For 95 Minutes, the BBC Brings George Orwell to Life

George Orwell occu­pies a fun­ny place in the mod­ern lit­er­ary con­scious­ness. The last few gen­er­a­tions came to know him, in Eng­lish class, as the author of the nov­els Ani­mal Farm and Nine­teen Eighty-Four. My own peers may remem­ber their teach­ers’ awk­ward inver­sion of the ear­li­er book, forced as they were to clar­i­fy Orwell’s already direct Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion alle­go­ry by explain­ing that, a long time ago, there lived a man named Trot­sky who was a lot like Snow­ball the pig, and so on. The lat­er book, many read­ers’ first glimpse at a real­is­tic dystopia, tends to hit us hard­er. All those tin­ny, piped-in patri­ot­ic anthems; the vari­cose veins; the saw­dusty cig­a­rettes; the defeat­ed cups of watery tea — why on Earth, we asked our­selves, did Orwell so con­fi­dent­ly fore­see a sham­bol­ic world of such simul­ta­ne­ous chintzi­ness and bru­tal­i­ty?

Apart from his six nov­els and four vol­umes of mem­oir, Orwell pro­duced an aston­ish­ing quan­ti­ty of essays. These I reg­u­lar­ly con­sult in my brick-like Everyman’s Library edi­tion, and I bought that on the strength of two par­tic­u­lar pieces: “Pol­i­tics and the Eng­lish Lan­guage” and “Why I Write.” Many of us encounter these here or there in the course of high­er edu­ca­tion, and none of us with an inter­est in read­ing, writ­ing, think­ing, and the feed­back loop between the three for­get them. Pres­sured to cite the most inci­sive pas­sage in all of Orwell, how could I decide between the for­mer essay’s descrip­tion of how “a mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blur­ring the out­line and cov­er­ing up all the details,” and the lat­ter essay’s con­trast of the writer’s ego against that of “the great mass of human beings” who, after thir­ty, “almost aban­don the sense of being indi­vid­u­als at all — and live chiefly for oth­ers, or are sim­ply smoth­ered under drudgery”?

Despite pass­ing at only 46, Orwell left an almost impos­ing­ly large body of writ­ten work. Read­ers who’ve savored it and want to learn, hear, and see more come up against a cer­tain dif­fi­cul­ty: we have a few pho­tographs of Orwell, but as far as sound or film, noth­ing exists. Yet that didn’t stop BBC Four from putting togeth­er George Orwell: A Life in Pic­tures, cast­ing actor Chris Lang­ham as Orwell, hav­ing him speak Orwell’s words, and insert­ing him, Zelig-like, into his­tor­i­cal footage real and recon­struct­ed of Orwell’s places and times. Doc­u­men­tary purists may balk at this, but strong choic­es make strong films. As a com­pul­sive read­er of Orwell myself, I’ll take any chance I can to expe­ri­ence more rich­ly the mind of this child of the “low­er upper-mid­dle class” whose fas­ci­na­tion with pover­ty drove him down into it; this social­ist who loathed both the trap­pings and pro­po­nents of social­ism; this wor­shiper of hard man­u­al labor who under­stood more about the impact of words than most of us do today; this famed writer who cloaked his giv­en name of Eric Arthur Blair to bet­ter retreat, alone, into his gray, qua­si-ascetic Eng­lish plea­sures.

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.