Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’

Thisses title might be a bit confusing, coming as it does straight after the last one, so this might end up being even less read than usual due to people thinking it’s the same post. It isn’t. I’m also doing all of this from memory without re-reading or re-watching anything, so I’m hoping I’ve got it right.

There was a time before I read ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, and it was before 1984. My image of it was very different from what it delivered. I imagined it would be futuristic and somewhat like ‘Brave New World’, which I think I read first. There are ways in which it is, from Orwell’s perspective anyway, and there is advanced technology in it, though not often in the way that might be expected. I think for someone who’s read neither, at least in the 1970s CE, the two novels are conceptually smushed together and are just weird high-tech dystopias without much distinction between the two. In fact I once came up with a fan theory to convert Orwell’s world into Aldous Huxley’s, which went on to become H. G. Wells’ ‘Time Machine’ world of the Eloi and Morlocks, but that’s not very literary tinkering of which I’m fond but probably bores most people and can’t be done without altering details of Huxley’s back story unless that’s unreliable in-universe. Once I’d read it, I had to rewrite history with authentic memories.

Winston

With the exception of ‘Coming Up For Air’ and presumably ‘Animal Farm’, which I haven’t read, Orwell’s central characters are generally similar to himself both psychologically and physically. Winston Smith is no exception. In fact, since Orwell was basically dying at the time, Winston is also not a well man. His varicose ulcer in particular gets mentioned a number of times. However, he’s also transposed down in history and some of his experiences are therefore inevitably different. He’s divorced, feels guilty about betraying his mother and sister and is living in the aftermath of a nuclear war. He’s also complicit in the regime, like all Outer Party members, his job being to rewrite history to accord with the current party line. Orwell was involved in the wartime BBC propaganda effort, working from Room 101 of course, and I presume this reflects his ambivalence about this work. However, Winston is far more heavily coerced than the author. He’s constantly surveilled, like all of the Outer Party. Incidentally, it’s notable that the proles are not surveilled to the same extent and seem to have a lot more fun than he and his colleagues have. It’s been said that fascist regimes rely very much on the middle class to succeed, so this may be it, and the low level of education among the poorest is accompanied by lack of political awareness. The working class don’t come across very positively in this novel, and unfortunately given the attitudes stereotypically associated with them in England today, the contempt for them continues. Orwell has seen their lives from the inside and it’s made him pessimistic about the idea that they can be the source of any revolutionary activity. This doesn’t sit well with me even while I suspect it’s often true. However, they’re not a monolith and different people have different attitudes and values.

Novel-writing machines

Julia, Winston’s love interest, works on the novel-writing machines and is of course mainly seen from his perspective in the novel. Recently, the novel ‘Julia’ has attempted to tell the same story from her viewpoint, which also helps the reader see Winston from outside. Julia disguises herself as an enthusiastic member of the Anti-Sex League, and this among other things provokes the thought that the whole society is built on dishonesty and bad faith. Everyone is encouraged to think that everyone else loves Big Brother. The concept of the novel-writing machine is interesting because it doesn’t seem like it fits technologically. The trope arises repeatedly in science fiction and outside it – I think Roald Dahl uses it and Jonathan Swift does too – and I suppose it’s the author’s nightmare and since Orwell seems to have been trying to cram everything he hated into the world of ‘1984’, it finds its place there. At the time of writing, though, it must’ve seemed completely impossible and it seems out of place in the general grimy, low-tech atmosphere of Airstrip One. The solution to this, I think, is that the Party invents anything it needs to keep the populace in check, whether propaganda or some other kind of technology, so where there’s a will, there’s a way. It also makes me wonder if technology is potentially much more advanced than is seen in day to day life by the common people but they only get to avail themselves of it when it helps Ingsoc. This theme is also visited in ‘Brave New World’ where it’s openly admitted that technology is deliberately held back. Focussing on the very obvious thing which hasn’t been said yet, yes this is AI chatbots and they absolutely can produce stories of poor quality with lots of cliches and stereotypes in them, which is exactly what writing in ‘1984’ does. Song lyrics are also written by machine if I remember correctly. Like the real world, the fun creative thing which people actually want to do is taken away from them and they’re left with drudgery. Creativity would be subversive of course. Another aspect of this is that Newspeak is quite mechanical in nature and it might be easier to mechanise textual production in it than in English, but I’ll return to that later.

Telescreens are the most obvious bit of tech in the novel. Supplemented by microphones, they ensure that nobody outside the Inner Party can go unobserved in that manner. In a humorous note, the gym instructor can see Winston failing to do his physical jerks and criticises him through the telescreen. Anthony Burgess, incidentally, provocatively stated that “‘1984’ is essentially a comic book”, but what he seems to have intended by that, apart from being edgy which I think is probably his main motivation, is that Orwell takes the immediate post-war situation in Britain with its austerity and rationing and extrapolated it over almost four decades, leading to a caricature which might not have been meant to be taken entirely seriously. In my desire to make sense of the technological minutiae of the novel, which is never entirely absent from my mind, I’m given to wonder if telescreens use cathode ray tubes like the televisions of the time or whether they’re flatscreens which work in a handwavy way, because there are enormous public telescreens in places like the one in Victory Square which suggests to me that there must be a massive long tube behind them the size of Nelson’s Column or something.

The other notable bit of technology in the book is the machine used to torture Winston during his interrogation. Probably like you, I’m not sure I want to go there in too much detail but it seems able to read his mind and there’s a quantitative rating system which reminds me of electric shock therapy for some reason. I get the impression that the machine can fix transitory thoughts in the mind before doubts set in.

The nature of truth

My English teacher once observed that the novel is as much a philosophical treatise as a work of fiction. This was before I’d formally studied philosophy, so it was presented to me at a time before I had fully formed and thought-through ideas about that, but the main issues seem to be those of history and truth, or perhaps the relationship between language, thought and experience. There’s an incident during Winston’s interrogation where O’Brien burns a piece of paper and says he doesn’t remember it. Winston has some difficulty conceiving of how he can refer to something which he claims is not remembered. This is of course doublethink: being able to hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time. The idea seems to be not only that one outwardly expresses contradictory propositions but that the actual mental activity involves sincerely embracing the contradiction. It isn’t even a question of some thought being required to reveal the contradiction: it’s just there, blatant, as an object of one’s attention. There’s a theme throughout the novel that the indoctrination goes all the way to the centre of the mind.

This relates to the Party’s hostility to orgasm. An orgasm is a subjective experience, often ecstatic, over which the Party has no control. It can make the outside world as drab as it likes, but because orgasm is generally seen as pure pleasure, often shared between people, it has to be eliminated. There’s no control over it. It’s also possible that the existence of orgasms in such a stark world would reveal that things could be better in other ways too because of the contrast. Beyond this though, it seems to be control for its own sake, and it’s what the Anti-Sex League is about. It’s therefore a particularly telling contrast that Julia of all people is in that organisation. She is using doublethink against Big Brother.

Then there’s history. Winston is aware of the Party rewriting history to attribute the invention of the steam engine to Big Brother. He is himself involved in this activity. O’Brien’s burning of the paper is a reference to the immediate past.

Bad Faith

Parsons is Winston’s neighbour and colleague, and is scarily conformist in a very bad faith kind of way. His wife and he, though not his daughter, have a deeply buried aversion to the regime but cover it not only with a veneer of approval but one which penetrates most of the way to the centre of their identity, though not quite all the way, though they won’t even admit it to themselves. Ingsoc has had more success with their daughter, who is no “oldthinker”. She bellyfeels Ingsoc because they have moulded her from birth, and she’s reminiscent of both the Hitler Youth and the children who were to emerge in East Germany who used to report their own parents to the government. She hardly belongs to the family and is really there as living surveillance. In a somewhat similar move to Winston’s as a boy, she betrays her father to the authorities by telling them the possibly fabricated tale that he said “Down with Big Brother” in his sleep. Although this may be her lie, it could also be that this is really what Parsons said because only in an unconscious state can he admit to his abhorrence of his situation. Whatever actually happened, Parsons praises his daughter for turning him in before the rot had truly set in, that is, before he had to admit the truth to himself.

‘The Place Where There Is No Darkness’

The above is my favourite quote of the entire novel. Winston has previously dreamt that his boss O’Brien is his saviour and he later appears to demonstrate this by letting him into the inner circle of the Party but also the illusory inner circle of the resistance. He imagines that this place is one of hope, but in fact it’s the Ministry Of Truth, where the lights are on all the time to prevent prisoners from sleeping, and also the light penetrates their minds to reveal their secrets, deepest wishes and worst fears. Darkness in this context is simply anything Big Brother wants to get rid of such as sexual pleasure and happiness in general. Although it’s not his intention, I feel very much that this metaphor of light as evil and darkness as good is very productive, and also reflects the fact that Oceania is an ethical photographic negative, also shown by slogans such as “Freedom Is Slavery” and “War Is Peace”.

