George Orwell

[David]

I sincerely believe that Orwell was one of the greatest minds of the 20th century. I loved 1984, and Animal Farm was excellent too. For those of you who have never read either, I would strongly suggest that you do one day.
Thanks to some excellent internet resources, you can read not only those books online, but also his other works, including some of his brilliant essays.
http://www.george-orwell.org
I also find it somewhat ironic that Orwell is generally associated with the left, yet despite the fact I would consider myself more conservative, I agree with most of what he wrote. I wish he was still alive today, to see how he would view the world as it is today.

[Dr Alf Andrews]

I think he'd be able to say "I told you so."

Orwell's writing goes well beyond the left-right divide.

The sort of dictatorship that he predicted ... in a socialist context ... has actually come true in a capitalist context. What we have today is the tyranny of the so-called "free" market. Never before in the history of the human race has the following been more relevant:

War is peace
Freedom is slavery
Ignorance is strength

And we have Big Brother watching us everywhere ... security cameras all over the place ... We are on-call 24 hours a day ... our phones have cameras in them ... and sure, you can be like me and refuse to conform to all this ... but it's getting harder all the time because the system is putting more and more demands on everyone. If you don't maintain a rigorous external appearance of conformity, you are likely to find yourself under surveillance. Your bosses own you. And the caged rats are never far from your face.

Welcome to the "Free World" in 2006.

[HAL]

So? Thanks, Dr Alf Andrews, for your kind criticism.

[David]

Alf, while I agree with a lot of what you state, I believe that Orwell's dystopia hasn't really eventuated as such. Even though our freedoms have been reduced a little perhaps, democracy still does exist, as do dissenters. As much as I dislike Michael Moore, the fact he exists is some comfort as it proves that there still is a fair degree of freedom of thought. And it could be debated that the free market economy does actually provide more freedoms than what would exist under a socialist regime.

[Dr Alf Andrews]

It comes down to perceptions, David.

You can put two people in exactly the same situation ... one will see themselves as free ... the other will see themselves as a slave. Our past experiences, expectations, values, social standing and temperament have a lot to do with the way we judge the system we find ourselves living in.

[Didaicos]

Orwell was a Leftist, however he was also the Left's greatest critic. It ia important to divide Orwell's criticism of communism as not an attack on Socialism. Orwell remained Democratic Socialist his entire life, he did however state however in "The Bridge to Wigan Pier" that much to his dismay that a truly democratic socialist society was unlikely. (He thought Britain's time to adapt to socialism was going to be just after the WW2-it as we know did not eventuate)

Agreed that his work goes beyond Left/Right, and I never like seeing his work used by one side against the other.

A man well ahead of his time, some of the so call "columnists" of today could take a leaf out of his book and stop seeing things as "us against them" instead of seeing the point of view from the other side.

[rand corp]

My favourite work of Orwell's is undoubtedly Burmese Days, lot of personal/biographical experience in this work from his time as a constable in upper Burma.

Get the feeling it was a painful book to write but, very insightful from a, geographical, historical, cultural and colonial point of view.

Many of his other more famous works have a more powerful message, social comment to convey but this is raw and one gets the feeling pretty close to the bone, a great read.

[Cathalyst]

He was fantastic in Citizen Kane

[London Dave]

[Cathalyst]

Remember Kenny Everitt? my favourite gay comedian

Horse on Welles

[Robert Walls (not really)]

His War of the Worlds radio presentation scared a whole American nation.

Says something for the American IQ.

[David]

I'm not completely sure about this, but wasn't that an urban myth, at least to some extent? Anyway why are we talking about Orson Welles

[Robert Walls (not really)]

http://www.war-ofthe-worlds.co.uk/radio.htm

Less than seventy years ago, television was barely at an experimental stage and in the United States, radio was the undisputed king of the airwaves. Three out of four families already owned a set (eight million alone were sold in 1936), but as many were to rudely discover, they were not yet fully attuned to the power of this exciting new medium. The wake up call came on the Halloween night of October 1938 when a brilliant young auteur by the name of Orson Welles tapped into the subconscious fears of a nation and convinced thousands of people (perhaps many more) that Martians were invading the United States.

Incredibly, the cause of this mayhem was a dramatic presentation of The War Of The Worlds, a seminal novel written 40 years previously by H. G. Wells. So how and why did this all happen? There are a number of reasons, but it is first worth emphasizing just how new and exciting radio still was in 1938. The big radio networks such as NBC and CBS were only a decade old and engaged in a frenzy of experimentation, filling the airwaves with vast amounts of original material such as comedies, dramas, soaps and a fresh brand of journalism that opened the US public to a new awareness of world conflict and politics.

Americans were now able to connect with events and hear their law and opinion makers as never before. A notable trailblazer in this regard was President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose "fireside chats" (beginning in 1933) brought the voice of government and authority into the home as never before. Major news events also gripped the nation. Bulletins on the hunt for the kidnapped baby son of aviator Charles Lindbergh kept listeners in an agony of suspense over several months in 1932 and in 1936 the war correspondent Hans Von Kaltenborn became the first American reporter to broadcast live from a war zone, when he brought the actual sounds of a Spanish civil war battle into ordinary homes. Equally dramatic was the fatal crash of the airship Hindenburg, recorded on May 6th 1937 by Herbert Morrison of Chicago station WLS, an event that reduced the helpless reporter to tears of frustration and horror. Undoubtedly however, it was the troubling broadcasts from Nazi Germany that did most to unsettle America in this period. During the Munich Crisis of September 12-30th 1938, more radios were sold to anxious Americans than in any previous three-week period, as Hitler rallied his forces and the world slid inexorably toward war.

