On the threshold of the building he once described as a cross between a girls’ boarding school and a lunatic asylum, on an appropriately grey and drizzly day, George Orwell has returned to the BBC, cigarette in hand.

On the wall behind him a suitable confrontational quote from Animal Farm has been inscribed: “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

“He is looking down on us – and quite rightly so,” the broadcaster Andrew Marr said. For those whose loved him, Orwell’s was a voice forever in their heads.

Marr viewed the statue and the quotation as a challenge to those working at the BBC: “We must do the job we do best, we must ask the awkward questions, we must work harder.”

The project initially stalled when the statue was rejected by the BBC, reputedly because they didn’t want to celebrate one of their more contrarian former employees. But he was welcomed back by Tony Hall as soon as he took over as director general. Hall called Orwell one of the most important journalists of his time, and added nobly: “His time at the BBC helped influence some of his most important novels.”

Orwell worked as a talks producer for the predecessor of the World Service, but left after two years in 1943. His resignation letter snarled: “For some time past I have been conscious that I was wasting my own time and the public money on doing work that produces no result … I feel that by going back to my normal work of writing and journalism I could be more useful than I am at present.”

His normal work soon included one of his most famous books, Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which Room 101, the basement torture chamber where each victim encounters “the worst thing in the world”, was modelled on a particularly airless recording studio.

Baroness Whitaker and Richard Blair at the unveiling of the statue. Photograph: Philip Toscano/PA

Orwell’s son Richard Blair said his father left the BBC because he wanted to finish a book, and partly because he wanted to prepare himself for parenthood having decided to adopt: Richard arrived as an infant the following June. Although he was only six when his father died in 1950, Blair has vivid memories of blissful fishing excursions in their little boat when the day’s writing work – not to be interrupted – was done.

He thinks that although his father had a low opinion of public monuments in general, he might have made an exception. “I think secretly, shyly, he might have been chuffed.”

The striking larger-than-life size statue was created by Martin Jennings, showing Orwell leaning forward to accost each arrival as if about to step off his plinth – appropriately into the area where the corporation’s remaining smokers normally huddle in disgrace, though they were evicted for the unveiling. Orwell first took up smoking as an act of defiance at school, was described as regularly wheezing like an accordion, and almost certainly accelerated his own death from tuberculosis.

Jennings, who also created the statues of Mary Seacole, and of the poet John Betjeman in St Pancras Station, described Orwell as an ideal subject. “Orwell was forever a member of the awkward squad and his tall bony frame was almost purpose-built to express this. Several inches over six feet tall, with cabbage-patch hair and a lamentable moustache, consumptive, built like a scarecrow and with a potting-shed wardrobe to match, his physical appearance stands as a joyful counterpoint to a monumental intellectual acuity.”

Commissioning the first public statue was the dream of the late Labour MP Ben Whitaker, who chose Jennings as a fellow Orwell devotee, and set up the George Orwell Memorial Trust to raise funds for the project before his death in 2014. The challenge was inherited by his widow, Baroness Whitaker, supported by Orwell’s adopted son.

Whitaker said: “George Orwell was my husband Ben’s boyhood hero, because of his uncompromising fidelity to truth – all the more important in an age of fake news.”

Orwell’s monument joins the regiment of talking statues, which can address any member of the public armed with a smart phone – his near neighbour, the sculpture of Ariel, by Eric Gill, over the main door of Broadcasting House, already talks back.

The Orwell statue is voiced by the actor Damian Lewis - who is, like the author, an Old Etonian. The school has also welcomed Orwell back, commissioning a replica of the portrait head to remind future generations of scholars that stroppy awkwardness is not necessarily a barrier to genius.

“I shall look forward to saluting him every morning and evening as I arrive and leave from work,” Hall said, “reminding us all of why we do what we do.”