00:00War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.
00:051984 is a book about a rebellion that fails, and the rebel knows it's going to fail.
00:25It's the most famous dystopian novel, but it's also a thriller, and a love story, and in
00:32times, a horror story.
00:35As all well knew, he didn't have the imagination of a great novelist.
00:40He was not very good at sort of conjuring things up.
00:44The texture of Airstrip One was inspired by London after the war, when it was still blitz-damaged.
00:52The texture of the Ministry of Truth was based on his time working for the BBC.
00:59The destabilizing of the idea of truth had come to him when he fought in the Spanish Civil
01:02War and saw the news reports in many of the papers, particularly the Stalinist papers,
01:08just bore no resemblance to what he'd seen.
01:15Bing Sock was basically a satirical exaggeration of totalitarianism, of things that Orwell had
01:22learned about Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia.
01:24So it is oppressive on multiple levels.
01:29You have the thought police that basically arrest people for things that they haven't even done
01:34yet.
01:34You have surveillance through the two-way telescreen.
01:37And then you have the most pernicious form of all, which is doublethink, which basically
01:43teaches people to believe two contradictory things and to have lost faith in objective truth.
01:50In Newspeak, the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by six words.
01:55There's a new form of language called Newspeak, which is designed to limit the range of thought,
01:59to rewrite history and to rewrite reality.
02:04We're not only inventing words, we're destroying scores of them, thousands every day.
02:09He was identifying these pernicious habits in the way that we talk and which could lead
02:15democracies down a very dark path.
02:17There's no word for freedom. How do you describe freedom?
02:22Surveillance is now at a level which was unimaginable in Orwell's time.
02:27The image of the two-way telescreen is so powerful and seems so prescient.
02:32And Orwell didn't understand the technology.
02:34He didn't own a television set like most people in Britain at that time.
02:37But he knew that the desire to surveil people, it was so powerful that whatever new technology
02:45came along, it was going to be used in that way.
02:48But when the BBC did the first televised version of 1984 in the 1950s, it caused outrage and the
02:56viewers were horrified and scared.
03:00The director afterwards said one of the reasons was people still weren't used to having televisions.
03:05And the idea of Big Brother staring down the lens out of the television was really unnerving
03:12in, you know, drama which features the telescreen.
03:15It's just strange that that's what I'm doing now and it's perfectly normal.
03:18And hopefully nobody is going to be terrified by me.
03:23Within a few years of the book coming out in the 1950s, people were talking about
03:27the Doublethink and the Thought Police and Big Brother.
03:31And obviously over time, that means that you get these very bizarre sort of travesties of the
03:35meaning, you know, the Big Brother TV series or the BBC TV series Room 101.
03:41When you do see these words, go back to the text and go,
03:45well, what did he really mean by the Thought Police?
03:47It's not, as some people suggest, political correctness.
03:49It's a bit worse than political correctness.
03:52There is so much in the book that different aspects of it come to the surface at different
03:58periods in history. So when it came out throughout the 1950s, it was seen as a study of totalitarianism
04:05and as a critique of Stalinism, which is true. But then as the Soviet Union began to weaken in the
04:13late 70s and in the 80s, people became far more interested in the technology, which is not
04:19actually a huge part of the book. But they became fascinated that it was a warning against
04:22computer databases and closed circuit TV cameras. And what's happened recently, people are going to
04:30it for what it says about truth and flagrant lies and the nature of exerting power by distorting reality.
04:37And for a book to have these sort of multiple meanings that it seems relevant at very different times
04:45in history for different reasons is remarkable and perhaps not something that he would have expected.
04:51So if I did a little bit more, I'd be happy to have these things that they've been interested in.
04:55I'll go to the next two weeks.
04:56I'll be happy to see more of this.
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