Maintenance of hatred to distract and unify

A very familiar aspect of the novel is its emphasis on the need for an external enemy, whether Eurasia or Eastasia. Dorothy Rowe, the psychotherapist, used to concentrate very much on this idea and I once went to a talk from her on this subject where she pointed out that soon after the Cold War ended and many people expected a new era of peace, the first Gulf War ensued and we all of a sudden had a new enemy to distract us. During the real 1984, one recent manifestation of that enemy had been Argentina. Nowadays many people would say it was immigrants and asylum seekers, and here I have a question. Some people use this novel to defend what they see as the Free World against other agents and forces such as what they call communism, and then on the Left we would tend to see it as about the likes of totalitarianism and fascism in a more right wing sense. It’s interesting that it should work so well in such a double-edged way. Orwell leads us to see that Ingsoc calls itself socialist when it clearly isn’t, and that would seem to accord with the general left wing view of state capitalism as manifested in the Soviet Union and China, but it seems to work just as well the other way around. Recently we’ve had the “War Against Terror”, which is more abstract but the same thing. Big Brother also regularly retcons the constant alternating wars with Eastasia and Eurasia, more or less entailing that the other two powers constantly shift between alliance and war. Each needs the other two as enemies. This is a particularly vivid and relevant aspect of the novel today.

Newspeak

English is called “Oldspeak” in Oceania. The idea of Newspeak is twofold. One aspect of it is within the regime, to close down thought and reasoning subversive to Ingsoc, but it also serves the purpose for Orwell of being ugly and unpleasant, and also kind of mechanical, not requiring deep thought but rather doublethink. There’s a third aspect to it which I’ll come to in a bit. I’m not entirely sure about this but I have the impression that there are no capital letters. Winston doesn’t use them in his diary, which is in Oldspeak, and there are also no capital letters in Minitru memoranda. Winston observes that someone using Newspeak speaks like a block of text with no spaces between the words, or it may be an aspect of simplifying the language while losing nuance – destroying it actually. However, there are some capitals, such as “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU” and “INGSOC”. I’m sure I don’t need to go into much detail about the language if you’ve read the book. Orwell seems to buy very much into the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis that language shapes the world, and therefore that restricting language is restricting freedom of thought. I don’t agree with this and in fact the hypothesis is, I think, largely discredited nowadays. Interestingly, to me, Suzette Haden Elgin tried to do the opposite by creating Laadan, a constructed language specifically geared to women’s experience, but later decided that it wasn’t actually any harder to articulate that in natural languages although other women have taken and developed her conlang and disagree. It does appear to be true that we think of things differently to some extent depending on the language we’re able to use: I found it much harder to express philosophical ideas in Gaidhlig than English and I don’t think that was my lack of competence in the language.

The extra aspect of this I mentioned, and I’m not sure whether it’s intentional, is that the simplicity of Newspeak reflects Esperanto, which had reached its peak about fifteen years previously. In fact I have written a short story in Newspeak to explore this, set in a community where only Esperanto is spoken. I’m not aware of any other fiction written in Newspeak. In general, Esperanto was considered progressive at the time, so I have some difficulty reconciling this, but then Orwell was also like that – he engaged in doublethink himself to an extent, so maybe he was externalising a habit of mind. Zamenhoff’s popular conlang had its momentum destroyed by fascism and Nazism.

Film Adaptations

To be fair, this should be called “The Film Adaptation” because although several have been made I have the 1984 version in mind. I found it very faithful in terms of the events. It would have been difficult to reproduce Winston’s thoughts verbatim there, but at one point O’Brien bends down next to him in the torture chamber looking old and tired and the text in the book reads ‘you are thinking. . . that my face is old and tired.”. I was of course primed by having read it, but that does, I think, get very clearly communicated in the film. Mike Radford, the director, said that there was nothing in the film that wasn’t happening somewhere in the world that year, a very similar claim to Margaret Atwood’s concerning ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ that nothing in that had not been done to women somewhere. Orwell seems to have anticipated that one day the technology would exist to keep tabs on people minutely, which by the time of the real 1984 had already seemed to have gone too far and since then has only gone further. In a review of the film from the time of its release, “Shoplifters Will Be Prosecuted” was said to be the “real” version of “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU”. That year, the Met had set up a bank of cameras at Brent Cross which could recognise number plates of cars leaving and entering London by that route and cross-referenced them with DVLA records in Swansea. That was over forty years ago now. There were also concerns about computers keeping track of credit card transactions and cheques. Nowadays of course everything is done by card or bank transfer and those worries seem trivial, which just shows how much we’ve normalised all this. MI5 had also just bought two ICL mainframes with 20 Gb of storage, which doesn’t sound like very much now but compared to the 5 Mb which many hard drives could accommodate at the time, it was a heck of a lot and this had been done secretly – why? Another notable aspect of the film is that it shows nothing which didn’t exist in Orwell’s lifetime, so for instance IT is still based on valves. This leads to a little distortion in the story, particularly in the interrogation scenes, as they were clearly supposed to be more advanced than is shown on screen. Since Orwell’s central characters are self-inserts, John Hurt must have resembled him quite closely physically at the time, and I get the impression he must have starved himself to achieve that gaunt appearance. Apparently Orwell’s inspiration for the idea of altering back copies of ‘The Times’ originated from the editing of ‘The Great Soviet Encyclopaedia’ in the 1930s under Stalin’s orders, where articles on, for example, Trotsky were deleted and photos of scenes from the Russian Revolution airbrushed. Radford points out that for all the disquiet and woe of his situation, created by the Party itself, Winston actually genuinely seems to enjoy his job. Another character, possibly Symes, says that the destruction of words is a beautiful thing, and given that O’Brien has said that the only source of pleasure the Party wants to continue is the pleasure of a jackboot stamping on a face forever, much more overtly Symes but Winston also, both enjoy that aspect of their work in different ways. Symes is part of an effort to shrink English vocabulary to a size convenient for Ingsoc’s ideology and Winston destroys words printed on paper by burning them. Other sources of pleasure are denied them. During a break in filming, Radford watched a news item showing the Queen laying a wreath on the tomb of Jomo Kenyatta, who fought to liberate Kenya from the British in the ’50s. At the time he had been painted as Satan incarnate by the media, but all of a sudden he was rehabilitated and revered. Not that he should or should not have been, but the complete volteface is rather familiar. The year 1984 also saw the computerisation of much political campaigning, with for example the targetting of election leaflets on education to addresses of parents of school age children. All the stuff about our data being used to manipulate us is not new at all, although of course it’s become all-pervasive today.

A bit of an aside: there were two annoying pubic hair incidents in 1984, one connected with Nena’s armpits (okay, not pubic hair but you know what I mean) and the other Suzanna Hamilton’s, which was visible on screen. I didn’t give it a second thought at the time, but apparently more recent audiences have found it quite shocking and worthy of comment. To be honest this reminds me of the incident with the fillings in the mouth of the screaming woman, who had been born into the post-nuclear world where there was presumably no dentistry, at the end of ‘Threads’, in that it really seems like a distraction from the real point of the film, but if you like you can actually shoehorn it in, in that women in Airstrip One don’t want to squander their paltry wages on using razors to remove body hair but in fact I very much doubt anyone at all in Britain was doing that in 1948. A few other things: Richard Burton’s health was failing at the time and took forty-five takes to do one of the scenes because he couldn’t remember his lines, so he was in fact very old and tired at that point. He actually died two months before the film was released so I’m guessing it was his last movie. The scenes generally kept pace with the diary dates in the book, so the opening scenes, for instance, were filmed on 4th April. This meant, of course, that it couldn’t be released until late in the year. In connection with both the theme and the insistence on using technology contemporary with Orwell’s life, Radford wanted to film it in black and white but Virgin refused, so instead the footage was put through bleach bypass to give it the washed-out appearance it had in theatres. This added to the cost of production because it meant that silver couldn’t be reclaimed from the negative or positive prints.

Then there’s the peculiar issue of the music. The initial plan had been to use David Bowie because of his album ‘Diamond Dogs’, but he was too expensive, so the Eurhythmics were approached instead and there is of course an album of their music for the soundtrack. However, all of that was Richard Branson’s idea and he hadn’t told Radford, who had hired Dominic Muldowney to do it, who ended up scoring the entire movie. Branson then vetoed Radford’s choice and the result is that in the initial theatrical cut most of the music is the Eurhythmics’, although it does seem rather quiet and brief most of the time, but some of it, for instance ‘Oceania, ‘Tis For Thee’, which plays in the opening scene in the cinema after the Two Minutes’ Hate, is by Muldowney. Some versions of the film on Blu-Ray give viewers the option of choosing between soundtracks but there’s also a DVD which only uses Muldowney’s, which I guess is much sought after because it’s out of print. Personally I like the Eurhythmics soundtrack but think it reflects the kind of impression one has before one has read the book and the Muldowney version is much more in keeping with the atmosphere of the film because Orwell didn’t forsee popular music going in the direction it in fact did.

The other thing about the film is its influence on other near-contemporary works. In particular, Terry Gillam’s ‘Brazil’ shares a very similar aesthetic, and Apple’s initial ad for the Mac is also self-consciously very similar to the first scene.

