Why The BBC Wanted To Keep George Orwell Off The Radio

“I am quite seriously worried about the situation and about the wisdom of our keeping Orwell personally on the air.”

– the BBC controller outlines his reasons for keeping George Orwell off the air

In his his lifetime, George Orwell (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950) was thought “no good as a novelist”. He was better known for his essays and books of reportage: Down and Out in Paris and London (describing a period of poverty in these cities), The Road to Wigan Pier (describing the living conditions of the poor in northern England, and class division generally) and Homage to Catalonia.

In the decades following his death at just 46, he became a mainstay of English literature, chiefly on account of his final two books: Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). As Paul Gallagher notes, the impact of these two novels has enshrined Orwell’s surname, like Charles Dickens and Franz Kafka, into the English language as a descriptive term – “Orwellian”- for political oppression. Phrases from Nineteen Eighty-Four have become part of our everyday language – ‘Big Brother’, ‘Room 101’, ‘newspeak’, ‘unperson’, ‘doublethink’, ‘memory whole’ and ‘thoughtcrime’.

George Orwell’s original and corrected manuscript of ‘1984’ in his own handwriting.

Depending on how you read his work, Orwellian has been used to describe any number of perceived and real existential threats to the free world. It’s been used to decry everything from the rise of CCTV and wind farms, to the war against “the axis of evil”, the rise of Islamic fascism, globalisation, Brexit, the EU, the NHS, the BBC, Vladimir Putin’s political “grand vision”, Republicans, Democrats, ‘Obamacare’, and climate-change deniers and climate change scientists. The New York Times declared Orwellian “the most widely used adjective derived from the name of a modern writer  It’s more common than ‘Kafkaesque,’ ‘Hemingwayesque’ and ‘Dickensian’ put together. It even noses out the rival political reproach ‘Machiavellian’, which had a 500-year head start.”

George Orwell 1984 – illustrated by Ralph Steadman 

Controller (Overseas Services)      19th January, 1943

GEORGE ORWELL                                 STAFF PRIVATE

1. A.C. (OS) 2. E.S.D.

I listened rather carefully to one of George Orwell’s English talks in the Eastern Service on, I think, Saturday last. I found the talk itself interesting, and I am not critical of its content, but I was struck by the basic unsuitability of Orwell’s voice. I realise, of course, that his name is of some value in quite important Indian circles, but his voice struck me as both un-attractive and really unsuited to the microphone to such an extent that (a) it would not attract any listeners who were outside the circle of Orwell’s admirers as a writer and might even repel some of these, and (b) would make the talks themselves vulnerable at the hands of people who would have reason to see Orwell denied the microphone, or of those who felt critical of the B.B.C. for being so ignorant of the essential needs of the microphone and of the audience as to put on so wholly unsuitable a voice.

I am quite seriously worried about the situation and about the wisdom of our keeping Orwell personally on the air.

JBC/GMG (J.B. Clark)

 

Sir John Beresford Clark

One reason Old Etonian Orwell’s voice may not have sounded attractive was that he had been shot in the throat during the Spanish Civil War. Orwell returned the slight by naming Nineteen Eighty-Four‘s infamous torture room after “Room 101” on the first floor of the BBC’s Broadcasting House, where he had to sit through long, tedious meetings about political vetting.
Read: George Orwell’s 1944 Letter Revealing Why He Wrote 1984