AFTER A PROTRACTED PERIOD OF ILL-HEALTH AND A SERIES OF SMALL strokes, Nigel Kneale died of multiple organ failure at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in central London on Sunday October 29, 2006, surrounded by his family. He was eighty-four.
Just over a week later, on November 6, a private cremation was held at Mortlake Crematorium in Kew. His ashes were scattered by the Kneale family on Barnes Common, very near their home, and a tree was planted there in his memory.
In an obituary of Kneale published a few days later by the Guardian, Mark Gatiss wrote, “a true pioneer has passed — and the light of Mars will shine a little brighter tonight.” Later in the same piece, Gatiss lamented, “A few years ago I tried to persuade [long-running ITV documentary strand] The South Bank Show to devote an edition to Kneale, only to be told he wasn’t a ‘big enough figure’. This was doubly dispiriting, not only because, to anyone interested in TV drama, Kneale is a colossus, but because it seemed to confirm all the writer’s gloomy predictions regarding the future of broadcasting. Couldn’t the medium celebrate one of its giants?”
Even with Kneale himself gone, though, his influence continues to be keenly felt. Early in 2006, shortly before his death, ITV broadcast a major four-part drama called Eleventh Hour, starring Patrick Stewart as Ian Hood, a troubleshooting scientist working uneasily alongside the British government. The series was created and co-written by acknowledged Kneale admirer Stephen Gallagher. “Quatermass was a huge influence on the planning of Eleventh Hour, though it slipped entirely out of my control in the execution,” Gallagher says. “The show was never meant to be SF to any degree, but my vision was of this powerful, confident, Old Testament-style elder statesman of science cutting through bullshit and putting down politicians and saving the day.” For his main character, Gallagher drew partly from Dr Alan Hood, an emeritus physics professor who he’d created for a short story in 2003. But as Gallagher himself admits, “[Ian Hood] contains a dash of Professor Challenger, a soupçon of Bernard Quatermass, a whiff of Peter Brock [Michael Bryant’s character in The Stone Tape].” Eleventh Hour’s particular take on the intelligently speculative, rather than outright fantastical, science-based thriller was clearly influenced by Kneale’s work, and it had a new lease of life as a US remake in 2008, starring Rufus Sewell as the renamed Dr Jacob Hood.
That Eleventh Hour was commissioned at all bears witness to a change in the climate of British television. After a long drought, there was a sudden rush of new series for all ages with some kind of science fiction or fantasy content. The main factor in this was undoubtedly the return of Doctor Who in 2005, which, though viewed as a potential flop by many in the industry at the time, had proved to be one of the biggest TV hits of its day.
There was very little love lost between Kneale and Doctor Who, of course, but many of the writers on the revived show, including Mark Gatiss and show-runner Russell T Davies, were firm fans of Kneale’s work. Indeed Twenty-first Century Doctor Who is as littered with Kneale references as its earlier incarnation: Quatermass now seems to be etched into the DNA of the series for all time. For instance, Davies’ 2005 episode The Christmas Invasion features a space probe, Guinevere One, heading for a landing on Mars to search for signs of life: it’s not referenced in dialogue, but a logo in the background, and a tie-in fictional website, identified this ambitious project as the work of the ‘British Rocket Group’. Gatiss’ 2006 episode The Idiot’s Lantern rather neatly places an attempted alien takeover in London in June 1953, via the medium of television sets, during the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, thereby blending together the context and shades of the content of The Quatermass Experiment. The very next story, The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit, concerns a huge, ancient alien beast trapped underground, whose demonic appearance and terrifying, seemingly supernatural influence has apparently inspired ‘Devil’ figures in mythologies across the entire universe — a clear nod to Quatermass and the Pit, up to and including the very name of the episode.
The list goes on and on, taking in the title and plot of Stephen Greenhorn’s 2007’s episode The Lazarus Experiment — in which an unhinged scientist, played by Gatiss, becomes genetically mutated and goes on the rampage, before dying in London’s Southwark Cathedral — a sort of manic mash-up of classic Marvel Comics and The Quatermass Experiment; and the 2009 episode Planet of the Dead, co-written by Davies and Gareth Roberts, in which UNIT scientific adviser Dr Malcolm Taylor admits to the Doctor that he’s named a measuring unit for a four-dimensional wavelength parcel a ‘Malcolm’, after himself, with one hundred Malcolms equalling one ‘Bernard’. “And who’s that, your dad?” asks the Doctor. “Don’t be ridiculous. That’s Quatermass,” Malcolm replies (the line itself written by Davies). This raft of references, it should be noted, isn’t accidental, but rather they’re intentional cross-fictional nods by modern day Kneale fans.
