‘I think we’ve just found the fruit skin…’
If The Year of the Sex Olympics feels like a radical title for a television play that aired on the BBC in 1968 than you would be correct. Surprisingly, the outlandish title is far from the most radical thing about this curious little beast of a film…
In some kind of near future, the lower classes (or low-drives) are satiated by a constant diet of pornography, slapstick and other general slop (‘bread and circuses’ as the Roman poet Juvenal put it), while the higher classes (or high-drives) control the flow of information and the media. Nat Mender (Tony Vogel), an idealistic TV programmer, believes that television can be used to educate the masses – his boss, Ugo Priest (Leonard Rossiter), only cares about the ratings. Elsewhere, a fresh faced Brian Cox plays an unscrupulous TV executive.
Written by British TV royalty Nigel Kneale (Quatarmass, The Stone Tapes), The Year of the Sex Olympics was seen by many as being indecipherable upon release. This is not surprising as the complete lack of exposition in the first act ensures that the audience is always chasing its tail. As with Orwell’s 1984 (a novel that Kneale also adapted for the BBC), the characters here have lost the skill of conversation, instead communicating with crude and rudimentary words and phrases that bring to mind Nadsat (the language spoken by the Droogs in A Clockwork Orange). And as with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, that other great dystopian text, the masses are destroyed not by something that they hate, but something they love – in this case… lowest common denominator television.
While the general aesthetic and performance style are dated, the plot is almost unbelievably prescient. While it borrows from some of the previously mentioned classic texts, the film’s eerily accurate depiction of reality television is truly chilling to behold. It helps that in Cox, Rossiter and Vogel, all of whom are excellent, Kneale has a cast that can do this odd little fable justice.
As with Mike Judge’s depressingly accurate Idiocracy, much of your enjoyment here will depend on how much time you are willing to spend with morons. In the end, The Year of the Sex Olympics is a film that I admired rather than enjoyed.
