The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968)

The Year of the Sex Olympics is a 1968 television play made by the BBC as part of the Theatre 625 anthology series. It was written by Nigel Kneale, best remembered as the creator of the Quatermass serials which aired on the BBC in the 1950s and which were adapted by Hammer as three very successful feature films.

The subject of The Year of the Sex Olympics is television itself. It is set in the fairly distant future in which a totalitarian regime maintains order by effectively drugging the populace with mindless television entertainment. Most of the programming revolves around sex but its purpose is to eliminate any desire for actual sex. In fact, to eliminate any desire for anything other than consuming television. 

The populace are to be indoctrinated to watch rather than to do.

In 1968 hysteria about overpopulation was starting to peak so the idea that the government would want to discourage procreation seemed extremely plausible.

The watchword is Apathy Control. The aim is to encourage absolute passivity and an avoidance of any passions. People must never experience tension.

This was 1968, when people were becoming obsessed by the fear of overpopulation. The government does not want people to have sex, at all. Just to watch.

The population is divided into two castes, Low Drive and High Drive. The High Drives run things. The Low Drives watch television.

Nat Mender (Tony Vogel) is the producer of one of the most popular TV programs, SportSex. Its ratings are high and it keeps the audience cosy and comfy. 

Nat’s current girlfriend is the ditzy blonde presenter of SportSex, Misch (Vickery Turner).

Nine years earlier Nat and Deanie (Suzanne Neve) had a daughter. They have little to do with her (there is no marriage and no family in this future society).

Deanie’s current boyfriend Kin Hodder works as a designer in TV but he has been spending his spare time painting pictures. Misch is horrified and bewildered by the paintings. They’re pictures but they don’t move. Kin wants the public to see the pictures but that’s not going to be allowed - it must cause people to experience tension.

An accident on set provides the inspiration for a revolutionary new show. It will be Nat and Deanie and their daughter on an island, with no modern technology. They will have to survive without help. The Co-ordinator (Leonard Rossiter) knows it will be a risk because it will show people dealing with fear, anxiety, cold, hunger and isolation. All the things that are supposed to be avoided because they might make viewers feel something. His hope is that experiencing these things vicariously will keep them in their cosy comfy vegetative state.

This is very obviously predicting reality TV. And it’s dealing with the widespread fears at the time that TV was turning people into moronic zombies. Mind control and brainwashing were major pop cultural obsessions from the late 1950s until the 70s. The Year of the Sex Olympics is perhaps the bleakest most cynical view of the entertainment industry of all time. When I first saw it I thought it was overly pessimistic, that such extremes of manipulation of the public were just a little implausible. Today, watching it again, I have the depressing feeling that its view of human nature is pretty much spot on.

The main target is obviously the elite who manipulate the populace whom they regard with fear and contempt. This teleplay is successful in that respect but there is an ironic twist in that one does get the slightly uncomfortable feeling that Kneale may (perhaps even unconsciously) have shared some of that contempt for the TV audience. And this is a BBC production and the BBC at that time certainly regarded ordinary people with undisguised loathing (and of course they still do). The audience members shown have the intelligence of cabbages. Maybe we’re meant to think that this is the fault of the elite but it still speaks to a breathtakingly pessimistic view of ordinary people.

The acting is very exaggerated and very stagey but given that every member of the cast plays things this way I assume that this was entirely deliberate and that the intention was to emphasise the artificiality of this future society, and of course to remind us that we are in fact watching a television show. We are watching a television show about watching a television show.

The aesthetic of this teleplay is the 1960s Flower Children aesthetic on steroids, which might put some people off but once you accept it it works well enough.

The Year of the Sex Olympics is in some ways very much of its time (for example the overpopulation fears) but well ahead of its time in others (it doesn’t just predict Reality TV, it predicts it with uncanny accuracy). It’s an extraordinarily jaundiced view of the television industry coming from an insider (by 1968 Nigel Kneale had already spent 17 years forking for BBC-TV). And of course the points it makes apply equally well to all electronic media including the internet.

It’s not cheerful viewing but it is powerful and unrelenting and it is highly recommended.

It was released on Blu-Ray but it could be hard to find.

I’ve also reviewed Nigel Kneale's fascinating 1976 TV series Beasts. He really was doing some amazingly inventive TV work in the 60s and 70s.

The Saint: The Set-Up, The Abductors, The Death Penalty

I’ve just finished reading (and reviewing) The Saint and Mr Teal, a 1933 collection of three Saint novellas by Leslie Charteris. Interestingly all three novellas were adapted as episodes of the 1960s ITC Saint TV series towards the end of the series’ black-and-white era. Having reviewed the novellas I thought it would be fun to do parallel reviews of the TV episodes in question.

