The Year of the Sex Olympics, and Other TV Plays

by Nigel Kneale

Out of Print.

Genres: Film

144 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1976

About the author

Nigel Kneale was a British screenwriter. He is best known for being the creator of Professor Bernard Quatermass. Kneale wrote four Quatermass TV serials in total between 1953 and 1979 as well as BBC radio docudrama retrospective "The Quatermass Memoirs" that was first broadcast in 1995. Kneale also wrote such programs as The Year Of The Sex Olympics, The Stone Tape and the 1989 adaptation of Susan Hill's novel The Woman in Black.

Reviews

[Ian Duerden · Rating 5 out of 5]

It has taken a long time for this much anticipated book to fall into my hands and I am not disappointed... it is Kneale at his finest. The television recordings of 'The Stone Tape' and 'Year of the Sex Olympics' still exist and are therefore better know than 'The Road'. It was the latter, a play I saw in my childhood which opened doors in my imagination that have never closed, that I was most eager to read. It is set in the 18th century, the Age of Reason, and tells of two rivals, a Johnsonian idealist of the coffee houses of London and a country squire, an amateur of natural philosophy (the term scientist would not be coined for a further hundred years). Poles apart in beliefs and ideals they will confront a happening in a wood on the Eve of Michaelmas that will shake both their concepts of reality. Excellent dialogue, intriguing characters, atmospheric story telling. Ground breaking writing...

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a collection of original teleplays for English TV written by Nigel Kneale, the creator of the famous "Quatermass" series. It includes "The Road," which starts off sounding like a Hammer Horror period piece about a haunting, but which takes progressively unexpected turns both dramatically and conceptually. It also includes "The Stone Tapes," concerning a scientific ghost-hunt that stumbles across a troubling new theory for hauntings. And finally, it includes "The Year of the Sex Olympics." Don't be fooled by the lurid title: this is actually a grim, thoughtful meditation on a dystopian future, of the ilk of 1984 or BRAVE NEW WORLD. Though originally written and broadcast in 1968, the story is an eerily prescient, satiric look at a future where a small elite control the masses through a type of programming we would now recognize as "reality television."