A few years on, Gatiss’ 2013 episode The Crimson Horror, about a Victorian village community working on a mysterious project in a factory — revealed to be the planned annihilation of most of the human race, lead by an unearthly leech-like creature — played fast and loose with the plot of Quatermass 2. But perhaps the most overt attempt by Doctor Who to embrace Quatermass came with Neil Cross’ 2013 episode Hide. It centred on a scientific investigation into the apparent haunting of ancient Caliburn House in late 1974, undertaken by Professor Alec Palmer and his assistant Emma Grayling, with the ghost revealed to have a logical, albeit extraordinary, explanation.
To a large degree, then, Hide draws on the plot of one of Kneale’s most celebrated works. As Cross told Stephen Jewell of SFX magazine, “One of my great inspirations was The Stone Tape, which was a great Christmas sci-fi/horror teleplay from 1972, which was written by the great Nigel Kneale, who, of course, also created Quatermass. It’s one of the most brilliant and terrifying things to ever appear on television so I wanted to evoke a slightly Stone Tape-esque atmosphere.”
But the connections between the episode and Kneale’s work could actually have gone much deeper. Speaking to SFX, Cross observed, “I love ghost stories and I also have a great fondness and love for Quatermass, which in many ways is the show that proceeded Doctor Who. Doctor Who borrowed quite a bit from Quatermass and probably wouldn’t have existed in anything like the form we recognise today if Quatermass hadn’t come before it.” In fact, as Cross explained, originally he had very different plans for the character who became Professor Alec Palmer. “My first intention in this episode was to actually have Quatermass as a guest star. I wanted the Doctor to meet Quatermass, which would have just created a fangasm, but rights issues made that impossible.” The reasons for these ‘rights issues’, as we’ll see, remain intriguingly murky, but in the event, with Quatermass unavailable to appear in Hide, Cross had to resort to creating his own myth-busting professor character.
It may perhaps seem inappropriate to dwell on Kneale’s influence on Doctor Who when he was so vocal in his dislike of the series. But it’s worth bearing in mind that it its revived form it’s one of the the most successful drama shows on British television, broadcast at peak time on Saturday night on BBC One and seen around the world. As such, this represents a huge mainstream audience of all ages being exposed to some distant form of Kneale’s plots and ideas. Given that the Kneale homages in the original run of Doctor Who inspired a new generation of admirers for his work, we might see the same happen in this century.
The success of Russell T Davies’ revival of Doctor Who certainly led to a major shift in attitudes towards science fiction and fantasy in British broadcasting. The series developed its own direct spin-offs — The Sarah Jane Adventures for children, Torchwood for adults — but also helped pave the way for new shows of a similar bent, from Primeval, Demons, Merlin and Atlantis to The Fades, In the Flesh and Utopia. It’s also been followed by remakes of classic British telefantasy shows such as Survivors, The Prisoner and Gerry Anderson’s Thunderbirds. New Captain Scarlet, a CGI animated revival of another Gerry Anderson show, was broadcast in 2005. One episode, The Storm at the End of the World, sees the heroes dig up what turn out to be meteors containing deadly spores sent by their Martian arch-enemies, the Mysterons. As they dig, Captain Blue remarks, “Did you ever see that old movie where they dig out a spaceship that’s been buried under London since before the dinosaurs? Maybe the Mysterons have got kin down here”. It’s a safe bet that the writer of that episode, Phil Ford, knew precisely which old movie Captain Blue meant. Ford was another keen fan of classic British telefantasy, and would subsequently go on to work on Doctor Who.* With this fresh wave of British telefantasy, it’s hardly surprising that possibility swiftly arose of Quatermass itself being revived for television. The notion came from the Bolton-based writer Chris Lunt, who was then looking to break into television via Manchester’s Red Production Company, makers of much of Russell T Davies’ key TV work.
A self-confessed “sci-fi nut”, Lunt knew all about Kneale and his work. “I was very aware of Quatermass, though it was mostly the movies, particularity Quatermass and the Pit. I’d been developing Biggles as a movie and really enjoyed the process of adapting an existing IP [intellectual property]. At the same time I was working with Red Productions, and we decided to approach the BBC with some of their old IP that we could perhaps re-develop. Doctor Who had just done very well on BBC One, so we proposed Quatermass as a sightly more serious sci-fi drama for BBC Two. I wrote a spec treatment and it was really well received.”
