THE BRITISH BROADCASTING COMPANY WAS FIRST FORMED IN LONDON IN 1922, under the leadership of a General Manager, John Reith, with the intention of making and broadcasting radio programmes for the nation. As of 1927 it became a Corporation, owned by the state but assuredly not controlled by it. The acronym BBC stuck, and their radio service quickly became a much-loved fixture for Britons from all walks of life.
On November 11, 1936, the BBC began live television broadcasts from the hill-top Alexandra Palace studio, initially only to the London area, and for just two hours a day. Two competing television systems had been developed, by Baird and Marconi-EMI: the BBC switched between the two systems on alternate weeks until the following February, when the Baird method was finally abandoned.
Television sets were, at the time, prohibitively expensive items, which few could afford to own. A significant event in the early history of the medium was the coronation of King George VI, the first large-scale outside broadcast, on May 12, 1937. It’s estimated 20,000 sets were in use in Britain by September 1939, but they had to be hastily stored away. The nation was on the brink of war, and it was thought best to shut down all but the most essential transmissions. Television simply wasn’t signifi-cant enough at the time. It was still widely regarded as ‘the wireless with pictures’, both by audiences and, seemingly, most of its makers. Potentially, it was just a novelty, a passing trend. Certainly, it was no rival for radio in the nation’s affections. Throughout World War II, the BBC’s radio services had transmitted news reports to keep the nation informed, and their celebrated comedy shows helped keep spirits up.
Once the war was over, the BBC recommenced television transmissions as of June 7, 1946. The rather antiquated equipment at Alexandra Palace was dusted down and pressed back into service. There was still no affordable system of recording, and so programmes continued to be staged and broadcast live. In 1949, the BBC acquired another London studio, on Lime Grove in Shepherd’s Bush. Lime Grove, a tightly-packed rabbit warren of studios and offices, had been built as a film studio back in 1915, and was owned by the Rank Organisation at the time the BBC purchased it. Their intention was for it to be a temporary television studio while grander plans were put into effect. For the time being, though, Lime Grove’s facilities were still somewhat basic and geared towards live broadcast.
By the time Kneale joined the BBC in 1951, television had been running, on and off, for around seven years, and was still very primitive and largely unloved. It was quite a leap, then, for Kneale to have abandoned his literary work for an uncertain future. What’s more, before he worked in television, he wasn’t even a viewer. “I’d never seen any television,” he says, “because there wasn’t any on the Isle of Man. They got it, I think, in the fifties. I remember my father investing in quite a big set, and that was all new when those came in, but my father had contacts. As soon as you were outside Douglas, though, there was nothing.” (Indeed, the island first got a TV signal mere days before the new Queen’s coronation in June 1953, and then only because a radio dealer erected his own unofficial transmitter on Douglas Head. He was ordered to take it down soon after, but an official BBC mast, which engineers mounted on top of a farmhouse overlooking Douglas, wasn’t forthcoming until the end of that year. Even after that, reception in the south of the island remained notoriously poor for some time.)
Needless to say, there was no great tradition of television scriptwriting at the time. The service wasn’t long enough established enough for one to have developed. The BBC’s television service staff were making it up as they went along. Kneale found himself earning the petty cash by doing tiny pieces of work, writing or rewriting, not even significant enough for him to be credited. “I was there dogsbodying for everyone — the children’s department, the music department, the light entertainment and drama departments. I did odd jobs on scripts that needed a bit of fixing. I didn’t actually do football matches, but if they’d come my way, I would have done them too.”
Kneale remembers it as “a very pleasant time: a lot of wasted time, but also learning a lot about the mechanics of running the very primitive studios they had then. We started with the lowest of the low, technically. Just an old set of studios up at Alexandra Palace, on the top of the hill, which had been employed as all sorts of things in its time. Finally it got fitted up as a television studio with rather crude electronics stuck in, all very, very home-made. It was no kind of studio, but that’s all we had. It was all shot live, with literally the oldest TV cameras in the world, made in 1936 out of pretty rough stuff! They were mounted on things like carts, with huge bicycle wheels to roll about on, which had to be pushed about. Old, old things, the ones put in to disprove Baird’s method. What the cameraman saw, God knows. He would have a big ‘watch the birdie’ screen, and probably got a picture that was upside down and left to right…”
Reginald Tate, Isabel Dean and Moray Watson on the set for the live BBCTV broadcast of The Quatermass Experiment.
At this point in his career, Kneale was fast learning the most effective ways of using the BBC’s peculiar resources. “They had a huge quantity of props,” he recalls, “which were mostly bequeathed to them by expiring film companies, so you had to use what was there. I remember going around the enormous props department, looking for stuff you could make a story about, because that was the cleanest way to do it”.