To conclude, it probably doesn’t need saying that there’s a lot that did need saying about this novel. When I tried to write an essay about it at school, I ended up just giving a detailed synopsis because I felt it said what it did so well that it was practically impossible for me to rephrase it in any way which would be helpful, which is, I think, a general problem with literary criticism of sufficiently high-quality works. There may never have been a point when ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ couldn’t’ve been taken to describe the world outside the window, but that’s equally true now and that’s a true mark of the universalism of a great work of literature.

Nineteen Eighty-Four and 1984

There you go: don’t say I don’t listen to my readers! I don’t want this to seem self-indulgent, so before I start I want to point out that this is a response to a comment, that someone would like me to do something like this, so that’s what I’m doing.

Without tinkering with HTML, it seems difficult to provide links within a document in WordPress, so for now I’ll just give you a table of contents in order to prevent you being overwhelmed with the length of this post:

1. The Eternal Present

2. The Never-Ending. . .December?

3. George Orwell Is Better Than War-Warwell

4. My Secret Diary, Aged 16¾

5. A Collision With The Great White Whale

6. Armageddon

7. The Stereophonic Present

8. Harvest For The World

9. The Ending Story

10. Life Off The Fast Lane

11. Green Shoots

1. The Eternal Present

To me, the year 1984 CE is a kind of eternal present. I sometimes joke about this, saying that all the years after that one were clearly made up, and someone pointed out to me that that was highly Orwellian, but in fact it really is the case that all years are made up and we just have this arbitrary numbering scheme based on someone’s incorrect guess about the birthdate of Jesus, and yes, here I’m assuming there was an historical Jesus, which considering I’m Christian is hardly surprising.

2. The Never-Ending. . . December?

There is a fairly easy if absurd way to make it 1984 still, which is just to have a never-ending December. It’s currently Hallowe’en 2025, in which case it’s the 14945th December 1984. This wouldn’t be a completely useless dating system and I sometimes think we can conceive of time (in the waking sense: see last entry) differently according to how we choose to parcel it up. Another way of making it 1984 would be to date years from forty years later, and no that’s not a mistake as there was no year zero in the Julian or Gregorian calendars. There was one in a certain Cambodian calendar of course, from 17th April 1975, where it was inspired by the French revolutionary Year One, the idea being that history started on that date because everything that happened before that was irrelevant, being part of capitalism and imperialism I presume. My insistence that it’s always 1984 is the opposite of that, as I’m affectedly sceptical about anything happening afterwards. Coincidentally, I use a day-based dating system starting on 17th July 1975 in my diary, and I don’t actually know why I do this, but it’s only ninety-one days after the start of Year Zero (there are other things to be said about Pol Pot which would reveal the over-simplification of this apparent myth). It’s based on the first dated entry in any notebook and my mother’s suggestion that I keep a diary which I didn’t follow. It’s actually the second dated entry, as the first one is of a series of measurements of a staircase, which isn’t really about anything personal. I’ve also toyed with the idea of Earth’s orbit being a couple of metres wider, which would make the year very slightly longer but which would add up over 4.6 aeons (Earth’s age) to quite a difference, but if that were so, asteroid impacts and mass extinctions wouldn’t’ve happened which did and other ones which didn’t might’ve, so it totally changes the history of the world if you do that. If the year was a week longer, it would now be 1988 dated from the same point, but a lot of other things would also be different such as the calendar. It’s quite remarkable how finely-tuned some things are.

3. George Orwell Is Better Than War-Warwell

Although I could go on in this vein, I sense it might irritate some people, so the rest of this is going to be about my feeling of the eternal present, how 1984 actually was to me and thoughts about George Orwell. I’m just telling you this if you feel like giving up at this point.

I have habitually said that “George Orwell is better than War-Warwell” as a reference to Harold MacMillan’s paraphrase of Winston Churchill, and I wonder if Churchill is one of those figures who is always having quotes misattributed to him, like Albert Einstein. The trouble is, of course, that this is a practically meaningless phrase which I can’t do anything with, although Sarada has published a story with that title. I’ve read a lot of Orwell, although unlike most people who have that doesn’t include ‘Animal Farm’. It’s been suggested that if he’d lived longer, he would’ve gone to the Right and become a rather embarrassing figure like David Bellamy or Lord Kelvin, but of course we don’t know and I don’t know what that’s based on. He was known to be quite keen on the idea of patriotism though, so maybe it’s that.

Within the universe of his novel ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, we don’t actually know that it is that year. It does seem to be about that time, because Winston Smith was a small boy just after the end of World War II. The Party is constantly revising history and is now claiming that Big Brother invented the steam engine, so it seems easily possible that it isn’t exactly 1984 and that either new years have been written into history or removed from it, and just maybe it’s always 1984 and has been for many years by that point. Maybe they just want to save on printing new calendars or are trying to perfect the year by repeating it over and over again, for example. Maybe ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ is like ‘Groundhog Day’, and what we read is merely one iteration among many of that story. I’ve heard, although appropriately maybe this can’t be trusted, that Orwell simply came up with it by transposing the last two digits of the year he wrote it. Whereas it’s possible to play with this, the truth is probably simply that he needed to give Winston enough time to grow up and reach his forties so he could tell the story.

It interests me that there was a somewhat jocular, artsy attempt to claim that a period called the 19A0s existed between the late ’70s and early ’80s which has been edited out of history, which is similar to the Phantom Time Hypothesis. Just to cover these, I’ve written about this before, and the Phantom Time Hypothesis, so if you want you can read about it there.

A slightly puzzling aspect of ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ is why its title is spelt out rather than written as figures, but it seems that this was common practice at the time. It’s one thing that everyone gets wrong about the book, as it’s almost always referred to as ‘1984’. I should point out that one reason I didn’t get any further than A-level with English Literature is that I experience an impenetrable thicket of associations whenever I consider mainstream creative works which make it difficult to respond meaningfully to them. In the case of Orwell’s novel though, since it’s arguably science fiction it might be more appropriate than usual to do so, since that’s also how I respond to that genre but find it more in keeping with that kind of imagination. I’m not alone in this it seems: Orwell’s novel is analysed in such a manner by the YouTube channel ‘1984 Lore’. I myself used Newspeak to write a short story about a kibbutz-like community on another planet where everyone actually spoke Esperanto to explore whether language restricts thought, portraying it in terms of the idea that it does.

4. My Secret Diary, Aged 16¾

My personal experience in the year 1984 represents a peak in my life. Note that it’s just one peak, neither the biggest nor the only one. It doesn’t overshadow the year of my wedding or the births of our children, grandchildren or anything like that. ’82 and ’83 are also significant in their own ways. ’82 I thought of as the “endless summer” characterised by the nice pictures of young people in yellow T-shirts and long blond hair on the envelopes you got back from the chemists with the photos in them, and ’83 had been particularly poignant, but the year after those had been highly focussed on for a long time in various circles by many people. 1984 opened for me hiding under a table in a suburban living room in Canterbury whispering to my friend about when midnight came. I was wearing a navy blue M&S sweatshirt whose inner flock was worn on the inside of the left elbow, a blue and white striped shirt with a button-down collar which I was only wearing because she liked it, and jeans which annoyed me by not having any bum pockets, and she was wearing jeans which did have bum pockets and a white blouse with yellow check-line lines on it, but it was completely dark so neither of us could see anything. I was sixteen and had had a lot to drink considering my age, naughtily, as had she. We eventually conjectured that midnight must have passed and I rang my dad, who came to pick me up and whom I immediately told I’d had some alcohol (Martini, Cinzano and a Snowball) which my friend saw as not only typical of my impulsiveness and indiscreetness but also liable to get me in trouble but it didn’t. The street lights looked rather blurry on the way home. Thus opened my 1984. A few days later I was back in the sixth form and my friend Mark Watts, who was later to go on to found an investigative journalism agency and uncover a number of cases of child sexual abuse, informed me that it was vital that we didn’t fall for whatever spin the media were likely to put on it being the year named after that novel and that whenever he referred to George Orwell it would be under the name Lionel Wise (Eric Blair – Lionel Blair; Eric Blair – Eric Morecambe – Ernie Wise), which was quite clever if also rather adolescent, which is what we were. We were all very conscious that it was 1984 at last. Anne Nightingale played David Bowie’s ‘1984’ and Van Halen’s ‘1984’ on her request show on the evening of New Year’s Day. I didn’t have a hangover, because I don’t get them. I asked my brother to record something off Anne Nightingale because I was about to go out again to see my friends, and it happened that the next track was Steve Winwood’s ‘While You See A Chance, Take It’, which I’d wanted to get on tape for years but he cut it off halfway through the first verse. The machine on which that was recorded was a rapidly failing mono Sanyo radio cassette recorder which my mum was annoyed was deteriorating so fast seeing as it was less than four years old and I’d got it for my thirteenth birthday. Incidentally, I’m writing all this without reference to diaries or any other kind of record. I just remember it, plainly, clearly, in great detail, and I don’t know how this compares to others’ memories. My memories of much of the ’80s are as clear as flashbulb memories because they occur within my reminiscence bump. There are errors, such as the exact name of the Steve Winwood record, but also a lot of clarity. Anyway, later that year on my seventeenth birthday, 30th July, I got a stereo boom box possibly from Sony which I first recorded on on 8th August, namely Tracey Ullman’s ‘Sunglasses’, followed by ‘Smalltown Boy’. In September, I got my first job, as a cashier at the new Safeway, which looked enormous to me at the time but on returning to the Waitrose which it now is seems really tiny nowadays, and lost it after eleven weeks due to being too slow on the till, not assertive enough to turn people away from the “Nine Items Or Less” (now “fewer” apparently) queue, and £2 out on the cashing up on two occasions. Apparently this was a lot stricter than other places, such as Lipton’s where my sister worked and who was much further out than I on many occasions when she first worked there. I could say more about her situation there but probably shouldn’t. Anyway, I got £1.41 an hour from Safeway which I saved up to buy the first big item I’d ever got for myself, which was a Jupiter Ace microcomputer. Which brings me to computers.