Lunt estimates that, in all, he spent around six months on the project, some time around 2008. “I wanted to do engaging, intelligent sci-fi. All the stories were science fiction but they were also anchored to real world events. I recall at the end of every episode synopsis there were links to websites that suggested events had their basis in reality. The BBC really liked that. My big note to myself was ‘make it scary’. My dad was a massive fan of the original series when he was a kid, and he was always telling me how it terrified him.”
Lunt drew on a variety of influences for his Quatermass script, though, not least the hit American series House, starring Hugh Laurie as the brilliant, curmudgeonly Head of Diagnostic Medicine, Dr Gregory House. “On reflection, there’s no doubt I was influenced by House. Quatermass worked with a small team of younger scientists that he would play against each other as a sort of bizarre experiment in itself. I also loved The X-Files and the Hammer stuff . . . There are always lots of influences to everything, but I think it had a wit and humour that would have stood it on its own two feet as well.” Lunt’s proposal was for a fresh series of Quatermass stories, rather than remakes of Kneale’s original serials. “There were tips of the hat to the serials but no straight adaptations. It was quite dark, a nice mix of horror and science fiction. It was totally proposed as a reboot.”
The BBC commissioned a pilot script, and for a time Lunt continued to develop the project, weaving in some elements of the classic Quatermass stories. “I would probably have worked with other writers if it had been green-lit. I had about sixteen episodes outlined, ending with a cliffhanger taking place at Hobbs End that would have been a lot of fun and we would have launched season two with The Pit”. Lunt insists, “it was very, very important to me that it was respectful to the source material. I wasn’t just plucking Quatermass from thin air because I thought it was suddenly marketable again — I really wanted to do it justice. Hopefully I’d have found a way to do that and fans and non-fans would have liked it.”
But in the end, it wasn’t to be. When Lunt was partway through writing his pilot script, it transpired that the BBC didn’t actually hold the remake rights to Quatermass. On enquiring with Kneale’s agent, it was discovered that they were in fact in the hands of film-maker Tim Burton. By Lunt’s recollection, Burton was said to be planning a big-budget Quatermass film of his own, complete with a period 1950s setting. This project has never been announced, much less made, but it’s a fascinating prospect, and it has a certain logic. Burton is an ardent fan of classic scifi, most evident in his 1996 film Mars Attacks!, as well as being an ardent fan of Hammer horror — his follow-up to Mars Attacks! was the Hammer homage Sleepy Hollow. A good many of his films take place in mid-twentieth century period settings, too, including Ed Wood, Big Fish, Dark Shadows and Big Eyes. As such, it makes a certain sense that a Quatermass film set during that time might appeal to him.
Things can move very slowly in the film world, so it’s not possible to completely discount a Tim Burton Quatermass flm being made at some point in the future. In the short term, the rights situation put paid to the 2008 BBC/Red Productions project, despite the best efforts of Chris Lunt and company. “As a contemporary drama we even suggested that we do our TV drama and perhaps reference that movie [Tim Burton], should it happen, and have our Quatermass be the grandson of theirs. But they didn’t entertain that idea either, so the project died.” Chris Lunt himself, though, has since gone on to establish himself as a television writer of some note: his ITV series Prey, made by Red Productions, has been much acclaimed, and he’s since attempted to develop a reboot of another iconic television hero, namely Leslie Chateris’ The Saint.
Modern British television is peppered with respectful nods to Kneale and his work, often in the most unexpected places. League of Gentlemen alumni Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith have gone on to great success, most recently with their blackly comical anthology series Inside No 9. Explaining their influences for the series, Pemberton and Shear-smith have cited classic shows such as Armchair Thriller, The Twilight Zone, Play for Today, Tales Of The Unexpected, and Kneale’s own Beasts. In promoting the series’ second run in 2015, Shearsmith selected the Beasts entry Baby as one of his personal favourite TV horror anthology stories (for the Guardian), noting of the climax, “The noise the thing makes when it finally wakes up and needs to suckle will keep you awake for days.”
Quatermass has even popped up on MI High, a CBBC comedy-drama series about a team of secondary school children who work as undercover spies. The 2010 episode, Quakermass, guest-stars Nicholas Smith as the eponymous seismology professor who alerts the team to a series of less-than-natural disasters. The episode’s writer, Ben Ward, observes, “It was a reference, although I can’t say the episode itself had much to do with the character or the original stories. It was about a villain who was able to create earthquakes and I saw the opportunity for a nod to it with the name.”