In actual fact, Kneale’s very first professional dealings with the world of television came at the very start of 1951. His short story Essence of Strawberry — as included in the Tomato Cain collection, and read for the BBC’s Northern Home Service the previous year — had been adapted for American television. The previous Summer, the CBS network had introduced a drama anthology strand entitled The Web, presenting stories about ordinary characters being drawn into extraordinary circumstances beyond their control. As such, Essence of Strawberry was a perfect fit. It told the tale of an embittered married couple who run a milk bar. The husband, Fred, is conducting an affair with the young waitress, Valerie. Together they plan to murder Fred’s wife May by poisoning her over a long period of time.
Many entries in The Web were adapted from work by the Mystery Writers of America, but it’s likely that Kneale’s American publishers, Knopf, used their contacts to offer his story up for adaptation. Broadcast live on the evening of Wednesday 17 January, Essence of Strawberry starred Scots-born actor Michael O’Halloran alongside Leslie Paul and American TV regular Sally Gracie, shortly before her marriage to Rod Steiger. No copy of the show is known to exist and it’s now a forgotten footnote even within the annals of American TV drama anthologies. While Kneale didn’t script the adaptation himself, it stands nevertheless as his first television credit, and as such the quiet start of a very fruitful career.
Kneale’s first sustained television work for the BBC began in October 1951, when he wrote for children’s puppet shows such as Vegetable Village and Mr and Mrs Mumbo. The latter was part of a variety show for young viewers, shown on alternate Saturday afternoons. The former, broadcast live from Lime Grove, was the BBC’s first glove puppet series, with characters including Bertie Bean, Barbara Beet, Granfer Marrow, Squire Strawberry and the villainous Tramp Toadstool. They were voiced, Kneale recalls, by “a cast who nearly all went on to act in Carry On comedies. It was uproarious”. (Indeed, among the cast was future Carry On stalwart Joan Sims, making her television debut, while Kneale himself provided the voice for an onion puppet, cheekily aping the over-ripe tones of legendary Shakespearean actor Donald Wolfit.)
Having made himself useful, Kneale was soon rewarded with a promotion up from odd-job scriptwriter. “I hung on until they said, ‘We think you know the drill by now. You can have a three-month renewable contract’. Just touching up stage plays, mostly, so they could put them on television. And I thought, ‘Well, this is it’. But the trick was that you took that on their terms. There was no one else you could go to, no rival channel of any kind. So it was them or nothing, and they knew it.” Nevertheless, Kneale was struck by the opportunities of being in on the creation of a new medium, and persevered. “It wasn’t a very bright future, but it was some kind of a future. I always liked the idea of films and acting and being able to see the thing. So I was quite keen just to potter around the studios and watch how a few simple rules — and believe me they were very simple rules! — could make a stage performance into a television performance.”
And so Kneale found himself employed, for just three months at a time, as a writer/adapter within the BBC TV Script Unit. On paper, it might sound grand. “I was half of the Script Unit,” says Kneale. “There were two of us sharing a little tiny office. The other man, who’d been there a while, was George Kerr. A nice man; he was on the same sort of contract as I was. They’d had one or two people before us, I think. We were in these dreadful broken houses which were in Lime Grove itself. I think they’d been bombed and stuck together again. If you walked across a mud-patch you got into the canteen, where they served horrible food. I remember someone came over to inspect the pipes which were leaking and pumping out steam all over the area. He came in and looked around with pity, and said ‘How much do they pay you?’ That was life in the BBC: there was no luxury!’”
The Corporation’s TV service was slowly building up its own dedicated staff. Television ‘producers’, at the time, were, in modern terms, both ‘producers’ and ‘directors’, overseeing the entire project from inception to completion, ending up directing the cameramen on the studio floor during the live broadcast. It was certainly a challenge, but not all of them were enthralled by the new medium. “Mostly they had come from radio,” Kneale says. “That was the big thing: radio was good, television was bad. Television was a slum. That changed of course, but at that time, that was so.” For many such employees, the young medium was just a novel offshoot of its forebear. “There was one fellow who believed that what really mattered was the sound and that the pictures were nothing. He called it ‘illustrated radio’. That was a very, very important thought, which many adhered to. So the pictures were of no importance, and quite apart from the fact that they were a bit fuzzy anyway, there was no attempt to make them any better.”
