The final live teleplay from BBC2’s Thirty-Minute Theatre (1965-73) was called The News-Benders, which aired in 1968.
With its themes of extreme surveillance and television as tools to control the masses, this drama echoes Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and refers to a ‘Ministry of Morality’, which has a name similar to Orwell’s ministries of Truth, Love and Plenty.
Whereas Orwell’s novel depicts an overtly oppressed Britain, The News-Benders suggests that in 1968 similar control could be achieved invisibly via manipulation of the media.