Ward, now working as head writer on the CBBC revival of Danger Mouse, has childhood memories of seeing, and being terrified by, the TV version of Quatermass and the Pit. “It was pretty scary to a kid, even in the eighties. I’m a big Goon Show fan too, and I think I probably know their spoof of it as well as the original. There’s a nice through-line. Quatermass was used by The Goons; The Goons was used by Danger Mouse; and I’m the head writer of Danger Mouse.”
Contemporary popular culture is positively awash with tiny links and references to Kneale’s work. For instance, in 2007, Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill released a standalone volume from their epic metafictional series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen entitled Black Dossier. Set in an alternate Britain of the late fifties, it contains several brief allusions to the original Quatermass serials, up to and including a featured comic strip, Trump Traveller’s Club, in which two young twins visit an interplanetary zoo with their uncle, Professor Bernard.
Meanwhile, the success of the blockbusting film adaptations of Marvel Comics characters has already resulted in two big-screen versions of the Fantastic Four origin story, the first in 2005, and the latest in 2015, which can be read as new mainstream appearances of some distant iteration of The Quatermass Experiment’s central premise.
All told, one doesn’t have to look far to find admirers of Nigel Kneale at work in modern cinema. Via Twitter, director Guilllermo del Toro has confessed, “Nigel Kneale has been a vital influence on everything I do — lately, [del Toro’s 2015 film] Crimson Peak (his notion of ghosts being ‘loops’)”. Fellow director Edgar Wright, while publicising his 2013 sci-fi comedy The World’s End, told SciFi Now magazine, “The things that really inspired it, not specific films but really John Wyndham and Nigel Kneale, John Christopher . . . there’s a particular strain of British sci-fi that I felt was felt darker and would tackle global events through a very narrow focus in terms of this is one town, but it has consequences over the whole planet. And a lot of the Quatermass films are like that.”*
There’s also the matter of a recent music subgenre, Hauntology, best exemplified by the output of the record label Ghost Box, which uses a blend of found sound samples, field recordings and vintage electronica to wistful, occasionally unsettling effect. Key Kneale works, such as the Quatermass serials and The Stone Tape, have been cited as an influence by its practitioners: indeed, an early Hauntology touchstone is Mount Vernon Arts Lab’s 2001 album The Séance at Hobs Lane.
IN 2007, DUTCH MEDIA MOGUL JOHN DE MOL, ONE OF THE FOUNDERS OF TV production giant Endemol, bought up the rights to Hammer Films, and within a few years the long-mooted revival of the company’s horror output was finally up and running. One of the relaunched Hammer Films’ first releases was a big-screen version of Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black, released in early 2012 and becoming a hit. Needless to say, the new script, by Jane Goldman, was a rather different beast to Kneale’s own TV version.†
The film was so successful that an all-new sequel, The Woman in Black: Angel of Death, was released in late 2014, with some input from Hill herself at the initial story stage. Speaking around the time of the sequel’s release, Hill reflected that her negative reaction to the Kneale-scripted TV version of The Woman in Black had mellowed greatly. “I changed my mind about it ,” she said, “and with hindsight, think it better than it first seemed. It has improved with age in my sight.”
Having re-established their stake in the horror movie business, Hammer Films were actively looking to create franchises from their old properties, with Quatermass among them. Speaking to cult film website Hey U Guys, Hammer Films CEO Simon Oakes said, “We are developing Quatermass at the moment. Completely contemporary, but rooted in his character. If you look at the BBC’s Sherlock, it’s got enough DNA there, so you could bring him forward and say that this is what Bernard Quatermass would be like today. So he’d still be gruff, an outsider, contrary, fighting authority but what would he be doing today? He wouldn’t be doing the Rocket Group because the world has moved on since the 1950s. We’re going to be announcing something about that soon.”
Indeed, Simon Oakes had managed to resolve the hellishly thorny rights issues around Quatermass, and a potential revival was put into development. Stephen Gallagher recalls discussing the project during a wide-ranging meeting with Hammer around 2012. Some time later, a script was commisioned from Doctor Who/Sherlock writer Steve Thompson, but ultimately it was not used. In May 2016, it was announced that the project was under the aegis of BBC America, who were looking to branch out into producing more of their own original drama content. Writer Jeremy Dyson was commisioned to write an entirely new TV script, which is believed to focus on the professor and his daughter as they combat an alien invasion (shades, perhaps, of Quatermass II). Planned as a co-production between Red Productions and Hammer, at the time of writing the project is still in development stage, awaiting an official green light. (Hammer have also announced that a new film version of Kneale’s The Abominable Snowman [aka The Creature] is being prepared, with a fresh script written by Matthew Read and Jon Croker.)