Increasingly, though, forward-thinking people were being employed to shape the BBC’s TV drama output. One such was born Rudolph Kacser, in Vienna, on April 17, 1904. Having studied architecture and later drama (under Max Reinhardt) at the Vienna Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, Kacser had become a scriptwriter of crime thrillers for UFA Studios in Berlin, alongside future cinema luminaries Billy Wilder and Emeric Pressburger. He’d fled Germany in 1935 when Nazism began to take hold, and along with Wilder, sought work for the major studios in America, having first changed his surname to ‘Katscher’ and ultimately anglicised it to ‘Cartier’. “Billy probably said, ‘Come on, let’s go to America’”, Kneale says, “and Billy made a fortune and Rudy didn’t!” Like his ex-colleague Pressburger, Cartier was drawn thereafter to Britain. His first work on these shores was in 1948, as co-writer and producer of the atmospheric film thriller Corridor of Mirrors.
After a few fruitless years, Cartier spotted a new opening for his talents. According to Kneale, “At that time, the BBC were showing signs of interest in television, and he said, ‘Do you need a producer?’” In 1952, he was duly signed up to the BBC TV’s drama department by Michael Barry. In their first meeting, Cartier had spoken disparagingly of the state of current television drama output, which favoured adaptations of stage successes and literary classics over original work. Barry could only agree.
Cartier soon began making waves with his bold, ambitious television work. His first was Arrow to the Heart, a television adaptation of Albrecht Goes’ novel Unruhige Nacht, about the events of one night in January 1943, in a Ukrainian garrison town of Prostorov, under German occupation. Cartier handled translation duties, and written the script, himself, but somehow it wasn’t quite right: enter Nigel Kneale of the Script Unit. “We just came together by pure accident,” Kneale remembers. “They had this play ready for production, and Michael Barry knew that it could have been tweaked up a bit to make the dialogue sharper. It all sounded a little bit too German, which Rudy was happy to agree with. And so I anglicised it up a bit.” Arrow to the Heart, with Kneale credited as providing ‘additional dialogue’, was broadcast on July 20 as part of the BBC Sunday-Night Theatre strand. Kneale’s input earned him his first major drama credit for television, and proved to be the first of many collaborations with Rudolph Cartier.
“He was a brilliant cameraman,” Kneale says. “He had a marvellous eye for a dramatic scene. It was a great pleasure working with him, because he was very flexible, and most of them weren’t. Producers and directors were very stick-in-the-mud, partly because of the way the whole thing was structured. It was so rigid. The BBC went back to 1922, back to when I was born — no connection! Rudy was very glad to get into the BBC. I think he wanted to re-establish himself in a new medium. He was, in fact, valued very highly. They knew they’d got a good one.”
As was the custom, Arrow to the Heart was broadcast live on the Sunday night and repeated — that is, staged live all over again — on the following Thursday. It was out of sheer necessity. For one thing, it lightened the workload of the writers and producers having to come up with the dramas. However, there was as yet no affordable, reliable method of recording performances for repeat broadcasts. The only technique available was telerecording. Basically, this involved directing a camera at a TV screen showing the live performance and filming the result. It was crude and rather expensive, and the result weren’t always usable. (Surviving telerecordings of the period often have poor quality sound and images: there are even instances in which insects have landed on the screen during filming.) Occasionally, the process would be used to provide trailers for serials: say, episode one would be telerecorded, and a clip broadcast to trail episode two. It might even be used to provide a recap of a previous instalment. Certainly, there was scant hope of these shoddy recordings being repeated in full, or sold for broadcast abroad.
The only strong argument in favour of telerecording was that it avoided the expense of entirely restaging a one-off drama days after the first performance. Equity, the actors’ union, soon twigged to this fact, and insisted that the BBC could only telerecord the second performance of a play, thereby ensuring their members at least a double fee. (Actors already had a good deal of sway in the new field. The traditional formula — staging a TV drama on a Thursday and repeating in on the Sunday — was largely designed to fit in with working actors, who would only be free from commitments in the West End on those evenings.) For the most part, until technology developed further, the work of the BBC TV drama unit, Kneale included, was transmitted once and was then gone forever.
After working on Arrow to the Heart, Cartier and Kneale were assigned to different projects, and their paths didn’t cross again for a little while. In fact, just prior to the production, Kneale had met another Jewish émigré; in due course she proved to be the most important figure in his life. This momentous meeting took place during February 1952 in the unprepossessing surroundings of the BBC’s Lime Grove canteen. One lunchtime, Kneale sat at the same table as a BBC secretary, who was accompanied by an attractive acquaintance who worked at a trade school directly opposite Lime Grove. The friend rather caught Kneale’s eye.
