Having explored the impact George Orwell and Franz Kafka have had on the language we use, the psychological anxieties we experience and the dystopian frustrations that seem rife in 2024, Ian Hislop and Helen Lewis turn their attention to the future. Will the stories created by two writers from fading 20th century European Empires continue to resonate across the globe, and how potent is that resonance beyond the west. Helen speaks to the Booker winning author Shehan Karunatilaka about his experience of both men's work and his own dystopian afterlife novel 'The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida'. They're also joined in the studio by Professor Laura Beers, author of Orwell's Ghosts and Professor Carolin Duttlinger of Wadham College, Oxford.
But they begin the programme with some priceless recollections from the BBC archive from listeners who had seen the first TV adaptation of Orwell's novel in December 1954, a programme that counted amongst its audience the then monarch Queen Elizabeth I. And then there was the typically British reaction to the dark foreboding of political satire and angst - an episode of the Goons Show which went out a month later called '1985'.

Producer: Tom Alban Show less