IN 2012, ONE OF KNEALE’S MOST CELEBRATED DRAMAS, THE STONE TAPE, came close to being remade for BBC2. An updated script was penned by Matthew Graham, a successful TV writer best known as co-creator of Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes, who had also scripted three episodes of the revived Doctor Who. To direct the project, Graham brought in Peter Strickland, whose feature film debut, 2006’s Katalin Varga, had won him much acclaim. Strickland’s next film, 2012’s Berberian Sound Studio, would raise his profile even higher – and its preoccupation with the haunted quality of recording technology made him an ideal match for Kneale’s drama. Late on in the process, though, the necessary funding couldn’t be found, and the project was abandoned.
By 2015, though, Strickland had begun to develop a side career in radio drama, initially with the surreal black comedy The Len Continuum, made for BBC Radio 4 by the London-based production company Somethin’ Else. Strickland found himself discussing potential new radio projects with Somethin’ Else producer Russell Finch, and hit upon the notion of reviving The Stone Tape. “The idea of doing it as a radio play was right under our noses,” Strickland says. “From that first conversation, it moved very quickly. Jeremy Howe [BBC Radio 4 commissioning editor] gave us the green light and Judith Kerr very kindly gave her permission.”
Together with Matthew Graham, Strickland then began revising the existing script from their unmade TV version. “I thought Matthew wrote a brilliant script, which also had many extraordinary visual moments, but it needed changing for radio both because of losing visuals and also because radio budgets mean less characters.”
The end result, which cleaved closely to the structure of Kneale’s original but was free with the details, came out of a close collaboration. “The writing process for me is so integral to making something that I can’t help getting involved”, Strickland says. “Matthew was very generous to allow me to do a whole draft on my own, but sticking to his characters and plot line, which obviously takes some detours from Kneale’s story. My contribution was writing a lot of dialogue and expanding upon the ideas of recording/playback space and natural acoustics. Matthew would then do a draft based on my draft of his draft and then I would do a pass of that draft and so on and so on until we were both happy.”
In the event, Strickland found that creating an audio version of the story was a bracing challenge. “I loved the idea of losing the visual element, especially with the ghost. Restricting ourselves to audio means that it could be more likely for the listener that the scream is a recording rather than a spirit. I’m not saying it is or isn’t, but it makes the scientific reasoning more plausible. There’s also a unifying aspect where we are as much in the know as the characters. Had they seen the dying maid in the radio version, then the connection with the listener isn’t as vivid. Now that we’ve done it for radio, I don’t feel the need any longer to do it for television.”
By his own admission, Strickland is a relative newcomer to Kneale’s work. “I came to The Stone Tape very late, sometime in the previous decade. I saw The Quatermass Xperiment ages ago, but my memory is so foggy that someone recently asked me if our character Briscoe was named after a character from the film. The irony is that we chose the name Briscoe in tribute to Desmond Briscoe [Radiophonic Workshop manager and sound designer on the 1972 TV The Stone Tape].”*
In gearing up to adapt it, Strickland says, “I didn’t want to look at the original television play again. I didn’t want to be overtly faithful nor did I want to actively kick against it. The most natural thing was just to write from my foggy memory of the original. The period here is 1979, so we’re a few years ahead of the original, at a time when the characters would certainly have their minds opened up more by the nascent technology, yet still remain sceptical.”
Strickland was struck by one particular line of dialogue in the original: Peter Brock speculating about the possibility of ‘recording the whole of Wagner’s Ring cycle inside a ball-bearing’. In an age where CDs are virtually outmoded technology, it’s sobering to think that, in 1972, this was extraordinary thinking. “It must’ve been absurd to imagine so many hours of music even fitting onto one record, let alone a ball-bearing. Our concept of music in the seventies was restricted to physical measurements rather than zeros and ones, which is a far more amorphous concept.”