I was very into computers in the early to mid-’80s, but also deeply ambivalent about them. At the start of the year, the family had owned a ZX81 for a year and a bit. I found this annoying because it was such a low-spec machine, but restrictions fuel creativity so it was in fact not a bad thing. I was spending a lot of my time reading computer magazines and wishing I had a better computer, which I resolved late in that year, and also writing software, mainly graphically-oriented, which was difficult considering that our computer only had a resolution of 64×48, although I was later able to increase this to 192 on the Y-axis by pointing the I register on the Z80A somewhere else than the character set, so I could make bar graphs which looked quite good. I did also write a computerised version of Ramon Llull’s ‘Machine That Explains Everything’, a couple of primitive computer viruses and an adventure game. Later on, after I got the Jupiter Ace, I got it to display runes and produce screeds of nonsense words in Finnish. As I said though, I was ambivalent. I’ve never been comfortable with my interest in IT for several reasons, and for more reasons at this point. One reason was that at the time I was communist, and also kind of Stalinist, and felt that the use of IT and automation as fuelled by the microchip boom would create massive unemployment and reduce the power of the workers to withdraw their labour. However, it isn’t clear to me now why me not having a ZX81 would’ve made any difference to that. In the middle of the year, I decided that communism was over-optimistic and there was a brief period during which people were very eager for me to adopt their views, but I quickly opted for Green politics. I was not yet anarchist and believed in a Hobbesian state of nature. Besides this perspective, I was also uncomfortable about my interest in computers because it seemed nerdy, something very negative at the time, and unbalanced – obsessive and not “humanities” enough to my taste. It felt too much like my comfort zone and not challenging enough. It did, however, become apparent that I had spent so much time studying computers, with text books as well as mags and experimentation, that I could’ve easily aced the O-level, which was another example of how my formal educational focus was outside educational institutions at the time, and it was also suggested that my aforementioned friend with whom I hid under the table and was trying to learn BASIC at the technical college, would’ve welcomed me teaching her. This got to the point where I helped her with her homework. On another occasion, an acquaintance was trying to write a FORTH programming language interpreter in Z80 assembler and I had a look through it with interest. One of my other friends later went on to write parts of the major GNU text editor “religion” Emacs, already almost a decade old by ’84, which I still use today. However, I found my interest in computers made me feel embarrassed and self-conscious and I felt somewhat ashamed of it. I think I found a lot of my interests at the time to be very personal and not something I felt comfortable sharing with others.

It was also the year of my perhaps most significant cultural shift. I entered the year enthusiastic about mainstream literature and poetry. I had been warned, though, by my O-level English teacher, that A-level English Lit was likely to spoil my appreciation of reading, and this did in fact happen. Early in the year my enthusiasm continued and I came to enjoy reading poetry and literature. I planned to continue my writing on the works of Samuel Beckett as part of my A-level and the fact we were studying Joyce gave me optimism in that regard. We had a fair bit of freedom to do that kind of thing. In the summer exams, my practical criticism of a particular poem was chosen as a model answer for others to emulate and I was able, for example, to uncover themes in poetry which my teacher hadn’t noticed, which was mainly due to my insistence on maintaining a wide education. I was applying to university in the later part of the year, having researched them in the earlier part, and having opted for degrees in English and Psychology or Philosophy and Psychology, I was clearly sufficiently committed to English at the time to consider it as a first degree. However, all of that was about to go to shit.

5. A Collision With The Great White Whale

It may be worth analysing what went wrong in some depth, but the simple facts of how it happened were as follows. My A-levels were in English, RE and Biology, which I want to stress is a very popular combination. At the end of the first year, around June, there was a marine biology field trip which was in itself quite formative for me because I didn’t relish getting stuck in the stinky, sticky black tarry mud encouraged by the anaerobic respiration in Pegwell Bay, an estuary on the edge of Thanet. It was cold and wet, and the water was of course salty, and I thought I’d ruined that sweatshirt I’d mentioned earlier which I was once again wearing. My dissatisfaction was palpable. Anyway, it was assumed by the English department that those who were off on the field trip would, possibly from their friends, learn their summer reading assignments, which were to read James Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’ anthology and Herman Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’. I didn’t get that information, didn’t talk about the assignments with my friends because it wasn’t a priority for us and consequently was confronted with reading an absolute doorstep of a book plus much of the Joyce one, which was less problematic because being short stories it was easy to catch up with that one. I was then confronted, on reading Melville’s novel, with a load of American men murdering whales for a living. Right then, I wasn’t even vegetarian but I did, like a lot of other people, believe in saving the whale. Over my childhood, I’d read a lot of story books about animals, like ‘Ring Of Bright Water’, ‘All Creatures Great And Small’, ‘Incredible Journey’, ‘Bambi’, ‘Watership Down’ and ‘A Skunk In The Family’. Of course there was peril in these and also horrible deaths on occasion, not to mention sad endings, but the focus was on the otter, the bovines, dogs, cats, deer, rabbit and skunk. There is no problem with depicting them being treated badly, suffering and so forth. But in ‘Moby Dick’, there is never any sympathy or focus on the experience of the whales or acknowledgement of them as victims, in a similar manner to the people who had lived in North America before White colonisers turned up. It was all about something else, and there wasn’t just an elephant in the room but a whale. I was unable to bring myself to step into Ishmael’s or anyone else’s shoes. The only bits I could tolerate were the encyclopaedic sections. I could go into more depth here. I think Melville was probably trying to make a whale-sized book, was using the whale as a metaphor for the intractable and incomprehensible nature of, well, nature and the world in general and as a tabula rasa, them being white like a piece of paper, and there’s the angle that the whale is in some way a phallic symbol. Ahab also anthropomorphises the whale, seeing them as a rival in a battle with him when in the end the whale is just the whale and doesn’t even realise the tiny figures above lobbing harpoons at them are even conscious beings. From the novel’s perspective, the whale probably isn’t even a conscious being. Hence I was confronted with what I read as a hostile, nasty and animal-hating, actually animal-indifferent story where I couldn’t work out whether any of the characters were supposed to be sympathetic and,moreover, the only chapters I could actually garner any interest in were dismissed as mere padding by my teachers. I also found, for some reason, that the same approach I’d been taking to poetry up until the summer no longer seemed to work. It probably didn’t help that one of my teachers was a frustrated Classics teacher who later left and taught that at the King’s School, although I was interested in the classics she managed to shoehorn into the lessons such as Oedipus Tyrannus, the Oresteia and Antigone. I would say, though, that I really didn’t get on with the Oresteia because I felt very much that it lacked universalism. None of that was in the exams of course, but I wasn’t ever very oriented towards those. I was more just interested or not.

The autumn of the year was marked mainly by anxious procrastination about submitting my UCCA form, which I handed in a month later than I was supposed to due to indecision about what to put in my personal statement, which wasn’t up to much partly because of not wanting to admit what I was interested in, and partly because of not pursuing it in a public way due to the shame I felt about admitting it. I also got annoyed with universities insisting on being put first, so rather than selecting places I actually wanted to go to, although my first choice, Keele, I was very keen on due to the balanced and eclectic nature of their educational approach, I deliberately listed Nottingham, Reading and Exeter, followed by Sheffield in which I was in fact fairly interested in. I got rejected by all of them except Keele and Sheffield, Exeter apparently by return of post. Among the polys I applied for Hatfield, Oxford and NELP, and would’ve got into NELP in fact. I liked the modular nature of the course at Oxford, which appealed to me for the same reason as Keele did.

6. Armageddon

Another association which arrived in 1984 and which has been with me ever since is the idea of “proper Britain”. I may have mentioned this before, but the notorious nuclear holocaust drama ‘Threads’ was broadcast on 23rd September 1984, notable for being the first depiction of nuclear winter in the mass media, and I remember being edgelordy about it by saying to my friends that it was over-optimistic. I was ostentatiously and performatively depressive at the time. I did not in fact feel this, but my takeaway from it was probably unusual. There’s a scene at the start where Ruth and Jimmy are canoodling on Curbar Edge above Hope Valley which really struck me. It was grey, drizzly and clearly quite cold, even though I think the action begins in May. There’s also the heavily built up large city of Sheffield, where I might be going in a year or so, and it suddenly crystallised my image of what Britain was really like. Not the South with its many villages and small towns densely dotted about with relatively dry and sunny weather, which I was used to, but the larger block of large post-industrial cities with redbrick terraced houses, back-to-backs, towerblocks and brutalist municipal architecture set against a background of rain, wind and greyness. I relished that prospect, and it felt like real Britain. This is how the bulk of the British population lives, and it becomes increasingly like that the further north you get, hence my repeated attempts to move to Scotland, which in a way I feel is more British than England because of many of those features. By contrast, if you go from Kent to France it’s basically the same landscape and climate with different furniture. Maybe a strange reaction to a depiction of a nuclear war, but there you go.

