Arena — Season 1, Episode 215: George Orwell 4: Nineteen Eighty-four
Documentary • 90 min • 3 seasons, 689 episodes • ★ 7.2/10
Episode synopsis
The last in this series of Arena films about the life and work of George Orwell begins with the tragic death of his wife Eileen in March 1945. Overcome with grief at his bereavement and despair at the future of Britain under the post-war Labour government, Orwell retreated to the remote Hebridean island of Jura. It was here, crippled with tuberculosis and isolated from the rest of the world, that Orwell cared for his adopted infant son, Richard, and wrote his last novel Nineteen Eighty-four-a nightmare vision of a totalitarian future in which Big Brother controls not only the lives but also the thoughts of his citizens, and love and individual freedom is no more than a distant memory. Among those appearing are Avril Dunn, Bill Dunn, Susan Watson, Sonia Orwell and Richard Blair.
About Arena
Arena is a British television documentary series, made and broadcast by the BBC. Voted by leading TV executives in Broadcast as one of the top 50 most influential programmes of all time, it has run since 1 October 1975 with over five hundred episodes made, directed by the likes of Martin Scorsese, Alan Yentob, Roly Keating, Frederick Baker, Volker Schlondorff and Vikram Jayanti. Arena's subjects are a roll-call of the world's best known cultural figures from the 20th and 21st centuries, from singers Bob Dylan and Amy Winehouse to academics Edward Said and Eric Hobsbawm, from writers Jean Genet and V S Naipaul to artists Francis Bacon and Louise Bourgeois. The current series editor is Anthony Wall.