‘Sadists and Readers of Horror Comics’: British Post-War Identity in Viewer Responses to the BBC’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954)

Abstract

The responses in audience letters and in the press to the BBC’s 1954 television adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four relate it to horror comics and ideas of sadism. This thread can be followed to connect this response to wider concerns with horror comics not just in the United Kingdom but across Europe in the post-World War II period. These concerns related to the fears of American soft power in the post-war world, and the potential effects that soft power would have on national identities. Comics in general, and horror comics in particular, were a useful focus for expressing these fears because of their American origins and because they were considered as products for children, and so as particularly important in forming the future of the culture. The Nineteen Eighty-Four adaptation connected to these fears, and so to the idea of ‘horror comics’, through its depiction of a depleted United Kingdom serving as a staging post for the forces of a larger power, an image of what some feared was the UK’s real post-war status in the world.