Nineteen Eighty-Four (BBC, 1954)

The BBC Sunday Night Theatre play, Nineteen Eighty-Four (BBC, 1954), is one of the earliest surviving examples of British television drama. The play was broadcast live on Sunday 12 December 1954, at 8.35 pm, and repeated the following Thursday, at 9.35 pm, when the cast reassembled in the BBC’s Alexandra Palace studios for another live transmission.1 It was this second performance of Nineteen Eighty-Four that was recorded, through the process known as ‘telerecording’, by filming the live transmission of the play from a television monitor as it was broadcast. Telerecording had first been demonstrated in 1947 but there were problems synchronising the film camera with the electronic television signal and it was not until the early 1950s that results were considered suitable for archiving. The earliest surviving recording of a complete British television drama is another Sunday Night Theatre play, It Is Midnight, Dr Schweitzer (tx.26 February 1953) and it is significant that it was plays from this prestigious Sunday evening showcase that were deemed worthy of preservation when other drama productions were not. Even so, only 24 complete productions survive from more than 500 Sunday Night Theatre plays broadcast between 1950 and 1959.