Influenced by concerns about overpopulation, the counterculture of the 1960s, and the societal effects of television, the play depicts a world of the future where a small elite controls the mass media, keeping the lower classes docile by serving them an endless diet of lowest common denominator programmes and pornography.

The accidental death of a protester (Martin Potter) during the Sex Olympics gets a massive audience response and after this, the co-ordinator Ugo Priest (Leonard Rossiter) decides to commission a new programme.

In The Live-Life Show, Nat Mender, his partner Deanie (Suzanne Neve), and their daughter Keten (Lesley Roach) are stranded on a remote Scottish island while the low-drive audience watches.

[7] For The Year of the Sex Olympics Kneale extrapolated the possible consequences of the youth movement's desire for freedom from "traditional" cultural inhibitions, asking, as the academic John R. Cook puts it, "In a world of no limits, will the result quickly be apathy if there is nothing anymore to get excited about, nothing precious or illicit to fight for in the teeth of the censor?

Writing to Rossiter, offering him the part, Elliot described The Year of the Sex Olympics as "the most important play Nigel Kneale has written since Quatermass".

[14] The Year of the Sex Olympics met with obstruction when the 'Clean-Up TV' campaigner Mary Whitehouse of the National Viewers and Listeners Association obtained a copy of the script and attempted to block the production.

Industrial action by BBC electricians interrupted the production, and by the end of the recording session, the final ten minutes of the play remained untaped, leading to a remount on 23 June to complete the outstanding scenes.

"[17] Sean Day-Lewis, writing in The Daily Telegraph, hailed the programme as a "highly original play written with great force and making as many valid points about the dangers of the future as any science fiction I can remember—including 1984!

[17] As often happened in this era, the colour master tapes of The Year of the Sex Olympics were wiped sometime after the broadcast, and the play was believed lost until the 1980s when a 16mm black-and-white telerecording was discovered.

[20] One of the first to draw comparisons with The Year of the Sex Olympics and the rise of reality television programmes (soap operas without professional actors), such as Big Brother, Castaway 2000 and Survivor, was journalist Nancy Banks-Smith in a review of the first series of the UK version of Big Brother for The Guardian in 2000;[21] she later expounded upon the theme in 2003, writing that the play "foretold the reality show and, in the scramble for greater sensation, its logical outcome".

"[23] When The Year of the Sex Olympics was repeated on BBC Four on 22 May 2003, Paul Hoggart in The Times noted that "in many respects Kneale was right on the money [...] when you consider that nothing gets contemporary reality show audiences more excited than an emotional train-wreck on live TV".

Mark Gatiss has noted that the Artsex and Foodshow programmes that also appear in the play "ingeniously depicted the future of lowest common denominator TV".

[23] This view is echoed by the writer and critic Kim Newman, who has said that "as an extreme exercise in revolutionary self-criticism on the part of television professionals, who also lampoon their own world of chattering commentators and ratings-chasing sensationalism, the play [...] is a trenchant contribution to a series of debates that is still raging"[25] and has concluded that "Nigel Kneale might be quite justified in shouting, 'I was right!