I did, however, also feel very much that it would be strange and foreign to move away to an area dominated by Victorian redbrick terraced houses. I couldn’t imagine that they’d ever feel like home to me and I couldn’t envisage settling down there. I was still very much a Southerner at that time. I was also, however, fully aware of the privileged bubble I was living in and it made me feel very awkward.

Nor am I ignoring the actual content of the film. The Cold War and the threat of nuclear destruction was very high in many people’s minds at the time and it almost seemed inevitable. This made even bothering to make plans for the future seem rather pointless and almost like busy work. We all “knew” we were going to die horribly, as was everyone around us, so doing the stuff I’ve mentioned, like applying to university, seemed more like something I did as a distraction from that worry than something with an actual aim sometimes, depending on my mood. This had a number of consequences. One is that I wonder if a lot of Gen-Xers underachieve because they missed out on pushing themselves into things in their youth, expecting the world to end at any time. Another is that as the ’80s wore on, pop music and other aspects of popular culture began to reflect that anxiety. Ultimately even Squeeze (basically) ended up producing an eerie and haunting post-nuclear song in the shape of ‘Apple Tree’. Alphaville’s ‘Forever Young’ particularly captures the attitude and is widely misunderstood. The reason we’d be forever young is that we’d never get a chance to grow up and live out full lives. That single was released a mere four days after ‘Threads’ was broadcast.

7. The Stereophonic Present

Speaking of music, there were something like four bands in the Sixth Form at that point, the most prominent being The Cosmic Mushroom, clearly influenced by the Canterbury Scene even in the mid-’80s. My own attitude to music was to concentrate on cassettes because I didn’t trust myself to take care of vinyl properly. The advent of proper stereo in my life was on my birthday at the end of July, and there’s something vivid and recent-sounding about all stereo music I own for that reason. This is in fact one factor in my feeling that 1984 is current rather than in the past. The present is characterised by clear, stereophonic music, the past by lo-fi mono, and that switch occurred for me in summer that year. This is actually more vivid than the earlier shift between black and white and colour TV. Incidentally, CDs were out there for sure, but only for the rich, having been first released two years previously. Like mobile ‘phones, they were a “yuppie” thing, like jug kettles. Back to music. Effectively the charts and my perception of them that year were dominated by ‘Relax’, by Frankie Goes To Hollywood. This was released in November the previous year and entered the charts in early January. This got banned as it climbed the charts, which boosted its popularity enormously and got it to number 1. It stayed in the Top 100 until April the next year. We played it at the school discos, the other standard being ‘Hi-Ho Silver Lining’, which we all used to sing along and dance to. My personal preferences included The The, Bauhaus and The Damned at the time, although the ongoing appreciation of the likes of Kate Bush continued.

8. Harvest For The World

On 24th October, the famous Michael Buerk report on the famine in Ethiopia was broadcast. This led in the next couple of years to Live Aid and Run The World, but from that year’s perspective it only just began. There’s been a lot of justified criticism of media framing of the famine, but as a naive teenager I didn’t have much awareness of that and simply saw it as a disaster which required a response from me, which was initially in the form of a sponsored silence for the whole school in the sports hall, then later a sponsored 24- or 36-hour fast supervised by one of my biology teachers in which I also participated. Although I can’t really mention this without pointing out that the whole thing was dodgy, it did start a ball rolling which continued in much later political activism on my part and a passionate youthful idealism to make the world a better place, which I felt confident had to come soon and meant action from me. ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ was a further effort in that campaign, satirised by Chumbawumba as ‘Pictures Of Starving Children Sell Records’ and roundly criticised by the World Development Movement, but at the time I knew nothing of this. By the way, it’s remarkable how the unpopular Chumbawumba cynicism managed to get from the political fringe into the mainstream in just a few years with the Simpsons parody ‘We’re Sending Our Love Down The Well’ only eight years later, although that was also linked to a Gulf War song it seems, which however is in that tradition, which I first became aware of, superficially, that year. In fact I can’t overestimate the importance of this sequence of events, even with its grubby and cynical connotations, and my support of it has a simplicity and innocence which I wish in a way I still had. I want the world to be one in which something like that works straightforwardly and simply. As I’ve said before, nobody is Whiter or more middle class than I am.

A rather different aspect of this is that I and someone called Louise almost got the giggles during the sponsored silence and we both spent most of our time doing it, which was I think a whole hour, trying not to laugh. A while after that the same thing happened with the two of us in an English class, though on that occasion we gave into it and there was actually nothing provoking it at all. It then spread through the whole class. Once again, in an English class shortly after that, the teacher, discussing Moby Dick of course, took out a model of a sperm whale on wheels unexpectedly and rolled it up and down the desk, which again led to uncontrollable laughter. This was Thatcher’s Britain, yes, and most of us hated her, but it wasn’t grim or joyless, at least for seventeen year olds, and I actually managed to get some pleasure out of Herman Melville’s writing!

CND was very active at the time. I, however, was not, for a couple of reasons. I was slightly uncomfortable with the idea of unilateral disarmament, and in fact that was the last of the standard lefty/Green causes I committed to, but I had a feeling they were right and wanted to go on the demos but never actually did. This is by contrast with the Miners’ Strike. Kent, like Northern France, was a coalmining area and the strike was very close to us because several of my friends were in coal miners’ families. I asked what I could do but nothing really came to mind. I was also aware of hunt sabbing but was unable to work out how to find out about it. Had I got involved in that, I might’ve gone vegan years earlier than I did.

9. The Ending Story

Then there was cinema. My aforementioned friend under the table rang me up one day and just said we should go and watch ‘Champion’ at the ABC. That cinema, incidentally, was managed by someone I later got to know when he and I both coincidentally moved to Leicester. I was surprised my friend just spontaneously bet on the horses when I’d never dreamt of doing that, at the time because it was gambling. The film, in case you didn’t know as it may be quite obscure, was based on a true story about a famous jockey who has cancer and survives. One impression I got from it was that he looked like Lionel Blair, which is the second time I’ve mentioned him today. At this time it was still possible to sit in the cinema for as long as you wanted while the same films, yes, films plural, played over and over again. This was actually the last year it was possible. The year after, I’d just finished watching ‘Letter To Brezhnev’ and the ushers chucked us all out. It was a real shock, and you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. It meant that parents could use cinemas as babysitting services, though this may have been somewhat reckless by today’s standards. They did the same with swimming pools: Kingsmead had this going on, although specifically in ’84 I didn’t exercise much apart from walking eight miles, to school and back, every day. This lazy year ended immediately with my New Years’ resolution to go running every morning from 1st January 1985.

‘Ghostbusters’ was also quite memorable. I took my younger brother to see it and I wasn’t expecting the whole audience to shout the song when it came on. It’s a good film, with a memorable scene involving a fridge and an unforgettable line which is usually cut towards the end. It also mentions selenium for no apparent reason, and has Zener cards at the start. At the time, rather surprisingly, it seemed to be generally accepted even in academia that some people were psychic. I often wonder whether it’s really good-quality research which has led to received opinion on this changing or whether it’s just a reputational thing that psi is now widely rejected by academic researchers. The other major film I remember watching was ‘Star Trek III’, which is also very good, and at the time there was no plan to bring Star Trek back. It was considered a sequel too far by one of my friends, so at the time it looked like the show was completely defunct and they were trying to revive it beyond all reason. I also saw ‘2010’, which I liked for incorporating the new findings about Europa, but it definitely lacks the appeal of the original. Incidentally, the long gap between Voyager visits to Saturn and Uranus was underway and the remaining probe wouldn’t get there for another two years. The original ‘Dune’ also came out this year, and although I wanted to see it, I don’t think it came to Canterbury. I wouldn’t’ve liked it at the time, having seen it since, and oddly I had the impression it was in a completely different directing style and that it was also a 3-D film. It may also have been the most expensive feature film ever made at the time. ‘1984’, of course, also came out then, but that deserves its own treatment. As other people I’ve since got to know of my age have commented, ‘Neverending Story’ marked the first time I perceived a film as definitely too young for me, and in a way that realisation reflected the twilight before the dawn of adulthood to me.

10. Life Off The Fast Lane

Speaking of marks of adulthood, many of my peers were learning to drive and passing their tests at this point. Although I got a provisional licence that year and my parents strongly suggested I learn, I refused to do so for environmental and anti-materialistic reasons. Although I’ve had lessons since, I’ve never in fact got there and I’ve also heard that an ADHD diagnosis can bar one from driving in any case, if it affects one’s driving ability. I’m not sure mine would but I do think my dyspraxia is a serious issue there. 1984 is in fact the only year I’ve independently driven any motorised vehicle, namely one friend’s scooter and other’s motorbike. Like the underage drinking, it’s apparent that we didn’t take certain laws particularly seriously at the time and I’m wondering if that was just us, our age or whether that’s changed since. I was dead set against learning to drive, and this was probably the first thing which marked me as not destined to live a “normal” adult life. It has on two occasions prevented me from getting paid work.