First broadcast on the night of Hallowe’en 2015, Strickland and Graham’s take on The Stone Tape starred Romola Garai as Jill, alongside Julian Rhind-Tutt, Dean Andrews and Julian Barratt. The cast contained an intentional tip of the hat to its 1972 forebear: Jane Asher took a cameo role as Jill’s mother, having played Jill herself in the original. “It was something that we couldn’t resist,” Strickland says. “I think she’s a really great actor and very natural. She happens to act in one of my favourite seventies films, [Jerzy] Skolimowski’s Deep End.”
There was also a less obvious nod to the original version. Strickland oversaw a special 3D binaural mix of the play which was made available online, and which was produced by the BBC’s Research & Development department, now based in Salford. Neatly, it had been a visit to the BBC’s earlier Research & Development department at Kingswood Warren in Surrey which had first inspired Kneale to come up with The Stone Tape’s theme and setting in the first place.
IF KNEALE’S CREATIONS HAVE CONTINUED TO FLOURISH QUIETLY AFTER HIS death, the same is definitely true of his beloved family. Kneale’s son Matthew has continued his successful career as an author, writing the short story collection Small Crimes in an Age of Abundance (2005), the novel When We Were Romans (2007), which drew on his own experiences as an Englishman relocated to Rome, and a well received nonfiction title, An Atheist’s History of Belief (2014), which examines religion and spirituality with an outsider’s appraising eye — reflecting, perhaps, his own upbringing, and the atheist outlook of his parents. In 2011, his short story Powder formed the basis of a French feature film entitled Une pure affaire (also known by the English title Borderline). Kneale himself didn’t contribute to the script, but it represents his first credit in the world of film and television. In 2004 the TV playwright Alan Bleasdale wrote the script for a proposed film version of Kneale’s award-winning novel English Passengers, but the project never went ahead.
In recent years, Matthew’s sister Tacy has moved into working as an artist, specialising in striking portraits of insects, which have been exhibited nationally. Their uncle Bryan Kneale is still a much-admired working sculptor with a whole string of recent exhibitions. Of his sculpture, Bryan has said, “I think all my work is about the problem of what one sees and what one knows and the attempt to fuse the two and in a special sense disrupt them.” It’s a quote which could be quite comfortably applied to his late brother’s script work.
Judith Kerr, meanwhile, has graduated from being a successful children’s author to something like a national treasure. Now in her early nineties, her profile has never been higher. Among her recent achievements, in 2012 Kerr was awarded an OBE in recognition of her contribution to the spheres of children’s literature and Holocaust education.*
Turning ninety in June 2013, Kerr celebrated with the publication of Judith Kerr’s Creatures, a lavish, heavily-illustrated memoir. (It’s touching to see that the book’s title makes use of one of Kneale’s favourite epithets: as Kerr notes on the title page, “My Manx husband always referred to his parents as his creatures, so this title includes not only much-loved animals but also a much-loved family.”). That November, the BBC broadcast a new Imagine… television documentary on the subject of Kerr and her life, entitled Hitler, The Tiger and Me, which saw her making an emotional return to her childhood haunts in Berlin in the company of presenter Alan Yentob.
Kerr continues to undertake a whole host of interviews, talks and promotional appearances. One such event, at the 2014 Edinburgh Festival, was in partnership with her son Matthew, and was subtitled ‘Mother and son on creative inheritance’. Of course, Matthew, like his mother, had a writer for a parent — in his case, two writers — and this formed the crux of the talk. He spoke fondly of his childhood home as a hive of creative activity, with the constant clack-clack of his father’s typewriter being a familiar sound. Also, he suggested that his father’s habit of deconstructing any television drama that the family watched together was a major factor in his own burgeoning interest in storytelling.
Kerr’s picture book output hasn’t slowed in recent years: 2011’s My Henry was the touching tale of a widow who continues to have adventures with her late husband in her imagination. Kerr has insisted that it’s not explicitly about her own situation, but on some level at least, the parallels are plain to see.
2014 saw the publication of Kerr’s The Crocodile Under the Bed, originally intended as her follow-up to The Tiger Who Came to Tea back in the late sixties. It was abandoned at the time as an underwhelming effort, before being resurrected and rewritten from scratch nearly fifty years later.*
MEANWHILE, KNEALE’S HERITAGE WAS CELEBRATED IN JANUARY 2015, when Culture Vannin, a group dedicated to promoting the heritage and art of the Isle of Man, published a new bilingual English/Manx edition of his collection Tomato Cain and Other Stories (otherwise known as Tomato Cain as paart dy skeealyn elle) — actually a selection of seven of the original collection’s tales, namely those of a specifically Manx flavour. Free copies were distributed to local schools to help propagate an interest in the language, so in his own way Kneale has become embedded as part of the history of his homeland.