He takes up the story: “She’d been invited to have lunch, so she went off very gratefully to be treated to some mess in the BBC canteen! I just happened to sit at the same table. She was super. I just found her a fascinating character, and very loveable — this pretty girl who spoke rather purer English than I did!” At lunch the next day, Kneale encountered her again, “and I just wanted to know more about her. She said, ‘I was born in Germany’. I couldn’t quite work this one out, and I didn’t want to persevere too hard on her. So over the next few hours I began to work this out. She was about the same age as me, a bit younger, early twenties, and I thought, she’s obviously English, so what are her family? Maybe her father was some sort of official in the English government who was in Germany at the time. Or maybe a musician, or a photographer: there were a dozen things he could have been. So when I saw her again, I asked her, ‘Where exactly?’, and she said ‘I was born in Berlin; you do know I’m not English at all? I’m German Jewish’. That was much better, and from then on we had lots to talk about! That was the best possible thing to be. I was much more pleased with the fact she wasn’t English!”
Anna Judith Gertrud Helene Kerr, soon known to all as Judith, was born in Berlin on June 14, 1923. Her parents, Julia Kerr (née Weismann) and Alfred Kerr, were an extremely respectable couple. Judith’s mother wrote songs, and had composed an opera, Die Schöne Lau, based on a fairy tale by the German poet Eduard Mörike, which was first performed in 1928. Her second opera, 1930’s Der Chronoplan, with a libretto by her husband, concerned the travels of a time machine invented by Albert Einstein, who was actually a friend of the family. Sadly the three-act work, in which Einstein’s passengers included George Bernard Shaw, Richard Strauss and Lord Byron, was never fully performed.
Judith’s father, born Alfred Kempner, wrote for newspapers including the Frankfurter Zeitung and the Berliner Tageblatt, for the latter of which he was the co-editor and esteemed drama critic. His opinions were hugely influential, and he was known as Germany’s ‘Kulturpapst’ — that is, ‘cultural pope’. “Her father was, in fact, this phenomenal figure,” Kneale confirms. “He had been a devoted writer in Breslau, which was an academic town, about the only civilised spot in Germany. He’d got a job on a Berlin newspaper and sent a weekly newsletter from Berlin back to Breslau every week. He was also a critic of enormous eminence, practically the same level as Bernard Shaw. In fact, they knew each other. He was very, very important indeed.”
Kerr was also an outspoken opponent of the Nazis. “He hated Hitler, for good and complicated reasons — as a Jew — and did weekly broadcasts against him. He had to be taken to the studio by men with guns to guard him, because he was a target. By 1933, he knew it, and was tipped off by the police themselves to get out while he could if Hitler got in. And so he went out himself alone, with crude arrangements for the family to follow if the worst happened. And the worst did, and Hitler got in. They escaped the soldiers by one day.” The Kerrs fled on January 30, 1933, the evening that Hitler was elected Chancellor, and Nazi soldiers arrived to seize their passports the following day. Thankfully, they were too late. When they came to power four months later, the Nazis staged public burnings of Alfred Kerr’s books.
For a while, the Kerrs lived in Switzerland, and then stayed with relatives in France. Judith and her elder brother, Michael, adapted easily to the new language and surroundings. Alfred himself, at the age of sixty-five, was rather lost without his language, and struggled to find work. Looking to explore new avenues of writing, he penned his only screenplay, about the life of Napoleon’s mother, but at first it found no takers. Then the rights were bought by the Hungarian-born, British-based film-maker Alexander Korda. The film was never made, but Alfred was paid £1,000 for his script.
The family duly moved again, arriving in London in March 1936, to live in a boarding house in Bloomsbury. The Kerrs used the money to send their son Michael to Aldenham private school in Herefordshire. During wartime, due to his nationality, Michael was a temporary prisoner of an internment camp as an enemy alien — coincidentally, on the Isle of Man. Alfred himself continued to write, but his work wasn’t always used. He developed the habit of writing a humorous daily commentary on world events every morning and delivering it in person to the BBC’s German department, based in Bush House. But it transpired that a member of staff within the department was a keen follower of Karl Kraus, a leading Viennese theatre critic who was profoundly at odds with Alfred Kerr. Consequently, his commentaries were usually discarded.
Meanwhile, Judith attended a boarding school until the age of sixteen, leaving just prior to the outbreak of war in September 1939, whereupon she won a place on an art foundation course, as well as working voluntarily for the Red Cross. Her parents, naturally, were terrified by the prospect of a German victory: the Nazis had offered a reward for the capture of Alfred Kerr, alive or dead. Between them, Julia and Alfred had made a suicide pact, should the unthinkable happen.
Thankfully that didn’t come to pass, and in October 1948, a short while after the war was over, Alfred, then aged eighty, returned to Germany on behalf of the British Control Commission, to report on the state of theatre in the British Zone of Occupation. Entering a Hamburg theatre for a performance of Romeo and Juliet, he was recognised by the audience, who gave him a lengthy standing ovation. Tragically, that night, he returned to his hotel and suffered a major debilitating stroke. A few weeks later, assisted by his wife, he chose to end his life with an overdose of the barbiturate Veronal.
