Brave New World
Sky one

Depictions of the dystopias of the future often involve glassy-eyed people in unisex tunics drifting around vast, modernist ziggurats which resemble the Barbican Centre, complete with trailing greenery and, possibly, a huge glass dome through which radioactive sunsets can be safely observed.

The opening scenes of Sky’s new nine-part adaptation (all episodes streaming from 2 October) of Aldous Huxley’s novel, Brave New World, follows this format almost to the letter. It is 2540 and in the city-state of New London, citizens are engineered in artificial wombs, their social ranking, from cerebral Alpha to manual Epsilon, determined in the laboratory. The inhabitants of New London are kept in a state of unquestioning dependence by happy pills called soma and by a surveillance system known, reverently, as Indra, understanding of which is limited to a priestly elite whose members talk in obfuscating soundbites. Privacy is the first sin against the “social body”; monogamy is outlawed – and because there is no such thing as privacy, anyone who hooks up on too regular a basis will be summoned to the Alphas and given a talking to for indulging in “disgusting solecism”.