Television didn’t form a major part of my life at the time. We couldn’t get Channel 4 yet, so the groundbreaking work done there was a closed book to me. ‘Alas Smith And Jones’ started in January and incredibly continued to run for fourteen years. I’d stopped watching ‘Doctor Who’ two years previously when ‘Time Flight’ was so awful that I decided it was a kid’s show and put it away. Tommy Cooper died on stage. The second and final series of ‘The Young Ones’ broadcast. ‘Crimewatch UK’, which would eventually become compulsive but guilty viewing for Sarada and me, started. In a somewhat similar vein, ‘The Bill’ started in October, which I used to enjoy watching years later due to the handheld camera work, which made it seem very immediate and “real” somehow. NYPD Blue is like that for other reasons incidentally. ‘Casualty’ was still two years in the future and ‘Angels’ had just ended, so I was in a wilderness of no medical dramas.

11. Green Shoots

Also, of course, the Brighton hotel bombing took place, and many of my friends felt very conflicted because on the one hand there was the general sympathy and empathy for people being attacked, injured and killed, but on the other they were very much hated for what they were doing. I’m sure this was a widespread feeling, and there is of course the band Tebbit Under Rubble, which very much expresses one side of that sentiment. Greenham Common was in progress and a major eviction took place in March. Although I was later to become heavily involved in the peace movement, at the time I was still very much on the sidelines although some of the people I knew were connected, and I do remember thinking that computer and human error were major and unavoidable risks which meant that the very existence of nuclear arsenals was too dangerous to be allowed to continue.

Then there was the Bishop of Durham, and since I was doing an A-level in RE at the time, his stance was highly relevant. The Sea Of Faith Movement was in full swing, which promoted a kind of secularised Christianity which was largely non-theistic or even atheist in nature, and the foundations were being laid in my mind which I’d later extend but allow the high-control group I became involved in to demolish, almost inexplicably. Over that whole period, I was expected to read a newspaper of my choice and take cuttings from it on relevant religious and moral issues to put in a scrapbook, so my long-term readership of ‘The Guardian’ began a few months before this and persisted through the year. It was either 25p or 30p at the time, and this was before colour newspapers had come to be. I had also been an avid Radio 4 listener since 1980, but unlike later I also listened to Radio 3 a bit, never really managing to appreciate classical music to the full.

This was also the year I finally decided I wanted to become an academic philosopher, and I still think I could’ve followed that through though it didn’t happen. This is the end of a kind of winnowing process probably connected to my dyspraxia, where I became increasingly aware of practical things which I simply couldn’t do, I’d been put off biology by the griminess and unpleasantness of field work and therefore philosophy was the way forward. That said, like many other people I was also very motivated to study psychology in an attempt to understand myself, and as you probably know a lot of psychology undergraduates begin their degrees by being concerned about major issues in their own personalities, so in that respect I’m not unusual. I also presented two assemblies, one on existentialism and the other on the sex life of elephants as a parable of romantic love.

I feel like this could go on and on, so I’m going to finish off this reminiscence in a similar way to how I started. My emotional world revolved around the friend I was hiding under the table with at the beginning of the year and our significance to each other was important to both of us. About halfway through it, having just visited her she became concerned that she and I were going to be found together alone in the house by her parents who were coming back unexpectedly, so I left the house by the back door and crept surreptitiously over the front garden, only to be stopped and “citizen’s arrested” by their next door neighbour. This turned out to make the situation more embarrassing for her and me than it would’ve been if I’d just left when they came back. I don’t know if anything can be made or a picture can be drawn of who she or I was at the time by putting those two incidents together.

I’m aware that I haven’t talked about Orwell’s book and its adaptations as much as I’d like, so that’s something I’ll need to come back to, and there are huge things I’ve missed out, but I hope I’ve managed to paint a portrait of my 1984 and possibly also yours. I may also have portrayed someone who peaked in high school, but I do also think tremendous things happened afterwards. 1984 is, though, the first foothill of my life, which makes it significant. It’s sometimes said that the reminiscence bump is only there because fifteen to twenty-five is the most eventful period of one’s time here, but maybe not. It’s hard to say.

The Haunted BBC Micro?

I used to have an Acorn Electron. The thing about Electrons is that they think they’re BBC Model B microcomputers. Their system software is pretty close to or actually identical. However, when you come to actually use them, it becomes clear that they aren’t. They lack MODE 7, the Teletext mode, only have one sound channel and only have an edge connector as an interface. The CPU running both models of computer lacks specific I/O ports, unlike the Z80, and therefore peripherals have to be mapped directly onto the memory. Due to the hardware shortcomings of the Electron compared to the BBC B, there are unused spaces in the memory where the interface chips would’ve been.

One day I was looking through the Electron’s ROM (system software) and wrote a program to print out the printable bits of these regions. If you just look at memory contents and output them as characters, you end up changing the graphics mode, position of the cursor and so forth, and the colours on the screen, and while that’s entertaining for a bit it isn’t conducive to actually finding out what’s in the computer. This is because the ASCII control characters don’t actually print, and the BBC/Electron version of the character set is substantially used to communicate with the display hardware in quite sophisticated ways, probably because the BBC hardware is supposed to be adaptable as a terminal for the second processor. This second processor was ultimately to be the famous ARM whose descendants run today’s mobile phones. Hence the BBC is very much about telecommunications in that sense as well as many others. Anyway, if you blank out the most significant bit of the bytes in the memory and also only print out values above 31 (1F in hexadecimal), every character written to the screen will be printable. If you then look at the area of memory which is used on the BBC for peripherals, you find a list of acknowledgements for the people who designed and built the Acorn Electron. For some reason it isn’t stable and the longer it’s been since the computer’s been turned on, the less legible it is, so it’s a race to get to see it, but it’s there. I don’t know why it degrades. Doing a reset doesn’t restore the data either: you have to turn it on again to do that.

I seem always to back losers. For instance, I was a Prefab Sprout fan. If I like something it’s the kiss of death for it. Therefore, unsurprisingly, as well as the unsuccessful Electron I also had an even more unsuccessful Jupiter Ace. I used to do something similar with the Ace’s memory, dumping it to the screen. This is simpler with an Ace because it has fewer control characters. The 3K of static RAM in the Ace, as opposed to the dynamic RAM in the RAMpack, has a load of apparently random values when you turn it on, although like any other computer it also has system variables, and like many others it has working areas, video RAM, character shapes and the famous PAD FORTH uses for text manipulation, and of course the parameter stack as it’s a FORTH computer. The dynamic RAM of the RAMpack has blocks of zeros and hex FFs (255) in eights, I think, all the way through the unused map, which I assume to be an artefact of the hardware, although presumably the CPU does that thing of writing bytes every 256 locations or so to work out how much memory the computer has. Every time an unexpanded Ace is turned on, it has the same junk data in its RAM.

This phenomenon of nonsense in RAM and defining a word which displays it on the screen gave me the idea I hold to this day of the nature of dreams. It would be possible to get an Ace to turn those data into words. I’ve got it to produce random words in Finnish, for example, mainly because Finnish is an easier language to get a computer to produce than almost any other. English is a lot harder. I could’ve linked the two things together and got the Ace to turn all its random data into Finnish. I didn’t do this because I decided to go cold turkey on computers in about 1985 because I don’t trust my own interests and they seem a bit obsessive and unhealthy, but if I had, I wonder if it would’ve produced different Finnish for every Ace in existence, or if the random data were the same for all Aces. It didn’t happen on the ZX81 by the way. That just has zeros all the way through its unused memory. Anyway, this is my hypothesis about dreaming. When you wake from a dream, your memory contains random data like an Ace’s memory, and your consciousness is like the Finnish converter. It attempts to make sense of these data and you get the impression that you’ve just had an experience, although you usually know you haven’t. This is one of the reasons I always refer to events in a dream in the present tense, because the events in them did not happen in the past. However, this shouldn’t be taken to mean that they are invalid. Dreams are like tea leaves. They can be interpreted as a way of approaching reality with the added benefit that they’re already partly in this state when we receive them.

