Roy Oxley

Roy Oxley (9 March 1905 – 1980)[citation needed] was a production designer at BBC Television who became famous after the BBC chose him to model for a photograph to be shown during their adaptation of George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Oxley began working in set design in 1948, as an art decorator in the film London Belongs to Me.[citation needed] He also supervised the art decoration of the 1949 film, Passport to Pimlico.[1]

Oxley had been working for some years as set decorator for BBC when he was chosen, as an in-house joke, to model for the character of "Big Brother" in Nineteen Eighty-Four.[2][3][4] "Big Brother" was not actually a participating character in the programme; his face was only shown on various posters and billboards seen during the adaptation.

Oxley worked at several other productions as a production designer with the BBC, including seven episodes of the Douglas Wilmer version of Sherlock Holmes, various episodes of Z-Cars[citation needed] and an adaptation for television of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood.[5] In 1969, he won a BAFTA Award for Production Design for his work of the BBC play The Portrait of a Lady.[6]

Personal life

He was married to Jean; they had two children.[4]

References

  1. ^ Ede, Laurie N. (2010). No Sets Please, We're British! Realist Traditions of British Film Production Design. Design Principles & Practice: An International Journal 4(4): 395–404, doi:10.18848/1833-1874/CGP/v04i04/37927
  2. ^ Tom Fordy (8 May 2022). How the 'unadulterated horror' of Orwell created TV's first moral panic. The Sunday Telegraph, p. 24
  3. ^ Graeme Burk, Robert Smith. Who's 50: The 50 Doctor Who Stories to Watch Before You Die—An Unofficial Companion, p. 91 (ECW Press; 2013) ISBN 9781770411661
  4. ^ a b David Ryan. George Orwell on Screen: Adaptations, Documentaries and Docudramas on Film and Television, pp. 30–31 (McFarland; 2018) ISBN 9781476633138
  5. ^ Wrigley, Amanda (2014). Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood, 'a Play for Voices' on Radio, Stage and Television. Critical Studies in Television 9(3): 77–88 doi:10.7227/CST.9.3.8
  6. ^ Television | Design in 1969, BAFTA (Retrieved 2 October 2022)


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