The Picture of Dorian Gray (1976 TV) The Picture of Dorian Gray (1976 TV) The Picture of Dorian Gray is a 1976 BBC video-taped production which formed part of the "Play of the Month" anthology series. It stars Peter Firth, Jeremy Brett, and John Gielgud. A 100-minute adaptation of Oscar Wilde's novel "The Picture of Dorian Gray" by John Osborne, it was first broadcast on 19 September 1976. This production was a critical success at the time of its first screening. In 2009 "The Times" called it the "most Wildean" adaptation of the novel, boasting "perhaps the best Dorian" and mentioning that John Gielgud "steals the show,
The Picture of Dorian Gray by attending a high-society party only twenty-four hours after committing a murder. Moral duplicity and self-indulgence are evident in Dorian's patronage of London's opium dens. Wilde conflates the images of the upper-class man and lower-class man in Dorian Gray, a gentleman slumming for strong entertainment in the poor parts of London town. Lord Henry philosophically had earlier said to him that: "Crime belongs exclusively to the lower orders. ... I should fancy that crime was to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations"—implying that Dorian is two men, a refined aesthete and a coarse