Judith went on to study at the prestigious Central School of Arts and Crafts, on a scholarship from London County Council. One of her classmates, who became a good friend, was Peggy Fortnum, who later provided the original illustrations for Michael Bond’s Paddington Bear books. In 1951, Judith was teaching art in local schools, supplemented by selling the occasional painting, when another old friend from the Central school pointed her to a part-time teaching position she was about to vacate at a girls’ technical college in Lime Grove. While employed there, Kerr grew very intrigued about the nearby world of television, though she didn’t have a set of her own. So when a friend of a friend invited her over to the studios one lunchtime, Kerr leapt at the chance, and duly changed the course of her life.
“So that was Judith’s background,” remarks Kneale, “vastly interesting. Much better than if her father had been English musician performing in a German orchestra or something. I never met him. He died before I met her. As a German refugee, she had no assets really, and she’d got herself a job trade teaching — teaching girls to cook, needlework, things like that. She didn’t see herself as a great cook, but it was a practical thing you could do. It was quite altruistic. At least they had some knowledge of what they were doing when they left these trade schools.” Over lunch at the BBC canteen, Kneale had unexpectedly found his soul mate. Speaking to Catherine O’Brien of the Times in 2004, Kerr herself recalled, “He rang me a few days later and took me to see a play that was so terrible, it was funny. We knew that night that we would be together.”
As Kneale and Kerr became romantically involved, he was continuing on a succession of three-month contracts for the BBC Script Unit. As per his contract, the bulk of his time was taken up with adapting existing works for television. During the later months of 1952, he adapted Stanley Young’s play Mystery Story and Hugh Walpole’s novel The Cathedral for producer Douglas Allen. They weren’t jobs of any great significance to Kneale. “Those were just routine things,” he says. “They were all right, but they never amounted to anything much. They weren’t mine. That was what my contract said — I adapted for television. There was no mention in the contract of writing original material.” (Mystery Story, though, is notable at least because of its subject matter. It concerns an enigmatic professor and his experimental dabblings with the space-time continuum, placing it in the same vein as the ‘scientific romantic’ writings of H G Wells and Jules Verne. As such it counts as one of Kneale’s first overt dealings with the science fiction genre.)
At the time, Kneale was much more enthused about a play he’d written for radio called You Must Listen. This was an original work, and it was a clear development of the sort of stories he’d written for Tomato Cain. It concerns a solicitor’s office, West and Paley, that’s having a new phone line installed — a common occurrence at the time. “There was great difficulty in getting a telephone line in those days,” Kneale says. “And they then found there was a voice on it, which never stopped. It was an awful, lecherous, sexual woman’s voice and they couldn’t lose it. All the staff in the office came in and listened all the time and it had to be disconnected — and it still went on.”
The engineer who handled the installation, Frank Wilson (played by Charles Leno), is called back to correct the fault. It’s thought, at first, to be a crossed line. The sultry, intimate woman’s voice (played by Janet Burnell) implores the listener, whom she calls Harry, “When I’m by myself I can’t bear it, I want to hear you and talk to you, only that… you must listen”. The fascinated office staff christen the voice ‘Passion Fruit’ — at one stage, a potential title for the play. Over time, though, it’s realised that the voice never stops. Nor does another voice answer. Wilson is dealing with a haunted phone line.
After a good deal of listening to the urgent, ceaseless voice, it becomes clear that ‘Passion Fruit’ is addressing her lover, a married man, whom she compels to leave his wife. When that doesn’t happen, ‘Passion Fruit’ takes her own life, and the voice interference ceases. Wilson discovers that the events happened exactly a year ago, when the same phone line belonged to another company.
You Must Listen was produced at the BBC’s London studios by Raymond Raikes, and transmitted on the Corporation’s Light Programme on September 16, 1952. “It was fun doing it,” remembers Kneale. “They did it very well: it was a good one.” It was also a natural evolutionary step for his writing from the style of Minuke, in that it was contemporary and character-driven, for all the curious goings-on it features. Kneale had fused the tone of his short stories with the craft of scriptwriting. The next chance he’d get for original storytelling would be for television, but it was still some months away.
Kneale was never entirely seduced by radio drama, though. He considered that seeing the human face was crucial to engaging, successful storytelling. Not unconnectedly, he was a keen cinema-goer. “In my early writing years I went to the cinema about twice a week and was really influenced,” he admits. “I wanted to make my work more visual: less making points in verbal terms and more paying off through images, which you tended not to get then.”
