The Year of the Sex Olympics

"The Year of the Sex Olympics"
Theatre 625 episode
Episode no.	Season 5 Episode 25
Directed by	Michael Elliott
Written by	Nigel Kneale
Produced by	Ronald Travers
Original air date	29 July 1968 (1968-07-29)

"The Year of the Sex Olympics" is a 1968 television play made by the BBC and first broadcast on BBC2 as part of Theatre 625. It stars Leonard Rossiter, Tony Vogel, Suzanne Neve and Brian Cox, and was directed by Michael Elliott. The writer was Nigel Kneale, best known as the creator of Quatermass.

Influenced by concerns about overpopulation, the counterculture of the 1960s and the societal effects of television, the play depicts a world of the future where a small elite controls the mass media, keeping the lower classes docile by serving them an endless diet of lowest common denominator programmes and pornography. The play concentrates on an idea the programme controllers have for a new programme that will follow the trials and tribulations of a group of people left to fend for themselves on a remote island. In this respect, the play is often cited as having anticipated the craze for reality television.

Kneale had, fourteen years earlier, adapted George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four as a classic and controversial BBC broadcast, and the play reflects much of Kneale's assimilation of Orwell's concern about the power of the media and Kneale's experience of the evolving media industry.