It should be pointed out that The Saint and Mr Teal belongs to the first phase of the Saint’s adventures and features the first version of the character. At this stage Simon Templar still has a lot of the overgrown hyper-active schoolboy about him, with a schoolboy sense of humour and an extraordinary recklessness. The character evolved over the years, in a believable and logical manner. The Saint grew up. He became older and wiser, with a slight sense of wistfulness and while he never lost his taste for adventure it was tempered with good judgment. The Saint, as he grew older, also became more of a genuinely sophisticated man of the world, and a restless world-traveller. The character in the TV series is based on this final version of Simon Templar.

This necessitated a few changes when these stories were adapted for TV.

The Death Penalty

The Death Penalty was the ninth episode in the third season of The Saint. It was scripted by Ian Stuart Black and went to air in December 1964.

The big problem facing anyone trying to adapt the Saint stories for television in the 60s was that the stories had to be sanitised. Most crucially Simon Templar as a character had to be sanitised. He had to be sanitised a lot. In Charteris’s stories the Saint is an unrepentant criminal. He has ethics. He only steals from bad people. But he is a thief and feels no shame about it. The Saint is also extremely ruthless. If he thinks that a man really needs killing then he’ll kill him without feeling the slightest remorse. The Saint is one of the good guys, he’s on the side of justice, he is a sworn enemy to those he refers to as the ungodly but he also feels very strongly that sometimes the most effective solution to dealing with the ungodly is simply to kill them.

For television all of these elements had to be not merely toned down, they had to be eliminated. Unfortunately these elements were what gave Charteris’ stories their unique flavour. Simon Templar had to become a Boy Scout, which meant that he ceased to be Simon Templar. That the TV series worked so well was due largely to the charm and charisma of Roger Moore. I love the TV series, but it lacks the bite of the books.

The Death Penalty was a story that presented a very big problem. In this novella the Saint displays a breathtaking disregard for the law and sets out to commit coldblooded murder.

The basic plot outline is retained. There’s a power struggle between two crime lords, Stride and Osman. Stride’s daughter Laura becomes an element in that struggle. There’s an Englishman working as secretary to Osman and he’s a mere shell of a man. Simon is determined to save Laura. There’s a climax on Osman’s yacht which ends in murder.

It’s an OK story but all the elements that added spice to Charteris’s story have been removed. In the novella Stride sells his stepdaughter to Osman to save his own skin. He is as rotten and corrupt and evil as Osman. In the TV episode Stride would never do such a wicked thing. He’s a criminal but a devoted father. In the novella Simon’s intention is to carry out coldblooded murder. In the TV episode Simon would never do anything so ruthless. He hopes to leave justice to the police. The secretary Clements is just a drunkard in the TV adaptation rather than a man who has been systematically stripped of his self-respect.

The TV episode is enjoyable enough but it lacks some of the edge of the original story. The novella is like a double Scotch with a dash of soda. TV episode is like a Scotch and soda with extra soda and no Scotch.

The Set-Up

The Set-Up, scripted by Paddy Manning O’Brine, went to air in January 1965 and was based on Charteris’s novella The Man from St Louis.

Again the basic plotline is fairly similar. An American gangster with ruthless American methods has been behind a string of daring robberies. He has a gang of would-be tough guy English crooks. Simon has decided that this sort of thing cannot be allowed to happen in England and as in the novella he’s prepared to assist Chief Inspector Teal.

Simon utilises the same ploy he utilises in the novella when Ted comes gunning for him. As in the novella Tex suspects that someone in his organisation has squealed.

The thieves are more up-market than in the novella and a female movie star is introduced into the story to add some glamour but these minor changes are very much in keeping with the feel of the TV series.

The climactic heist sequence is original to the TV script and it’s well executed. The ending is satisfactory although it lacks the twisted cleverness of the ending of the novella.

The Abductors

The Abductors, scripted by Brian Degas, went to air in July 1965 and was based on Charteris’s novella The Gold Standard.

Once again the bare bones of the original story are retained. A man is murdered in Paris and the murder is connected to a plan to kidnap his brother, a top metallurgist. Again there’s a sinister Mr Jones involved. And as in Charteris’s story Simon Templar was on the spot when the murder occurred.

Patricia Holm does not appear in the TV series at any stage (this is the later incarnation of the Saint as a loner) so as in several other episodes a female guest star is introduced to fulfil the same plot function - to lead Simon to the bad guys’ lair. In this case the guest star is the charming Annette Andre who would be a regular in a later ITC series, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased). The Saint will have to rescue both the girl and the professor. It was presumably felt that one of the key plot points in the novella would have been too outlandish so it’s dropped and the reason for the villain’s interest in the professor is left rather vague.

And again the essential bite of the original story is missing.

All three episodes are quite good and reasonably enjoyable but none of them are up to the standards of Charteris’s stories. One can’t really blame the screenwriters. They had to make the stories more wholesome so as not to corrupt the fragile morals of British TV viewers and that’s what they did. Unfortunately in all three cases it meant that Charteris’s deliciously clever devious endings had to be sacrificed and replaced by utterly boring utterly conventional endings. It’s no wonder that this TV series reduced Leslie Charteris to despair.

I’ve reviewed the original novella collection The Saint and Mr Teal at Vintage Pop Fictions.