1984 in 1954 now public domain

The fifty year term of copyright doesn't just apply to sound recordings and radio it also applies to Television broadcasts.

Unfortunately prior to the early 1960s most television was broadcast live due to videotaping being in the development stage so very few recordings were made and exist to this day.

One such recording that still exists is the 1954 BBC Television dramatisation of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Wikipedia entry on Nineteen Eighty-Four (TV programme)

This dramatisation was adapted for television by Nigel Kneale and produced and directed by the equally-respected Rudolph Cartier, the same team that produced The Quatermass Experiment in the previous year. It starred Peter Cushing in the lead role of Winston Smith and is widely regarded as one of the greatest television productions of the 20th Century.

It was first broadcast live on Sunday December 12, 1954 and was such a controversial broadcast that it attracted complaints, motions were tabled in Parliament and there was even a report in the Daily Express newspaper under the headline "Wife dies as she watches", allegedly from the shock of what she had seen.

However the broadcast had attracted a huge audience including Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip who made it known that they had watched and enjoyed it. The BBC then decided to go ahead with a planned second performance of the play and understanding what an important broadcast it would be decided for it to be telerecorded onto 35mm film. This second broadcast was on Thursday December 16, 1954 and thus it is this second performance that survives in the archives, one of the earliest surviving British television dramas.

It was most recently broadcast on BBC Four on June 14, 2003.

Coincidentally 1954 was also the year that the BBC launched it's daily TV news service. It is unlikely that there are any recordings of news bulletins from this year as it would probably have been deemed unnecessary.