In I think February 1984 CE, economics teacher Ken Webster took a BBC Model B Micro home from his school to his seventeenth century cottage in the Cheshire-Flintshire border village of Dodleston. I’m going to be fairly brief about the details of this case, which is extensively written up elsewhere, including in his book ‘The Vertical Plane’, because I want to concentrate on something else. There were three people in the house: Ken, his girlfriend Debbie and a musician who lived upstairs whose name I can’t remember. That night, he left the computer on and the house was vacated when they went to the pub. On coming back, a poem had appeared on it. Over the next sixteen months a series of messages appeared to which he and some other people responded. Here are a few screenshots from a dramatic reconstruction:

I shall explain. There was an apparent dialogue between Ken and Debbie and a person appearing to live in the sixteenth or seventeenth century called Tomas Hardeman (living in the time before standardised spelling so his name is uncertain) who initially claimed to be a graduate of Jesus College Oxford and later Brasenose. There are both historical and grammatical inaccuracies in the messages purporting to be from the past. Tomas Hardeman is arrested for witchcraft and only released after the Ken threatened the sheriff who arrested him, who was apparently also communicating. The messages are then interrupted from a source known only as “2109”, possibly a year, which is more threatening and claims to be made of tachyons. Its spelling is also a little peculiar, with single consonants where we might put double ones and the “-tion” ending being spelt “-cion”. At the same time, there was poltergeist activity in the house, particularly the kitchen, where utensils tended to be piled up, and on one occasion Debbie came back to the house to find the cats nervous and all the furniture piled up in one corner of the living room. Brasenose College helped with the research and it emerged that there was indeed such a person who was expelled from the college for refusing to remove the Pope’s name from certain books in the library, which confirmed what had appeared in the messages. The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) then got involved, typed a number of questions into the computer without disclosing them to anyone, sealed it in the room for an hour, then deleted the messages, and got a reply which implied that “2109” was aware of their content. David of the SPR proceeded to ask the “entity”, if that’s what it was, the solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem, which was only found in 1994. It replied that the answer was only to be given if the questioner was prepared to lose soul, mind and body, so they didn’t proceed. “Harman” then said that he would write a book about the events to prove that they had happened and hide it somewhere, so that when it’s found it will be demonstrated that this was not a hoax. 2109 mainly seems concerned not to cause a temporal paradox. Oh, and the house was on a ley line, but then so was mine so that’s not unusual. Harman also mentioned that his house was made of red stone, and foundations of a building made of red stone were later found in the garden, so the house which stood there before was like that and Harman complained about the alterations made to the house in the intervening four centuries.

The mistakes made in the grammar and history were attributed by “Harman” to interference by “2109”. Both the SPR and more general sceptics agree that it was a hoax, but Ken and Debbie, particularly Debbie, insist that it wasn’t and it’s still unclear how it was done. Debbie has been very up in arms about it and expressed her annoyance at being accused of faking. She said she couldn’t understand why people thought so because she was not motivated to do such a thing. There are, however, textual similarities between Ken’s own writing and Harman’s. For instance, 26% of nouns are preceded by adjectives in both sets of text compared to an average of 32% taken from contemporary texts composed by other people, and in Ken’s case the sample is very large as it consists of his entire published book of 374 pages. Although this seems like more than a coincidence it doesn’t rule out the possibility that he was either doing it unconsciously or that the poltergeist was associated with him in some way, but I’m still basically convinced it was a hoax. Nevertheless there are some enormous difficulties in explaining how it was done.

I’ve seen some annoyingly naïve descriptions of how this was done, so I’ll go into the situation as it was then. Both the internet and email existed at the time. However, although it would be possible to connect a BBC micro to the internet (not the web of course) or to a Bulletin Board System, this computer was not connected in this way. BBC micros do have local area network connectors in the form of Econet, but again this one was not connected, at least while it was in the cottage. The SPR suggested that signals were being sent along the earth line of the plug and socket through the wiring of the house. Other than ROM, this BBC had no persistent memory. As it happens, this particular model was being used to run EDWORD, a sideways ROM for word processing, at the time. It was linked up to a green screen monochrome monitor, presumably without a Faraday Cage, and there was a 5¼” floppy disc drive with discs available.

The frustrating thing about the investigation is that as far as I know, nobody seems to have examined the hardware involved. The fact that the monitor was presumably unshielded means that it would’ve been possible to detect the signal and read what was on it from nearby using a scanner of some kind, so the content of the questions the SPR guy typed wouldn’t have been secure by the standards of the time. There was a dialogue, or at least it appeared to be interactive, and although the BBC micro could easily run a program like the Rogerian psychotherapist simulation ELIZA or the paranoid “patient” Parry, the sophistication of the responses means it has passed the Turing Test, which would be quite an achievement for a 2 MHz 6502-based micro with 32K RAM and the same ROM.

I regard all this as a puzzle to be solved by naturalistic means, because of the grammatical and historical errors. For instance, in the screengrab at the top, “BEHALTHE” is a spelling mistake which would never have been made by an English speaker of that era, and “WOT” is also incorrect because Midland English at the time strongly distinguished “WH” and “W” in speech, although Southern English didn’t. These would’ve been easy to fake and they seem to be poorly faked. There is, however, a claim that 2019 had a hand in the apparently older messages, which would explain the historical and linguistic inaccuracies. It’s also likely to be a valid excuse that telling the SPR the answer to Fermat’s Last Theorem would cause a temporal paradox, although it could presumably be stored in a sealed envelope and the people could be sworn to secrecy. But I think strong corroboration of backwards time travel would lead to a paradox anyway, meaning that there could only ever be vague references easily refutable or impossible to corroborate, so this is exactly what one would expect from a responsible message from the future.

The idea of the earth pin is interesting. Although it seems to have been suggested ignorantly by someone who didn’t know much about computers, it would in fact be possible with some hardware modification. The back of the BBC Micro looks like this:

Power is on the right, and likely to carry an earth line. Even if it doesn’t, one could be used. One of the other interfaces could be connected up to the earth, although I’m not sure which would be best. The cassette port is able to transmit data at 1200 baud along a single line, so wiring the in and out to the earth internally and having a way to switch remotely between the two is possible. Alternatively, a faster connection could be made between the Tube and the earth, and depending on how the Econet works that might be another option. The RS423 is, however, the obvious choice as it’s a communications interface. There would then need to be something connected to the wiring of the house, possibly something like a radio mike, which could then transmit and receive to another computer or terminal fairly nearby. But all of this would obviously involve modifying the hardware inside the case. The presence of a sideways ROM makes it feasible, although Edword would then have to take up less than 16K to allow for the software. Having said all that, I think the comment about signals entering and leaving via the earth is probably just a sign of being uneducated about computers.

The reason for this explanation is of course the need to look for a cause other than communication with someone living several centuries ago and an entity apparently 124 years in the future. The other options seem to be that there was communication with an entity in the future, communication with a timeless entity or communication with someone living in the past and someone else living in the future, or just talking to a ghost. “Harman” mentions a “boyste” of “leems”, I think in his fireplace or chimney, which could be the computer itself or something else. It’s also possible that voice dictation was supposed to have been used at his end because of how it’s described, factually or not. “Leem” means a glimmer of light and “boyste” appears to mean box, which could refer to a CRT monitor. It feels rather away with the fairies to say this, but it was possible to dictate to microcomputers at that time, although I suspect it didn’t work very well. When I say “at the time”, I mean the 1980s.

It really does seem like a hoax, and the biggest issue is really how it was done. Although I’ve mentioned one feasible way, there could be others, and it makes more sense to seek an explanation in hardware hacks than the supernatural or time travel. But that doesn’t mean that there is no paranormal or time travel, and the poltergeist isn’t explained by any of it.

Vintage Dystopias

Unlike ‘1984’, ‘Brave New World’ seems practically impossible to adapt well for any size of screen. I don’t understand why this is. I’ve recently endured two and a half episodes of last year’s NBC version of it and whereas the first episode was okay, it rapidly slumped into sheer awfulness which was painful to watch even a minute of. It isn’t even the exception in that respect. There have been earlier TV and cinematic versions which were just as bad in their own way. The one with Leonard Nimoy in it for example was just dire. The only version which I can remember which was any good was the 1980 TV movie, and even that was plagued with low production values and was very stagey.

Just indulge me a moment while I slag off the latest version. This will obviously contain spoilers.

I can’t be comprehensive or incisive in my criticism of the series, but I can pick out a few things which form part of the calamity. One is the depiction of the Savage Reserves. My impression is that the makers of the series got antsy about racist and inaccurate depictions of the Southwestern Native Americans and decided instead to show them as “white trash”. The problem with this is that it isn’t actually any better to stereotype the White working class than any other group, and it seems to me that the motive there is simply to attack an easy target which is unlikely to be watching and therefore unlikely to complain. It also seemed that as soon as we’d got to the Savage Reservations and their very un-“Brave New World”-ly atmosphere, we got stuck there. I don’t think the quality of the writing could ever measure up to that of Huxley’s, and the effect is therefore of an ugly clash. Moreover, the majority of the world needs to be depicted as vapid and it seemed they were rather too keen on showing off the slickness and beauty of the sets and special effects. Also, guns‽ Are you kidding me‽

It isn’t even “so bad it’s good”. I was only driven to continue by disbelief at how awful it was, hoping there would turn out to be some kind of twist which justified what they’d done. But it’s just bad.

What puzzles me about this is that whereas this is often bracketed with ‘1984’ as great mid-twentieth century depictions of dystopia, Orwell’s work seems to lend itself quite well to such treatments. My personal favourite is the John Hurt version. This and Terry Gillam’s ‘Brazil’ have an oddly similar appearance, although the tone is rather different. Pains were taken not to depict anything in the film which didn’t exist in 1948, when the novel was written. The acting is excellent, the sets are too. I find it coming to mind on a regular basis even now, getting on for forty years later. Maybe the difference is that romance in Orwell’s book is not dead, but is persecuted, whereas in Huxley’s work it died centuries before the start of the novel. One problem may be common to much science fiction: ‘Brave New World’ focusses more on ideas than plot or character and suffers if adaptation focusses on special effects because that reproduces the very superficiality it aims to criticise. Science fiction cinema and TV is generally worse for high budgets and good special effects because they distract from the core meaning of the text, and the kind of ideas Huxley’s novel addresses are hard to depict visually. There also isn’t that much action, and there are great slabs of exposition in it, including the climax. A somewhat worrying possibility concerning adaptation is that the world is probably now considerably closer to how it is in the story and therefore it’s harder to see what it’s criticising because we tend to take it for granted.

