Is Big Brother watching you?

Yet another 41-day series of the ever-awful Big Brother (ITV3) has come juddering to a miserable finale.

In this, the doyen of “reality shows”, up to the last moment the contestants were metaphorically scratching each other’s eyes out.  No longer quite the draw that it was, BB still managed to get a respectable 900,000 viewers each evening, mainly among the advertisers’ prized 18-34 age group.

What now passes as the title of a tacky commercial hook has its roots deep in one of the most frightening, and possibly prophetic books, in modern English literature.

The 1954 live drama of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (BBC 4) shows in stark detail how Big Brother was able to use emerging technology, fear, and brute force to subjugate an entire population.

Despite its age, with a fascinating introduction and an interval halfway through to enable the actors to rest, this screenplay remains remarkably fresh. 

Orwell originally wrote this as a satire on the Soviet Union, with a nod to the similarities with Nazi Germany. A party gains power and then turns the truth on its head: “War is Peace”, “Freedom is slavery” and “Ignorance is Strength” were slogans ruthlessly imposed by the Thought Police.

Winston Smith, a lowly writer of Newspeak in the Ministry of Truth realises that it’s a pack of lies. He wants to be able to say 2+2=4, even if the party disagrees. When the regime recognises his non-compliance, Smith faces a brutal, non-fatal reckoning.

Several familiar themes surface, with traces of our contemporary discussions about gender identification, fake news, and even novels created by artificial intelligence. It is a brilliant story that explains why “Orwellian” has become an adjective in the English language.

Many older viewers will see several familiar faces. Peter Cushing played the lead role, supported by Yvonne Mitchell, Donald Pleasance, Andre Morel and Wilfred Bramall.

1984: the Read with Sacha Dhawan (BBC4) is a chilling curtain-raiser to the 1954 play. Filmed earlier this year, Dhawan reads excerpts from the novel directly to camera. The emphasis is less on the totalitarianism of the now-dissolved Soviet Union, but more on the consequences of living under continual surveillance, which is more possible today than it was in 1954.

In Dhawan’s mouth, Orwell’s words need few images to convey the horror of Winston Smith’s predicament and, if anything, Dhawan’s production is more challenging than the play.

There are threads of the fictional 1984 in our political parties, churches, businesses and many other institutions.  We must be vigilant in our defence of free speech and that includes the right of others to disagree with even our most cherished beliefs.

It could be shades of Big Brother but The First Digital Nation (BBC World Service) looks at how the South Pacific nation of Tuvalu will preserve its culture should its islands be lost to rising sea levels.

There is already a diaspora in Australia and the aim is to create an online replica which would conserve its language, music, and art. Possibly, a little naive, but some great singing and a fascinating look at an entirely different culture.

During the real, chronological 1984, the theologian and philosopher Don Cupitt of Emmanuel College Cambridge was given the time and space to look at religious belief in the scientific age. Forty years later, Don Cupitt Remembers(BBC4) tells us that the series’ greatest impact was on young male Anglican clergy who were trying to make sense of the apparent contradiction between science and faith.

”People”, Cupitt concluded, “just don’t know what to believe today”.

The repeats of The Sea of Faith (BBC4) show us a younger Cupitt taking us back to the world view of Medieval European Christianity and focussed on the Roman Catholic view of scientific authority. It is a shame he didn’t look in more detail at what was happening in the emerging Protestant communities, but nevertheless, we hear of people such as Galileo, Pascal and Descartes. Their science challenged the established Christian view and, at times, was deemed heretical.

By the nineteenth century innovative thinking about geology and writers such as Malthus, Darwin and later Freud, were creating new areas of conflict between faith and the “laws” of science. Cupitt’s response is that a religious faith somehow affirms human dignity.

The 1980s were a turbulent time in European-centric Christianity. Competing parties of Charismatics, Evangelicals and Liberals fought a running battle in every denomination, each convinced that their way was the only way to save Christianity. By 2024 every denomination of whatever strand has seen attendance decline as our communities become more secularised. Cupitt asked many questions, but couldn’t provide answers. He is informative and able to sum up complex ideas, so worth catching.

We took a break from the TV schedules and enjoyed streaming the  2014 film The Hundred-Foot Journey (BBC iPlayer). If you live in a suburb with some of the finest Indian cuisine in the world, as we do,  it is entirely believable. The plot is simple: an Indian family are driven out of their home and business in India, flees to Britain, and then decides to seek their fortune by setting up a restaurant in France. There they find, they but overcome, opposition from some powerful competitors.

There’s a real feel-good ending and with a cast which includes Helen Mirren, Om Puri, Manish Dayal and Charlotte Le Bon, there’s some great acting.

Relaxation and enjoyment after Orwell’s and Cupitt's prophesies of doom!

This article first appeared in the Methodist Recorder, 29 November 2024