Towards the end of his life, Nigel Kneale sought to satisfy his curiosity about an issue that had niggled away at him for decades. He asked his agent to look into the precise details of the deal between the BBC and Hammer for the rights to make a film of The Quatermass Experiment, for which he’d been paid a pittance. The eventual findings weren’t what he expected. In fact, it transpired that the rights had been sold for an astonishingly small fee. But rather than being relieved at this, he felt aggrieved all over again. To add insult to injury, his creation had been sold cheap.
As the climax of The Quatermass Experiment, the professor races to prevent the hybrid Carroon creature from releasing its spores. And he succeeds — but in real life, The Quatermass Experiment spawned freely. It spawned sequels, film adaptations, script books, plans for remakes, homages and pale imitations. It made Nigel Kneale’s name and kick-started his whole career. So while it’s regrettable that his lasting feelings about the project strayed into bitterness and contempt, there’s no denying that its influence was massive, and indeed, continues to be felt.
Kneale never embraced his status as the forefather of a whole strain of modern science fiction and horror. He always seemed determined to prove that he was more than just a genre writer, and tried repeatedly to break away from it. Nevertheless, his genre writing was by far his strongest and most distinctive work. It’s striking, too, that being a genre fan is now considered to be part and parcel of being a genre writer. Think of Neil Gaiman, Mark Gatiss, Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat. For better of worse, Kneale’s rather cooler approach to the genres in which he worked is no longer the norm.
IN HIS FINAL YEARS, ACCORDING TO JUDITH KERR, KNEALE COULDN’T HELP but miss writing, and continued to work up ideas for new scripts, “but was too tired to complete them”. There was one such writing project which Kneale spoke of, albeit fairly casually, on a number of times. In many ways, it drew on a familiar source, namely the rise of the Nazis, and the genuine horror of World War II. It’s a subject which always loomed large for Kneale. Speaking in 2002, he said, “It all connects back to my wife’s life, which I’m always very conscious of, her real life, far away from the Isle of Man, escaping from Germany by one day. Then the Gestapo came for them, but they were out.”
And yet, the new project blended those events with Kneale’s most famous fictional creation, the beleaguered rocket scientist Bernard Quatermass. One obstacle, of course, was that, at the end of his last appearance, Kneale had killed the character off. He had a solution, though. “Quatermass, through the various versions we’ve had, goes from the age of somewhere in his fifties to somewhere in his nineties, and then blows himself up,” Kneale explained. “That’s him. That’s his life. He didn’t even die in his bed; he got blown to bits, so the only way I can ever resurrect him is with a prequel.”
The concept of the prequel percolated in Kneale’s imagination for some time. “The only sensible thing is to put him back in time, to the 1930s, when he would have been in his late twenties. So, he’s a young man with his life before him. You have to put it in a date that makes sense, and that is 1936. He’s in Berlin, the year of the Berlin Olympics. Then you have to find out what he’s doing there.”
Therefore, in Kneale’s story, the young Bernard Quatermass’ journey begins in prewar Britain, and hinges on a disaster. “He’s experimenting with the sort of rocket ships they had in the 1930s, through short distances in the air and down again,” Kneale said. “It’s very primitive, but that’s what he would have done, if he’d been experimenting in about 1936. He has a catastrophic accident with one of these things, and his young wife is killed by it. Then he is blamed: ‘What are you playing with this ridiculous rocket thing for?’”
The British authorities close down Quatermass’ experiments and cut off his funding, leaving the gifted scientist extremely vulnerable. “He’s in a state of shock, terrible depression and shame, and in that state of mourning he is approached by people from Germany, and invited over to go and join them, and attend the Berlin Olympics to cheer him up. Of course, von Braun at that point had just been appointed to be in charge of their rocket programme…”
With Quatermass thus ensconced in Nazi Germany, and uneasily enlisted into their rocket research programme, he would become aware of the Nazis’ grander plans. “What were the Germans really looking for? More than anything at that time, the Nazis really believed deeply in total superstition and magic. It was called der Thule, which was grounds for the belief that they were the best people on Earth; that they were not descended from monkeys like the rest of us, but were in fact descended from spiritual matter. That totally pleased all the people like Hitler and Goebbels and Göring: ‘That’s us! That’s where we came from!’ So Quatermass could be there in Germany, and he could rumble this. Now, where do you go…?”