For now, Kneale was busy adapting other work for television, as he’d been employed to do. During the early months of 1953, he scripted small screen versions of Dorothy Messingham’s Broadway play The Lake, and — in collaboration with his colleague George Kerr — the novels The Commonplace Heart by Margaret Storm Jameson and Number Three by Charles Irving. The former was an age-gap love story starring Michael Hordern and Margaret Wedlake, whereas the latter concerned a group of nuclear scientists whose discoveries are under threat of being weaponised. It starred Terence Alexander, Jack Watling and, in a smaller role, an up-and-coming television actor called Peter Cushing. Kneale was rather ambivalent about what he describes as “this business of amending stage plays to make them workable on television. ‘Workable’ meant that the actors were in the right place to say their lines, which wasn’t always easy in a live studio. So I went on doing that. Some of it was absolute trivia.”
Another adaptation, this time of N C Hunter’s stage play The Affair at Assino, earned Kneale a little extra something in his pay packet. Rights to his script was sold to Canadian TV channel CBC, to be remade by them that September. Kneale recalls, “if by any chance they could sell on one of these adaptations you had done, to a company elsewhere, it was their happy custom, a gentlemen’s agreement, to pay the writer a little more — say, £50 — for having written it and enabling a small sale. So I found once or twice that I was given this small sum and would buy a new tie or something with it.”
One particularly notable assignment from this period was Curtain Down, a dramatisation of the lesser-known Chekhov short story, for which Kneale found himself working with future cinema director Tony Richardson. “Tony had just joined the drama department. He was a newcomer to the whole business of television or stage. He said, ‘Couldn’t we do a story of some sort that nobody had ever done? A Chekhov, if possible’. We got hold of a nice lady called Tatiana Lieven, who was the actor Miles Malleson’s wife. She spoke fluent Russian, and she reread an awful lot of Chekhov to see if there was something that hadn’t ever been translated into English, and she found this one.”
The story in question was An Actor’s End, first published in 1886, concerning an ageing thespian called Shtchiptsov, described by Chekhov as ‘a tall and thick-set old man, not so much distinguished by his talents as an actor as by his exceptional physical strength’. “It was very simple,” Kneale says. “It was about a Russian touring company long before the revolution which was out in the sticks somewhere, and the leading man has a heart attack. He manages to stagger back to his dressing room and they’re all frightened because it probably means the end of the tour. They all come in to help, one after the other, and offer suggestions, all in very primitive Russian. It was very good stuff. So I adapted that as a television play, which Tony directed. George Devine played the leading man [here renamed Misha], who had the heart attack. Suitably, he ended up running the Royal Court Theatre, and took on Tony to direct plays.” Devine’s fellow cast members included Alfie Bass and Michael Gough, both destined to become familiar players in British film and television.
In the grand scheme of things, 1953 was shaping up to be an eventful year in Britain. On the night of January 31, the country’s East coast had been battered by phenomenal freak winds and storms: 40,000 had to be evacuated from their homes in Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and Kent, and over 300 were killed. On a more heartening note, the last vestiges of wartime food rationing were finally coming to an end, and on May 29, Commonwealth citizen Edmund Hillary of New Zealand, and his Sherpa, Tenzing Norgay, became the first men to ascend to the summit of Everest. The year’s most media-friendly event of all, though, came on June 2, when the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II took place at Westminster Abbey. It was a turning point in the history of television. After some early hurdles, said to be due to the new Queen’s reluctance to be filmed, the ceremony was broadcast live by the BBC, and the whole nation wanted to see it. There was a rush for sales of TV sets beforehand. On the day itself, many of those who didn’t own a set tried to squeeze into the front room of any friend or relative who did. It’s estimated that over twenty million people saw the event live on television, though there were only 2.7 million TV sets in the country. After the broadcast, many were inspired to go out and buy their own first television.
Not long after, the BBC drama department faced a small drama of its own. In terms of TV scheduling, these were less well-drilled times than today. Simply put, it became apparent that there was a half-hour gap in the lineup on six Saturday evenings between July 18 and August 22. Of course, this was the holiday season, and audiences would be expected to be low. But something, at least, had to go on.
The cry went out within the department, as Kneale recalls. “They said, ‘For God’s sake write something, because the programme is empty in the summer. Please, somebody think of something’. So I did.” Indeed, he didn’t have much option. All eyes were on the two-man Script Unit to come up with the goods, and Kneale’s colleague, George Kerr, was on his summer holidays at the time.
Kneale’s solution was rather neat. He could easily have suggested a book that might have made a workable television serial, but after endlessly adapting the work of others, he was longing to write something of his own. He dreamt up a contemporary thriller serial, entitled ‘Bring Something Back..!’ about a disastrous launch undertaken by the fictional ‘British Experimental Rocket Group’. Three men would go up in the rocket, which would disappear from the scanners, and reappear only to crash-land. Inexplicably, of the three-man crew, only one would remain — although it was impossible that the rocket had been opened during the journey. It would eventually transpire that some basic alien life-form, floating in space, had penetrated the rocket and fused the three men into one. In addition, the survivor was infected with the alien creature, and was slowly transmuting into a monstrous hybrid. The tale would focus on the unfortunate victim, rocket scientist Victor Carroon, and the gifted man in charge of the whole experiment, one Professor Charlton.
