A memo about using the name George Orwell on-air 15.10.42
Joseph Millson reads letters by George Orwell.
Transcript
Memo from Orwell to the Eastern Service Director
Confidential
From: Eric Blair, Indian Section
Subject: Weekly News Commentary
To: Eastern Service Director
15th October 1942
With reference to the suggestion that I should write and broadcast weekly news review in English over my own name i.e George Orwell. The four speakers who are at present doing this rotation have contracts up to November 7th, after which I will gladly take this on. But there are one or two points which it would be better to define clearly beforehand.
If I broadcast as George Orwell I am as it were selling my literary reputation, which so far in India is concerned probably arises chiefly from books of anti-imperialist tendency, some of which have been banned in India. If I gave broadcasts which appeared to endorse unreservedly the policy of the British government I should quite soon be written off as 鈥榦ne more renegade鈥� and should probably miss my potential public, at any rate among the student population. I am not thinking about my personal reputation, but clearly we should defeat our own object in these broadcasts if I could not preserve my position as an independent and more or less 鈥渁gin the government鈥� commentator. I would therefore like to be sure in advance that I can have reasonable freedom of speech. I think this weekly commentary is only likely to be of value if I can make it from an anti-fascist rather than imperialist standpoint and avoid mention of subjects on which I could not conscientiously agree with current Government policy.
I do not think this is likely to cause trouble, as the chief difficulty is over Indian internal politics, which we rarely mention in our weekly news commentaries. These commentaries have always followed what is by implication a 鈥榣eft鈥� line and in fact have contained very little that I would not sign with my own name. But I can imagine situations arising in which I should have to say that I could not in honesty do the commentary for that week, and I should like the position to be defined in advance.
Eric Blair
15.10.1942.
Clips
Reading of Orwell's memo to the Eastern Service Director
Read by Joseph Millson who plays Eric Blair in The Real George Orwell dramas.
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