In this atmosphere of tension, Orson Welles and his staff were preparing their latest Mercury Theater presentation, a show that has previously dramatised such novels as "The Count of Monte Cristo" and "Dracula". On the face of it, The War Of The Worlds should have had no greater effect on the listening public than the previous broadcasts, which is to say, none at all, but Welles and his co-writer Howard Koch were planning something special this particular night, and though it is a matter of considerable debate if they actually intended to create the subsequent panic, it was undoubtedly their very novel dramatic device that did much of the damage.

Rather than set the story in Victorian England as written by H.G. Wells, the action was transplanted (not unsurprisingly) to contemporary America, but much more significantly, Welles and Koch told the story as a series of newsflashes that intruded without warning into what sounded like a perfectly routine program. This radical departure from established dramatic formats was to prove devastatingly effective, and combined with the use of numerous real place names, added significantly to the depth of the panic. In yet another contributing factor, it is thought that many people (upwards of 50%) tuned in late to the broadcast. This was largely because a great many listeners switched at an inopportune moment from a rival network, which was broadcasting the wildly popular Charlie McCarthy Show. About 10 minutes into this show, a singer would be introduced, and this was the point a lot of listeners would twiddle their dials while waiting for the star of the show to return. Tuning into the Mercury Theater a few minutes late (and thus having missed Welles distinctively sonorous introduction) they found themselves listening to the innocent sounds of "Ramon Raquello and his orchestra", only for the music to be interrupted by the first of a series of increasingly alarming news stories.

First come reports of several explosions of "incandescent gas" observed on the planet Mars, then after a brief interlude of more music comes a hook-up to Princeton Observatory where an interview is conducted with professor Richard Pierson. Pierson (played by Welles) assures the listeners that there is nothing to be alarmed at, but then the first reports of a meteor impact arrive. It is at this point that an unassuming place called Grover's Mill enters the story. Even today Grover's Mill is a sleepy little hamlet of no great material consequence, but that night it was going to become the centre of the universe for a very considerable number of people.

As fate would have it, Howard Koch chose Grover's Mill as the beachhead for the Martian invasion by the simple method of jabbing a pencil into a map purchased at a roadside garage. He then plotted the advance of the Martians toward New York City, brushing aside American defenders and destroying dozens of familiar place names along the way. An emergency government announcement appeared to give credence to the story, and huddled about their radios, panicked listeners began to bombard local police stations with calls. For instance, from Trenton police headquarters comes the following illuminating passage extracted from the station duty log. "Between 8:30PM & 10PM received numerous phone calls as result of WABC broadcast this evening re: Mars attacking this country. Calls included papers, police depts including NYC and private persons. No record kept of same due to working teletype and all three extensions ringing at same time. At least 50 calls were answered. Persons calling inquiring as to meteors, number of persons killed, gas attack, military being called out and fires. All were advised nothing unusual had occurred and that rumours were due to a radio dramatisation of a play."

Also from Trenton comes the account of a Mrs Thomas. "We were petrified. We just looked at each other, scared out of our wits. Someone was banging on our front door. It was our neighbour across the street. She had packed her seven kids in their car and she kept yelling, come on, lets get our of here." Also a local at the time, thirteen-year-old Henry Sears was doing his homework when he heard the first news flash of the invasion. Taking the radio down into the tavern below which his mother owned, he and a dozen or so patrons listened with mounting fear to the broadcast, until the men jumped up and announced they were going to get their guns and join in the defence at Grover's Mill.

What then of Grover's Mill? Oddly enough, the epicentre of all this action seems to have slept through the entire night undisturbed. Like the proverbial eye of the store, the hamlet was apparently blissfully unaware of the pivotal place it held in history, as was discovered by the late Sheldon Judson. He was to become emeritus Professor of Geology at Princeton University but at the time was a student member of the University Press Club. Alerted to the possible fall of a meteor by the city desk of the Philadelphia Inquirer, he enlisted the help of Arthur Buddington, Chair of the Princeton Geology Department and together with another professor, they set out for Grover's Mill. Here they found it entirely unperturbed by events. Certainly though, as the previous stories attest, there was a considerable panic under way that night in other parts of the country.

So was it done on purpose? The unglamorous answer is probably not. Over the years, Welles told conflicting versions of the events, and even tried to claim credit for planning it, but as newsreel footage at the time clearly shows, he was fairly rattled by events himself. He also said on occasion that "seventy five percent of what I say in interviews is false", so we'll never know for sure. This certainly does nothing to detract from the significance of the broadcast and it clearly stands as a testament to his talents as a showman and the skill and dedication of his cast and crew.

[David]

credit where credit's due
the source is:
http://www.war-ofthe-worlds.co.uk/radio.htm
I stand corrected, I thought it was an urban myth, but I guess it was true. I just always found it hard to believe that people could have actually believed it was real, but the way Welles presented it probably did make it sound pretty realistic.

But again may I ask: why are we talking about Orson Welles?

[HAL]

Ask why are we talking about Orson Welles . I thought that was what you wanted to do.