Kneale presented this inspired proposal to BBC drama head Michael Barry, who was sufficiently enthused to offer him the incentive of £250, the department’s entire budget for original writing for the year. Kneale accepted, and pressed on with writing the proposal up into the necessary six-part serial. “I thought of a story and they said ‘OK, fine, write it’, so I started writing it in some haste. I got about four out of six parts written, and then it was on the air…” (Reportedly, Kneale’s private diary reveals that the first episode took him a whole week to write; the second, just four days; the third, one weekend — by which time pre-production on the serial had begun.)
In turning his idea into a set of scripts, Kneale altered his original concept only slightly. For one thing, there was a general agreement that a better title was needed. “‘Bring Something Back..!’ was the original title, but didn’t look like anything much,” says Kneale. “It could have referred to shopping… I thought we could get something better than that.” For a time, as broadcast loomed, it went by the title The Unbegotten. “That was just somebody else’s suggestion,” he says. “We didn’t take it very seriously. It came from a script reader who was a very devout Catholic, and he thought The Unbegotten would very much strike a religious note. But it was a bit too much like that type of title, so we didn’t use it. Not a bad one, though.”
It might be noted that just a few months earlier, in April 1953, Francis Crick and James Watson had a paper published in the weekly scientific journal Nature, publicly announcing their discovery of DNA. It’s not known whether Kneale was aware of this at the time, but with his keen interest in scientific developments, it’s perfectly possible. As such, it’s just about possible that the newly-minted notion of genetic coding was something of an inspiration for his new serial. Even if not, there’s a very pleasingly synchronicity to it.
In the process of writing the serial, Kneale decided to rename his professor character. He chose Bernard as a first name, in tribute to Bernard Lovell, then the director of the ground-breaking Jodrell Bank observatory. And he found a suitably striking surname by leafing through the London phone book. “There was a family in the East End who ran fruit barrows. They were the Quatermasses. I suppose it does have a certain ring to it. It’s from the same group of names as Middlemass. It goes back to William the Conquerer’s time, when he was dividing everything up. It must have been a land division. Middle would be half. There were probably eighths.” The name also has something of a Manx ring to it — and perhaps, in the wake of the Coronation, ‘Qu’ was a strangely voguish sort of syllable, too.
Kneale had clear ideas about the character of his Professor Quatermass. “He’s the sort of person you would trust. He was a decent sort; not ruthless, a good man, who found himself out of his depth again and again.” It was widely agreed that Quatermass was a wonderful name, and the serial was duly rechristened The Quatermass Experiment. (Kneale used several personal touches in naming his characters. Carroon was a traditional Manx name, and Kneale called the poor unfortunate’s girlfriend Judith — the echoes of ‘Kerr’ in ‘Carroon’ being an added bonus. “Judith didn’t mind me stealing her name”, Kneale says. In return, Kerr supplied the necessary German dialogue for the character of Dr Reichenheim.)
To Kneale’s delight, he was to resume his fruitful collaboration with Rudolph Cartier, who was assigned to produce the new drama. Looking back, Kneale was not slow to acknowledge Cartier’s skill. “His contribution was immense. He knew his stuff and he was very imaginative. He could produce stuff on the screen better than anybody else, and I enjoyed working with him. We had terrible arguments, but it was only about getting the right story”.
Cartier was assigned a total budget of £3,000, which was gradually increased to £4,000. It was to be broadcast, live, of course, from the BBC’s oldest studios at Alexandra Palace, following five days’ rehearsal per episode. Cartier set about trying to cast the lead role, and first approached André Morell, a leading television actor of the time. Mere months before, in February 1953, Morell had starred in Cartier’s landmark television drama It Is Midnight, Dr Schweitzer, set in a hospital in the French colony of Gabon on the eve of World War I. “Rudy had worked with André Morell before, and sent him the Quatermass script, as it then was. I hadn’t completed it: maybe that’s what made the difference. Anyway, André didn’t want to do it. He thought it was too much of a risk to his career, which was true, particularly as the thing wasn’t finished. He turned it down, and then Reginald Tate said yes, he’d do it. And did it very well indeed.” Tate had a wide range of experience in theatre and film, and had been a fixture in BBC television drama virtually since its inception. Indeed, he’d been one of André Morell’s co-stars in Cartier’s It Is Midnight, Dr Schweitzer.