Kneale considered this proposed prequel for some time, seemingly almost for his own amusement, and there’s no evidence that a single word of a script was ever written. “I had the idea in about 1999, and discussed it with my agent,” Kneale said. “He was a bit gloomy about it. Then later on I could see why he was, and I could see exactly how it could be fixed, except I haven’t written it. It’s just a matter of doing it. I can do the title all right. It would be Quatermass in the Third Reich.” In fact, at various points the project was known by two alternate titles: the self-explanatory Young Quatermass, and the more opaque Cosmic Ice. The latter is a translation of ‘Welteislehre’, an eccentric cosmological theory advanced by Austrian engineer Hanns Hörbiger, predicated on the notion that all planetary bodies were originally created from vast blocks of ice. After Hörbiger’s death, the theory was embraced by leading occult-minded Nazis, who wished to adopt it as a new official explanation for the creation of the universe. Evidently, Kneale intended to make this theory central, in some way, to his Quatermass prequel.
Nigel Kneale, a martian and Judith Kerr, as seen in the 2003 documentary The Kneale Tapes.
It seems that, at one point, the idea went as far as being tentatively offered to the BBC, who demurred. The sheer cost of the piece, with a period setting and some outlandish, fantastical content, was most likely not in its favour. Even at the time, Kneale admitted, “It might be unproduceable. Berlin in 1936: well, there isn’t much of it left. But there are bits, like the great stadium, which are there. But if you don’t go out of doors much and use tram cars and things which they would have used; if you stayed indoors, then you begin to think of a story that way. If it occurs in walled rooms, and you use it cunningly, it is still possible to write the story, and keep out of the sort of thing we don’t have any more.”
Kneale had some personal experience of the rapidly-changing face of modern Germany. “Even if Berlin had been unmarked, and nothing had ever fallen on it and blown it up, it wouldn’t look like what it is now,” Kneale said. “The Berlin my wife remembers as a little girl would be totally different from what she had now seen. The huge cranes are making a whole new city. We’ve been back, just for short spells. Originally she couldn’t bear to go back, and certainly then she couldn’t bear to go back on her own. Then, bit by bit, she got into the idea. We’ve been back and seen all these things being remade all around, and it’s alarming how fast it’s happening. They’ll have it all up again in no time.”
Sadly, the Quatermass prequel project never came to fruition, and Kneale didn’t feel inclined to find other writing work elsewhere. His 1997 Kavanagh QC episode remained his last produced original script. Towards the end of his life, Kneale cheerfully acknowledged the sheer span of his writing career. “I suppose in a way I’ve seen through quite an exciting time, when things changed from the beginning of television to almost the extinction of it. What the next stage will be I wouldn’t dare guess. It may replace everything, from books to films. It’s lying in wait for us now . . .” As Kneale said, “In twenty years’ time, I won’t be around, but there will be people who are making stories on a medium yet to be invented and enjoying it, and doing it in their own way.”
Sure enough, however popular storytelling evolves through the twenty-first century, it’s likely that the work of Nigel Kneale will continue to inspire admiration and respect. Whether his creations, his stories and characters, will gain a whole fresh lease of life, though, only time will tell.
*The third series of Russell T Davies’ Torchwood, entitled Children of Earth, also seems to nod towards Kneale’s output, specifically the Thames Quatermass serial, not least in its depiction of an alien race harvesting the young.
*Similarly, popular novelist and scriptwriter Anthony Horowitz has praised Kneale via Twitter, naming Quatermass and the Pit as ‘one of my favourite films’ and noting, ‘Never forgot The Stone Tape. I didn’t sleep for a month.’
†Initially, Kneale fan Mark Gatiss had been approached to script the film adaptation, but he declined the offer, citing work commitments. Certainly, by that point he was busy as co-creator of the BBC’s hit show Sherlock – with his fellow co-creator, Steven Moffat, having taken over the showrunner role on Doctor Who vacated by Russell T Davies.
*This character is a new addition to the radio version who doesn’t appear in the Kneale’s TV original.
*The following year, the UK’s first bilingual Anglo-German free school opened in Herne Hill in South London, and was named the Judith Kerr Primary School in her honour.
*Kerr also had special honour of drawing the cover for the festive edition of the Radio Times for Christmas 2014. One year later, Sainsbury’s major Christmas TV advertising campaign took the form of a short adventure entitled Mog’s Christmas Calamity, featuring a CGI Mog and a brief cameo from Kerr herself.