SOMEBODY HAD a huge amount of fun making George Orwell: A Life in Pictures (BBC Two, Sunday) — the producer-director Chris Durlacher to be precise. In my college teaching days, we would get our media students to try to mimic the photographic or film styles of the past. They were useful and usually popular exercises.

This biography turned out to be the Media Studies exercise to end them all. The narrator Barbara Flynn explained that there are no moving images of George Orwell nor surviving recordings of his voice. Given that we have wax cylinders of Tennyson croaking his way through The Charge of the Light Brigade, this is disappointing.

But the great social chronicler was reclusive, obscure and too poor to own a cine-camera until the last phase of his life, most of which fell during wartime. Durlacher’s solution was to produce the cleverest set of pastiches we shall see in a long time. Using only Orwell’s authentic words, he made a cod Face to Face interview (complete the rough charcoal sketch of the interviewee), an expressionist “short” about Orwell’s childhood, fake home-movie footage, observational documentaries, an early television panel discussion, a book promo film, several newsreels and radio pieces.

For good measure, he even had Orwell, or rather Chris Langham’s, face digitally inserted into old news photographs. It was all so beautifully done that by the end it felt as if the gaunt Old Etonian had had been the most filmed and recorded writer of the past century. His prose seemed to translate seamlessly into broadcast journalism, and you could imagine him, had he not died of TB, alongside Fyfe Robertson as a pioneering reporter on Tonight.

On the face of it Chris Langham was a strange choice for this role. They did a terrific job in make-up, but without the pencil moustache and floppy hairdo, the resemblance is not particularly close. And Langham is so familiar as the bland, bumbling Roy Mallard of People Like Us that it was always going to take a leap of imagination to see him as one of our most direct and acerbic social commentators.

Yet he pulled it off magnificently. We will never know what Orwell actually sounded like, but anyone who saw this programme is probably now convinced that they do. Even the residual sediment of Mallard proved unexpectedly appropriate as various contemporaries recalled a lanky, gauche and physically clumsy figure. Above all the programme offered a chance to re-evaluate his work, as we approach the moment when he would have had his telegram from the Queen.

For later generations he is only really famous for his two political novels, Animal Farm and 1984. Both have probably contributed to the well-being of democracy as successive generations of schoolchildren have pondered their import. Animal Farm nailed Stalinism in a world that had still not fully recognised its true nature, but it was also a fable of the nature of revolutions with far wider relevance.

1984 warned how what Churchill called “the lights of perverted science” could be used to create complete totalitarian dominance. Part of that process, of course, was to sedate the masses with trivial pop culture, so he might cringe to learn that two of his key phrases, Big Brother and Room 101, are the titles of light entertainment programmes.

Yet both these novels are essentially formulaic, written to demonstrate debatable ideas, rather than explore the human condition. More interesting was the account of his earlier writing. In a class-divided society, Orwell belonged to the long, if uncertain tradition of middle and upper-class writers who sought to describe the condition of the toiling masses to those with the power and wealth. Mayhew, Dickens and even Wordsworth were predecessors.

What made Orwell so important was the degree to which he was prepared to immerse himself in the project, perhaps influenced by the sociologists of Mass Observation. He lived with down and outs in London and Paris; he fought with the Republican militias of Barcelona, and struggled down a coal mine, where he realised that the work was so arduous it would kill him. He walked the walk, far further than most journalists would, and he stank the stink.

The programme also reminded us that, for all his clarity about Stalin (forged on the streets of Barcelona), Orwell’s political ideas were a bit of a mess. He rightly attacked fashionable Hampstead socialists for their instinctive dislike of real working-class people, but his own vision of the Home Guard as a potentially revolutionary people’s militia was equally half-baked.

Yet his bloody-minded refusal to adopt an “-ism” also meant he could recognise his mistakes, and his later descriptions of English popular life and culture are as open-minded, perceptive and generous of spirit as you will find anywhere. After the war a wave of young writers from the working-classes came forward to speak for themselves, and Orwell’s world disappeared with the clouds of coal smoke.

But the programme was a tour de force. As Langham’s beautifully pitched readings attested, Orwell’s writing had a sharp, often mischievous lucidity and his contribution to the tradition of humane, decent British social commentary was immense.

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