The Year of The Sex Olympics - Cultural Significance

Cultural Significance

One of the first to draw comparisons with The Year of the Sex Olympics and the rise of reality television programmes (soap operas without professional actors), such as Big Brother, Castaway 2000 and Survivor, was the journalist Nancy Banks-Smith in a review of the first series of the UK version of Big Brother for The Guardian in 2000, a theme she later expounded upon in 2003, writing that the play "foretold the reality show and, in the scramble for greater sensation, its logical outcome". Banks-Smith had long been an admirer of The Year of the Sex Olympics, having written in The Sun following its original broadcast in 1968: "Quite apart from the excellent script and the 'big big' treatment, the play radiated ripples. Is television a substitute for living? Does the spectacle of pain at a distance atrophy sympathy? Can this coffin with knobs on furnish all we need to ask?". Another admirer, the writer and actor Mark Gatiss, has said that upon seeing Big Brother he yelled at the television, "Don't they know what they're doing? It's The Year of the Sex Olympics! Nigel Kneale was right!". When The Year of the Sex Olympics was repeated on BBC Four on 22 May 2003, Paul Hoggart in The Times noted that "in many respects Kneale was right on the money when you consider that nothing gets contemporary reality show audiences more excited than an emotional train-wreck on live TV".

Although the reality television of The Live Life Show is the aspect most commentators pick up on, The Year of the Sex Olympics is also a wider satire on sensationalist television and the media in general. Mark Gatiss has noted that the Artsex and Foodshow programmes that also appear in the play "ingeniously depicted the future of lowest common denominator TV". This view is echoed by the writer and critic Kim Newman who has said that "as an extreme exercise in revolutionary self-criticism on the part of television professionals, who also lampoon their own world of chattering commentators and ratings-chasing sensationalism, the play is a trenchant contribution to a series of debates that is still raging" and has concluded that "Nigel Kneale might be quite justified in shouting, "I was right! I was right!"".