Nigel Kneale - BBC Staff Screenwriter

BBC Staff Screenwriter

Neither Kneale nor Cartier were impressed with the state in which they found BBC television drama. At his initial job interview with Michael Barry, Cartier had criticised the department's output as being too sedate and theatrical, while Kneale was frustrated at what he saw as the slow and boring styles of television drama production then employed, which he felt wasted the potential of the medium. Together they would help to revolutionise British television drama and establish it as an entity separate from its theatre and radio equivalents; the television historian Lez Cooke wrote in 2003 that "Between them, Kneale and Cartier were responsible for introducing a completely new dimension to television drama in the early to mid-1950s." Jason Jacobs, a lecturer in film and television studies at the University of Warwick, wrote in his 2000 history of early British television drama that "It was the arrival of Nigel Kneale ... and Rudolph Cartier ... that challenged the intimate drama directly ... Kneale and Cartier shared a common desire to invigorate television with a faster tempo and a broader thematic and spatial canvas, and it was no coincidence that they turned to science-fiction in order to get out of the dominant stylistic trend of television intimacy."

The science-fiction production to which Jacobs referred was The Quatermass Experiment, broadcast in six half-hour episodes in July and August 1953. The serial told the story of Professor Bernard Quatermass of the British Experimental Rocket Group, and the consequences of his sending the first manned mission into space when a terrible fate befalls the crew and only one returns. The Quatermass Experiment was the first adult television science-fiction production, held a large television audience gripped across its six weeks, and has been described by the Museum of Broadcast Communications as dramatising "a new range of gendered fears about Britain's postwar and post-colonial security." Kneale was inspired in choosing the character's unusual surname by the fact that many Manx surnames began with "Qu"; the actual name itself was picked from a London telephone directory. The Professor's first name was chosen in honour of the astronomer Bernard Lovell.

The BBC recognised the success of the serial, particularly in the context of the impending arrival of commercial television to the UK. Controller of Programmes Cecil McGivern wrote in a memo that: "Had competitive television been in existence then, we would have killed it every Saturday night while lasted. We are going to need many more 'Quatermass Experiment' programmes." Like all of Kneale's television work for the BBC in the 1950s, The Quatermass Experiment was transmitted live. Only the first two episodes were telerecorded and survive in the BBC's archives.

Kneale and Cartier next collaborated on an adaptation of Wuthering Heights (broadcast 6 December 1953) and then on a version of George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (12 December 1954). Nineteen Eighty-Four was a particularly notable production; many found it shocking, and questions were asked in Parliament about whether some of the scenes had been suitable for television. There was also prominent support for the play; the Duke of Edinburgh made it known that he and the Queen had watched and enjoyed the programme, and the second live performance on 16 December gained the largest television audience since her coronation the previous year. The Guardian newspaper's obituary of Kneale in 2006 claimed that the adaptation had "permanently revived Orwell's reputation," while the British Film Institute included it in their list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes of the 20th century in 2000.

The Creature—an original script by Kneale concerning the legend of the abominable snowman—was his next collaboration with Cartier, broadcast on 30 January 1955, followed by an adaptation of Peter Ustinov's play The Moment of Truth (10 March 1955), before Kneale was commissioned to write Quatermass II. Specifically designed by the BBC to combat the threat of the new ITV network, which launched just a month before Quatermass II was shown, the serial was even more successful than the first, drawing audiences of up to nine million viewers. Kneale was inspired in writing the serial by contemporary fears over secret UK Ministry of Defence research establishments such as Porton Down, as well the fact that as a BBC staff writer he had been required to sign the Official Secrets Act.

Almost simultaneously with the transmission of Quatermass II in the autumn of 1955, Hammer Film Productions released The Quatermass Xperiment, their film adaptation of the first serial. Kneale was not pleased with the film, and particularly disliked the casting of Brian Donlevy as Quatermass, as he explained in a 1986 interview. " was then really on the skids and didn't care what he was doing. He took very little interest in the making of the films or in playing the part. It was a case of take the money and run. Or in the case of Mr Donlevy, waddle."

Quatermass II was Kneale's final original script for the BBC as a staff writer. He left the corporation when his contract expired at the end of 1956; "Five years in that hut was as much as any sane person could stand," he later told an interviewer. But he continued to write for the BBC on a freelance basis.