The Year Of The Sex Olympics
Possibly the most provocative and prescient of British TV writer Nigel Kneale's superb body of work.
Like George Orwell's 1984, which Kneale was the first to bring to the screen, The Year of the Sex Olympics sees the sinister, manipulative potential in television.
Its future finds the mass of society - the "low drives" - subdued by a constant stream of television pornography pumped out by the media elite. These "high-drives" are headed by Leonard Rossiter and Brian Cox. As the stupefying effect of the non-stop hard-core diet begins to wane, a new way to fulfill the population's baser urges emerges - reality television.
Soon enough, The Live Life Show starts broadcasting 24/7 coverage of a family stranded on a Scottish island for the delight of a rapt audience.
Kneale's show was hugely risqué for its day, the culmination of a decade of increasingly adventurous science fiction television such as The Avengers, Adam Adamant Lives! and The Prisoner.
Although now available on DVD, Sex Olympics was for many years a criminally forgotten gem. It produced no contemporary sequels or remakes, but did prefigure the reality television wave that currently swamps us.
Nominated by waddlepearce and nickyf01.
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