1. A Nice Cup of Tea

George Orwell has rented a Scottish cottage to complete his final novel. Unfortunately, he's been double-booked with the very last person he'd choose a holiday with.

The first season of Untrue Stories will visit the worlds of both H. G. Wells' The Time Machine and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, exploring how the infamous rivalry between two of Britain's greatest speculative fiction writers culminated in an astonishing, hilarious, and entirely untrue story of meddling with causality and bicycles.

In this episode, tea and tempers boil over as Orwell and his inadvertent roommate H. G. Wells argue over the fate that awaits humankind. Will society develop into Wells's steam-powered dream, or Orwell's dystopian nightmare? Wells' latest engineering project may allow them to settle their bet...

Starring Robin Johnson as George Orwell, Patrick Spragg as H. G. Wells, and Joanna Lawrie as Mrs Watchett. Sound effects were sourced from freesound.org.

References:

• Orwell's essay on A Nice Cup of Tea

2022-09-09: This is episode 1, reuploaded and backdated to avert a catastrophe. Apologies for any confusion.

A transcript of this episode is available here.

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