Huxley and Orwell knew each other and the former wrote to the latter about ‘1984’. One striking observation in his letter was that rather than the kind of brutal physical violence committed to keep the Airstrip One populace down, something more akin to brainwashing would be more likely to be deployed because it would lead the citizenry to “love their servitude”. There’s certainly a lot of overt psychological manipulation in the post-war work, but it’s accompanied by torture and execution and the standard of living for most is very low. One thing the two do share is the colour-coding of the castes, and they also share the feature of being set at specific dates, at least insofar as we know Big Brother isn’t lying about that, but since Winston can remember the immediate post-war period as a child he probably is, for once, being honest. Huxley also said:

I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World. 

I want to move on now to something which may or may not constitute a dystopia: the Eloi/Morlock section of H G Wells’s ‘The Time Machine’. The Time Traveller moves downward in time to the year 802 701 CE, where he finds a society where the effete Eloi live above ground in a kind of bucolic setting but are predated upon by the more malevolent and violent subterranean Morlocks. There’s clear satire here, but Wells also attempts to portray human evolution in this respect. The Morlocks are descended from the lower orders and the Eloi are what remains of the middle and upper class, and the two have become different species.

There are other dystopias and depictions of the future from this era, insofar as the fifty-three years separating Wells’s and Orwell’s works can be seen as an era. They include Zamjatkin’s ‘We’ published in 1924 in English translation, which since it preceded the invention of the video camera envisaged an urban environment where all the buildings were made of glass. Olaf Stapledon’s World State is another, which is an Americanised world founded in the twenty-third century and lasts for five thousand years, was devised in 1930 and isn’t exactly a dystopia but reflects a serious lack of fulfilment of the human spirit combined with fairly advanced but stunted technological development. Huxley’s World State is technologically stunted by design, to prevent progress causing instability. Looking closer to the present day, ‘Blake’s 7”s Terran Federation is plainly modelled on a mixture of Huxley’s and Orwell’s worlds, with thought control by the use of drugs, the use of soma, the existence of castes referred to by Greek letters and also a corrupt military dictatorship with torture and summary execution. It’s as if someone who had never read either book but was aware of their influence had tried to imagine what it was like. Another example of a dystopian novel near that time is Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel ‘Fahrenheit 451’, where books have been outlawed. This may be unfair, but although I think Bradbury’s book is excellent, I also get the impression that Bradbury is praising quality literature without really knowing much about it. H G Wells also wrote the genuinely dystopic ‘The Sleeper Wakes’ and ‘A Story Of The Days To Come’, which I haven’t read but I think cover his vision of what would happen if socialism wasn’t adopted, so presumably we’re living in that future. Ayn Rand’s ‘Anthem’, written in 1937, does the opposite, imagining a world where even the first person singular pronoun has been abolished. Incidentally, it’s interesting that Olaf Stapledon was imagining something somewhat similar in the form of a cosmic hive mind in his ‘Star Maker’ of the same year.

In spite of my appreciation of the three works I’ve mentioned, and against the grain of the usual attitude towards respecting literature of this calibre, it has occurred to me that ‘1984’, ‘Brave New World’ and ‘The Time Machine’ could all be placed on the same timeline. This isn’t an entirely idle exercise.

First, dates. ‘1984’ is set in 1984, although it isn’t entirely clear because of the lies and propaganda woven by Ingsoc. ‘Brave New World’ is set 632 years after the first Model T Ford rolled off the production line in 1908, so that’s 2540 CE, and it also makes 1984 retroactively 76 AF (After Ford). The Time Traveller arrives in 802 701 CE, which is so far in the future that it hardly makes any difference when Huxley’s dating system is used, but it’s 800 793 AF. The chronologically earliest novel is in the most distant future and the latest is in the least distant, which might be significant. It could be linked to an increasing realisation of how social and technological change appear to accelerate, although there are arguments that it doesn’t, which I’ve been into somewhere (can’t remember exactly where). ‘Brave New World’ has a backstory which is again somewhat reminiscent of ‘Blake’s 7’, probably because that’s where the TV series got it from. However, because “history is bunk” according to Ford, the details are a little hazy and Ford and Freud are actually confused for each other, so the question of whether it’s accurate history arises. The same is true in ‘1984’ because of the distortion introduced by Ingsoc, which always reminds me of North Korea. For instance, Big Brother is said to have invented the steam engine. This provides the first link between the two. 1984 represents an early stage where people can still remember a time before Ingsoc and therefore can’t be lied to quite as effectively. Once living memory is gone and Newspeak has succeeded in remoulding thought, a new version of history can be created, and this is of course already underway with the editing of the ‘Times’ and other historical records which is Winston’s job. And as I’ve said, colour-coded uniforms already exist and the Inner Party, Party and proles have become classes with no possibility of social movement between them. Sexual activity is frowned upon and only accepted as a necessary evil, to be eliminated as soon as practicable. But as Huxley pointed out in his letter to Orwell, the ultimate revolution goes beyond politics and amounts to mind control, which he felt reflected the thought of the Marquis de Sade. He saw Orwell’s idea of the “boot on the face forever” as quite labour-intensive and wasteful. As Asimov pointed out, a society operating at Airstrip One’s level of distrust would require the watchers to be watched, and those watchers and so forth ad infinitum, which is of course impossible. However, it’s more efficient to get the populace to oppress itself, and this can be seen in the character of Parsons, who purports to be proud of his daughter for calling the Thought Police on him for allegèdly saying “death to Big Brother” in his sleep. He’s doing Big Brother’s job for him. Huxley’s view is that this is logistically a much better way of oppressing people, and this is why conditioning and soma occupy such a prominent position in his new world. There seems to be a fair bit of sadism in ‘1984’: they don’t like the fact that they have no control over sexual pleasure, so they’re trying to get rid of it.

These can be linked together as follows:

1. Shortly after 1948, coups of some kind took place throughout the world leading to the formation of three power blocks plus a disputed area in Afrika and the southern part of Asia. These are Oceania, consisting of the Americas, Australasia, southern Afrika and the British Isles; Eurasia, comprising continental Europe and the former Soviet Union, and Eastasia, which is mainly China. These are at constant war and their régimes are practically identical, consisting of an inner party which oppresses an outer party and doesn’t bother much with a third prole group because they oppress themselves due to their lack of education. They wear colour-coded uniforms. This is the situation as of 1984 CE.
2. Newspeak becomes all-pervading. The gradual unification of the world which began with the formation of the three power blocks continues until the whole world is part of one state, and history is re-written completely. The disputed areas change location and become savage reserves. The Inner Party decides that sex for reproduction gives the population too much opportunity to subvert the next generation and replaces it with artificial wombs growing fetuses outside the body. This gives it the opportunity to condition babies from before birth. A new drug is developed which causes the people to become placid and coöperative, which renders the constant state of shifting war unnecessary. The three classes, now mass-produced, become completely fixed and are conditioned differently.
3. By 2540 CE, the world is unified and divided into five castes. Reproduction is a function of the state and the people are controlled by drugs and conditioning. The colour-coded uniforms are now applied to each caste and therefore somewhat diversified. Alphas are the old inner party, Betas and Gammas the outer party and Deltas and Epsilons the proles. There is no possibility of rebellion and technological change is deliberately prevented as it leads to instability. There’s a lot of sex.
4. At this point I want to borrow from Stapledon’s First World State, which is contemporaneous with Huxley’s. The ultimate reason for its decline was that fossil fuel reserves became exhausted after five thousand years and there was insufficient flexibility in human behaviour to adapt, so a new dark age began. Similarly, a calamity befalling Huxley’s world state might not be amended due to the rigidity of conditioning and social roles, meaning that the loss of resources (“ending is better than mending”) would mean the end of civilisation as they knew it. Reproduction by means of intercourse could begin again, much to the distaste of the people involved, but the savage reservation people would have been doing it all along anyway, so they would have the upper hand. They would not, however, interact.
5. Finally, the situation H G Wells describes has developed. Humans are now two separate species, the Morlocks and the Eloi, living in a primitive state and in denial about their death, which is a remnant of the conditioning to accept death instilled in the days of the World State. Some evolution has occurred since it’s now getting on for a million years since the events of Brave New World.

In closing, it feels to me that Huxley failed to appreciate that the inner party of ‘1984’ was not merely motivated by efficiency but also by sadism and the need to know that others are worse off in order for them to assert their psychological superiority. This is, sadly, not even slightly fictional in my view. It is not enough to celebrate one’s own success. One must also be conscious of others’ failure. This is one reason the government of today’s Airstrip One needs an underclass.