Activity: Participating in or organising an event types › Participation in conference
Description
'Sadists and Readers of Horror Comics': The BBC, 'Nineteen-Eighty-Four' and the British Horror Comics Campaign
When the BBC broadcast their first television version of George Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' in 1954, the response was striking. One viewer called the people responsible for the production 'sadists and readers of horror comics', linking the broadcast to the then-current campaign to ban American horror comics from Britain. Similar connections were made between the campaign and the production within newspaper stories regarding the play. This paper will draw upon material from the BBC Written Archives in examining the discourse around this production relating it to horror comics, in order to show how the cultural concerns expressed by viewers and newspapers related to the concerns that Martin Barker in particular has identified as being embodied in the horror comics campaign.