Nigel Kneale - Freelance Film and Television Work

Freelance Film and Television Work

The same year that he left the BBC, Kneale wrote his first feature film screenplay, adapting Quatermass II for Hammer Film Productions along with producer Anthony Hinds and director Val Guest. Hinds and Guest had overseen the first Quatermass film, upon which Kneale had been unable to work due to his BBC staff contract. Kneale was disappointed that Brian Donlevy also returned in the role of Quatermass. The film premiered at the end of May 1957, and was reviewed positively in The Times: "The writer of the original story, Mr. Nigel Kneale, and the director, Mr. Val Guest, between them keep things moving at the right speed, without digressions. The film has an air of respect for the issues touched on, and this impression is confirmed by the acting generally." 1957 also saw the release of another cinematic collaboration between Kneale and Guest, when Kneale adapted his 1955 BBC play The Creature into The Abominable Snowman; in this case, Hammer retained the star of the BBC version, Peter Cushing.

In May 1957, Kneale was contracted by the BBC to write a third Quatermass serial, and this was eventually transmitted as Quatermass and the Pit across six weeks in December 1958 and January 1959. On this occasion Kneale was inspired by the racial tensions that had recently been seen in the United Kingdom, and which came to a head while the serial was in pre-production when the Notting Hill race riots occurred in August and September 1958. Drawing audiences of up to 11 million, Quatermass and the Pit has been referred to by the BBC's own website as "simply the first finest thing the BBC ever made." It was also included in the British Film Institute's "TV 100" list in 2000, where it was praised for the themes and subtexts it explored. "In a story which mined mythology and folklore ... under the guise of genre it tackled serious themes of man's hostile nature and the military's perversion of science for its own ends."

Despite the success of the serial, Kneale felt that he had now taken the character of Quatermass as far as he could. "I didn't want to go on repeating because Professor Quatermass had already saved the world from ultimate destruction three times, and that seemed to me to be quite enough," he said in 1986. It was also his final new collaboration with Rudolph Cartier, although the director did later handle a new version of Kneale's 1953 adaptation of Wuthering Heights for the BBC in 1962.

In 1958, Kneale's play Mrs Wickens in the Fall, transmitted by the BBC the previous year, was remade by the CBS network in the United States, retitled The Littlest Enemy. Broadcast on 18 June as part of The United States Steel Hour anthology series, the script was severely cut back in length. It was Kneale's only involvement with American television, and he was not pleased with the result. "I made up my mind I would never ever again have anything done on a television network in America," he later commented.

For the next few years, Kneale concentrated mostly on film screenplays, adapting plays and novels for the cinema. Described by The Independent as "one of the few writers not to fall out with John Osborne," Kneale adapted Osborne's plays Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer in 1958 and 1960 respectively, both for director Tony Richardson. Kneale knew Richardson through having previously adapted a Chekhov short story for the BBC, which Richardson had directed. Kneale was nominated for the British Film Award (later known as a BAFTA) for Best Screenplay for both films. Film producer Harry Saltzman, who had produced the two Osborne adaptations, approached Kneale about scripting a project he was working on to adapt Ian Fleming's James Bond novels for the cinema; Kneale was not a fan of Fleming's work and turned the offer down. Further adaptations Kneale did work on were H.M.S. Defiant (1962, from the novel Mutiny by Frank Tilsley) and First Men in the Moon (1964, from the novel by H. G. Wells).

Less successfully during this period, Kneale completed screenplays for adaptations of the novels Lord of the Flies by William Golding and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Neither of these scripts ever saw production, as the companies making them went out of business—Kneale commented in a 2003 interview that "I reckon I closed down at least two film companies." Another screenplay that went unproduced was a Kneale original, a drama involving a wave of teenage suicides called The Big Giggle, or The Big, Big Giggle. Written in 1965 while Kneale was suffering from a mystery illness and forced to stay in bed for a long period, the concept started life as a drama serial for the BBC, before the corporation had second thoughts about the nature of the storyline and the possibility of copycat suicides; Kneale later agreed that they were probably right not to make it for television. The production was nearly made as a film by 20th Century Fox, but John Trevelyan, Chief Executive of the British Board of Film Censors, forbade the script's production.

In 1966 Kneale worked again for Hammer Film Productions when he adapted Norah Lofts's 1960 novel The Devil's Own into the horror film The Witches. Kneale had first worked on the screenplay for the adaptation in 1961, the same year in which he had begun to adapt Quatermass and the Pit for Hammer. Like The Witches, the film version of Quatermass and the Pit took several years to reach the screen, eventually being released in 1967. Roy Ward Baker directed, with Andrew Keir starring as Quatermass. Kneale was much happier with this version than the previous Hammer Quatermass adaptations, and the film was described by The Independent in 2006 as "one of the best ever Hammer productions." Quatermass and the Pit was Kneale's final credited film work; 1979's The Quatermass Conclusion was only released to cinemas in overseas markets after having been made for television in the UK, and he had his name removed from the credits of Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982).

Kneale had returned to writing for television with the BBC for the first time since Quatermass and the Pit when his play The Road was broadcast in September 1963. The play concerned the population of an 18th-century village who become haunted by visions of a future nuclear war, and was followed by several further one-off dramas for the BBC over the following decade, including two entries into BBC1's The Wednesday Play anthology strand. During this period he was regarded as one of the finest writers working for the BBC. Kneale did his first work for the ITV network during this time, writing one-off play The Crunch for the ATV company in 1964.

A particular critical success was The Year of the Sex Olympics, broadcast as part of BBC2's Theatre 625 series in July 1968. Kneale's first television work to be made in colour—although only a black-and-white copy now survives—the story was based in a future where the majority of the population are kept in a docile state by constant broadcasts of pornography and other low-brow reality television programming. The Live Life Show, in which a family are watched twenty-four hours a day as they struggle to live on an isolated rural island, becomes a massive success, especially when a murderer is introduced into the set-up.

The Year of the Sex Olympics has been praised for its foreshadowing of the rise of reality television programmes such as Big Brother (1999–present) and Celebrity Love Island (2005–2006). The critic Nancy Banks-Smith wrote in 2003 that: "In The Year of the Sex Olympics foretold the reality show and, in the scramble for greater sensation, its logical outcome ... This is satire from a TV insider, but it mutates into something far more desolate and disorientating." The island locations scenes for the production were filmed on the Isle of Man, Kneale's homeland.

In 1965 Kneale had been approached by the producer of the BBC2 science-fiction anthology series Out of the Unknown to write a new one-off 75-minute Quatermass story for the programme. Nothing came of this, but seven years later he was commissioned by the BBC to write a new four-part Quatermass serial, based in a dystopian near future world overrun with crime, apathy, martial law and youth cults. The serial was announced as a forthcoming production by the BBC in November 1972, and some model filming was even begun in June 1973, but eventually budgetary problems and the unavailability of Stonehenge—a central location in the scripts—led to the project's cancellation. "It lingered through the summer and slowly died as a project," he later commented.

Kneale's next script for the BBC was The Stone Tape, a scientific ghost story broadcast on Christmas Day 1972. Lez Cooke praised the production, when writing in 2003, describing it as "one of the most imaginative and intelligent examples of the horror genre to appear on British television, a single play to rank alongside the best of Play for Today." His final BBC work was an entry into a series called Bedtime Stories, adapting traditional fairy tales into adult dramas. Kneale's script, Jack and the Beanstalk, was transmitted on 24 March 1974, and marked the end of his BBC writing career.