Last night I went to see the People's Theatre production of 1984. It was tremendous. The production captured the essence of the book to a degree that is rare in stage adaptions of book. It showed the Delmer of Winston Smith perfectly. But what was most striking was how a story written in 1947/8 could be so relevant to what is happening today. We are increasingly living in a "Big Brother" world with CCTV cameras watching us all the time, the state monitoring our movements in and out of the country and even monitoring our on-line activity (hallo special branch ;-} ). It was all in 1984. and when O'Brian, the party boss in the play who Winston and his lover Julia turn to for help, explains what they can expect now that they had declared against "The Party" could have been the basis of the al-Qaida recruiting speech - or any other terrorist recruiting gambit for that matter. It was a chilling experience made even more so by the realization that all of this has been out there for the last 55 years and instead of rejecting it in the real world we seem to congratulate ourselves for accepting it. We have turned "Big Brother" and "Room 101" into TV shows. We have watched spy cameras proliferate in our streets, shops and places of work and accepted their presence with very little in the way of questioning who is at the other end of the camera cable. We use call phones all the time without thinking how easy it is to pick up the radio waves that carry the messages and listen in. Also how easy it is to pin-point where an active cell phone (or sat-nav) is. Biometric identification is a requirement if we wish to travel beyond these Island and our DNA is increasingly finding its way onto databases - legally or otherwise.
1984 gave us a warning all those years ago which we seem on the whole to ignore. Now is the time to stand up and be counted and say
"Down With Big Brother."
"Down With Big Brother."
"Down With Big Brother."
"Down With Big Brother."
"Down With Big Brother."
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