The Year Of The Sex Olympics

Surfing on the waves of the Internet, checking out Jean Poole along the way and following her recommendation, I started reading this interesting essay about the origins of pessimism on the Left, and the prudent refusal of the Occupy movement to identify its aims, but soon started watching this futuristic TV show from 1968: "The Year Of The Sex Olympics".



(see the essay for the abbreviated video)

Well-done science fiction can be truly clairvoyant! We live in the near-future this TV show was designed for! Nigel Kneale foresaw Reality TV!

But what I thought most about were the big talent shows we have this day - American Idol, X-Factor, America's Got Talent; where you watch, not do - and the stark contrast with profoundly-subversive community musical theater, where you do, not watch:

'The Year Of The Sex Olympics' was written by the great TV writer Nigel Kneale (creator of Quatermass) and was originally aired on British TV on 29 July 1968. It was the penultimate play in the BBC series 'Theatre 625' which ran from 1964 to 1968. It was filmed in colour, but only black and white copies are known to exist. Directed by Michael Elliot, it starred Leonard Rossiter, Suzanne Neave, Tony Vogel and Brian Cox.

From the IMDb:

"Set in a future when the world is dominated and run by television, where language has become almost redundant and all 'tensions' - love, war, hate, loyalty - have been removed. Overpopulation is a problem, so there are gluttony programmes to put people off food and pornography programmes to put them off sex. There is artsex and sportsex, and now this - the year of the Sex Olympics. Audience attention begins to wane, however, until TV executive Ugo Priest works on a new concept - a reality-based programme in which a couple is stranded on a bleak island, without the aid of any modern technology, and their efforts to survive filmed twenty-four hours a day. A concept which may sound familiar in the age of reality TV... "