accompany the expression on his face as he watches, and we assume that his role in the creation of this tennis game’s reality is a metaphor through which he reaches some sort of realisation. (9) Although it is open to interpretation, there is the suggestion that Blue 439 now accepts that reality is a process of social construction which cannot be framed, controlled and understood as easily as he had previously thought.

Bombarded with differently mediated representations of “the real”, today’s viewing public face similar questions about how to best ascribe validity and truth to what they see and hear. Disturbingly self-conscious in their role of creating “history” for future reference, journalists are increasingly prone to make sweeping, grandiose judgements from the scene of the latest newsworthy event. Highly subjective soundbites and desperate attempts to impose massive significance on the material presented become mantras which either lull the audience into accepting an oversimplified parcelling of information, or stimulate an active and healthy mistrust of such techniques.

The 24-hour broadcast media’s infatuation with “breaking news” creates an audience hungry to be “informed” at every stage, one for which reflection can be conveniently ruled out, as assertions – often incorrect and later revised – are paraded before them. (10) Within a very short space of time, the sheer volume of online documentary evidence and published opinion,

which many are privileged to scrutinise at their leisure, forms a clash of discourses which cannot ever end in confident resolution. The old cliché of history being written by the victorious falls away as the spectator succumbs to an omnidirectional raft of propaganda; in the shadow of cascading information about global events, the mind becomes an increasingly pliable battleground for competing ideologies.

It may be useful to consider the process of engagement with this labyrinth of parasitic memes as simply one example of Hegelian “geist” coming to know itself in and through the mimetic dialectic, the particular witness as the agent of the higher compulsion to assimilate and supercede. (11) But sometimes it is impossible not to believe what one sees, let alone maintain a fondness for 19th century German idealism. Adopting a calculatingly dispassionate metaphysical position and willingly suspending one’s disbelief is initially useless when confronted with a horror revealed and mediated by technology. However, continual exposure to such severely traumatic stimuli numbs the shock but not the fear, and greater passivity through image fatigue is almost inevitable. (12)

“I want tension..I want to make pictures..Pictures that stay..I want to show them..to the whole world. I want..to make ‘em see. I want them to hurt!” (M.Potter-"The Year of the Sex Olympics")

Recently watching one of the worst trawls through British televisual culture in living memory – about prescient SF from the 60s – my attention was drawn to an obscure play which was touted as an uncannily prophetic work, originally screened in 1968. ‘The Year of the Sex Olympics’ was written by Nigel Kneale, (13) and features a world where “high drives” programme constant pornography for “low drives” to watch, in turn watching them on “audience sampler” screens to monitor and assess their vicarious enjoyment. (14) Although influenced by ‘1984’ and ‘Brave New World’, it operates as an even more unique,

The viewer is forced to interpret the conclusion Blue 439 draws through the only part of this whole segment which doesn’t explicitly show him examining the photos themselves, and we are perhaps to imply that he has imagined what we see.
At the end of the film, he encounters the group of mime artists at the tennis court and is forced to participate when the “ball” is knocked out of the court. After he retrieves it and throws it back, the sounds of the game drift in to