The Year of the Sex Olympics was made and broadcast four years before I was born. I saw it for the first time about a month ago and I couldn’t sleep for three hours after I’d finished watching.

For many years, this particular piece of 1960’s BBC drama enjoyed something of a mythical reputation. Repeated once in 1970, by the late 1980’s no print was known to survive; when the publication Time Screen audited the BBC’s sci-fi and fantasy TV holdings some fifteen years ago, it was conspicuous by its absence. What we have now is a monochrome film print of a play originally recorded onto colour videotape; by modern standards a meagre substitute, but as Kim Newman points out in his notes, in 1968 colour television sets were still very much in the minority and the number of viewers who saw The Year of the Sex Olympics in colour and with 625-line resolution probably numbers in the thousands rather than the millions. One look at the set designs and costumes in the first scenes is enough to impress on the modern viewer that this is a great shame as the production was clearly highly colourful, if not gaudy- however only one or two colour images have survived. However, although the play may have lost a proportion of its visual impact, it retains a great deal of its dramatic power for the viewer prepared to look beyond the limitations of the surviving print.

The concept behind the play is a straightforward extrapolation of a basic idea. At an undetermined but none-too-distant point in the future, society has essentially stagnated. There is no work to do and nothing to achieve for the majority of the population, who exist simply to watch television and burn out in their thirties. A small elite, however, produce entertainment for the masses, preoccupied with ratings, audience reaction and predicting the next viewing trend. The central character, Nat Mender, is a struggling producer of the Sportsex show, drawn to question the values of his society by the "obscene" paintings of his friend Kin Hodder and his daughter Keten’s unpromising future as one of the low-drive masses. With Co-Ordinator Ugo Priest keeping a close eye on his career, Mender takes Keten and ex-girlfriend Deanie to an island, where they form the focus of a new show. The "Live-Life Show" follows their attempts to live as a family without the benefits of society- they are to catch and kill their own food, clothe and protect themselves, and watching their every move is a camera in the ceiling of their home. What they are not to know is that the ambitious Lazar Opie has sabotaged the project, and that a killer has also been sent to the island. The experiment ends in triumph and tragedy- Opie is lionised by his colleagues as the discoverer of the next big thing, while Mender is reduced to the condition of a savage.

The Year of the Sex Olympics rather gives the lie to the popular myth that BBC one-off dramas were generously funded with production values to match. Studio-bound for the first hour, with about twenty minutes of location filming involving four cast members, the production values are not all that much greater than the average BBC production of the time- and how much dressing does a TV studio need to look like a TV studio anyway? Apart from the location filming, it is clear that much of the time, effort and money went on assembling a small but highly effective cast. As Mender, Tony Vogel is suitably intense, however it’s an intensity with no volume control which begins to lose its effect after a while when Nat responds to the latest surprise or revelation with the same burning glare. The difficulty with watching Leonard Rossiter as a Transatlantic television executive is that he plays much the same middle-management type that he would later gleefully dismantle as Reginald Perrin, however Priest is perhaps most effective in those scenes where he demonstrates a paternal concern for Mender’s career. Brian Cox as Lazar Opie is suitably scheming and reveals his true unscrupulous colours in his moment of triumph. The other notable member of the cast is Vickery Turner, who brings a gleeful superficiality to the fickle Misch, who attaches herself to whoever appears to be in the ascendant at the time.

The play hinges on the discovery that human suffering makes great television. This is as true as ever- death and divorce are the staples of our soaps, and the third round of the F A Cup is one of the events of the sporting calendar precisely because of the prospect of one of the major sides falling victim to an enterprising minnow. At the end of the play, Priest is left to speculate that the next stage is only a further degradation of humanity. Such a pessimistic approach in a television play is practically unknown today, where the cheap happy ending is commonplace- Kneale puts his finger on an inherent inhumanity in the human condition in a way which few writers or directors would dare in the modern world. And it’s these things which kept me awake into the small hours one night, knowing that every time I make fun of somebody’s misfortune (and working in the claims department of an insurance company, it happens fairly regularly), I’m no better than Kneale’s low-drive masses. In some ways, it’s hard to believe that people carried on making television in the same way after this play, so it’s no wonder that the BBC buried The Year of the Sex Olympics after its 1970 repeat- it did after all enable them to carry on in business.