quatermass Xperiment/The Creeping Unknown (1955) was adapted from Kneale’s tv play without his involvement. Kneale’s film scripts were Hammer’s The Abominable Snowman (1957); Quatermass 2/The Enemy from Space (1957); The First Men in the Moon (1964) from the H.G. Wells novel; Hammer’s The Witches/The Devil’s Own (1966); Quatermass and the Pit (1967); and uncredited work on Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982).
Film available online with Part 1 here