As transmission approached, Kneale and Cartier sought to ensure that the BBC kept the precise details of the serial secret from the press. They wanted it to have maximum impact, and they were keen not to allow film-making rivals to plunder their ideas. Cartier secured rehearsal rooms in the Student Movement House on Gower Street in Bloomsbury, conveniently close to the British Museum reading rooms, so the production team could refer to information about the script’s scientific content. Meanwhile, Kneale focussed on getting the set of six scripts completed in time. “Some of the actors had hardly the sketchiest idea what was supposed to happen. In fact, I doubt if anybody really knew what was happening! The only people who were really in on the secret were Rudy Cartier and myself. The others had to take it on trust, which they were good enough to do.”
scenes from The Quatermass Experiment, with Duncan Lamont as the doomed Victor Carroon.
The first episode, entitled Contact Has Been Established, went out from 8.15pm on Saturday July 18. As Kneale recalls, it wasn’t an immediate success. “It was received rather sourly when it began — at least, by the critics — but by the time it finished, the reaction had changed and they were much more keen on it.” On the other hand, the BBC judged the audience’s appreciation of its output by means of research, whereby a cross-section of viewers would rate the merit of a programme, and an average ‘reaction index’, out of 100, was reached. “It was much cruder then,” remembers Kneale, “but it was the same principle: they sent out forms saying, ‘Did you like this programme? Have any of you watched it?’” The first episode of the serial received an index of seventy; the results for the remaining episodes were equally as high. At the time, the BBC placed less store in ratings figures alone, but these were equally impressive, even by today’s standards. The serial began with an audience of just over three million, which rose to five million by the last instalment. It had been judged to be a success.
It’s difficult to appreciate, so long after the event, just how ground-breaking and pioneering The Quatermass Experiment really was. Suffice it to say, there had genuinely been nothing quite like it before. The BBC had dabbled in staging TV dramas with a science fiction theme — notably adaptations of Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. in February 1938, and The Time Machine, from H G Wells’ novel, in January 1949. But they were exactly that — literary adaptations, the standard mode of television drama at the time. As far as original writing was concerned, there had been a tradition, since the postwar reinstatement, of television staging so-called ‘horror plays’, an umbrella term for anything with supernatural or thriller content, but they provided nothing particularly remarkable or memorable.
scenes from The Quatermass Experiment, with Duncan Lamont as the doomed Victor Carroon.
Only the crime thriller serials of Paul Temple creator Francis Durbridge, the first of which debuted in March 1952, had made any great impact, and in effect even these weren’t vastly different from the usual drawing-room fare. “At the time”, Kneale says, “the only safe way to do a serial was to make it a very talky piece, preferably in a couple of rooms where people just threatened each other or said things like ‘Put down that gun, it might be loaded’, or ‘Let’s not go to the police’. You could wile away seven very tiresome half-hours with that. We wanted to get away from that and do something very adventurous. The Powers That Be were very shocked when we announced we wanted to build a rocket at Alexandra Palace.”
Kneale’s concept was extremely radical for the time, and Cartier had the skill and vision to bring it to the (very) small screen. “I was just really wishing desperately to try something different,” Kneale recalls. “I said it would be nice if we had something which really moved as fast as possible. Serials were the only place where you could have any looseness, really. The format was good. I liked it. The idea was to try a new kind of pace and style, to make it more like film.” Kneale’s fascination with cinema duly began to pay off.
The serial was firmly set in a recognisable contemporary London, through which Quatermass pursued the fast-mutating form of Carroon. For the climax, Kneale drew on the familiarity of a setting featured in very recent real-life events. “It was literally weeks since they’d had the crowning of the Queen in Westminster Abbey, and the place which was very near to where we’d last seen the hint of something horrid hanging in the bushes of St James’ Park. Geographically it’s only hundreds of yards to Westminster Abbey, so I thought I’d use it. Of course, we couldn’t film anything inside the Abbey — forbidden, forbidden. But we could fake it in a very simple way with a few boxes because everybody, if they were half-awake, had seen the Coronation. The shape of things there lingered in their minds. Given a tolerable bit of television scenery, they would turn it into Westminster Abbey in their mind’s eye. We did and it was totally accepted; it was a nice bit of scenery. It brought the whole thing up to date in a way, because that had only happened about six weeks earlier.” In execution, it also proved useful to have Kneale, a professionally trained actor, on-set: he mucked in to provide several off-screen voices, as well as the ‘story so far’ recap at the start of each episode.
Kneale’s script fused elements of the fantastic — the science fiction concepts of space travel and alien organisms, coupled with the horror of Carroon’s transformation, and the threat he comes to pose to mankind — with a believable character-driven modern drama. It draws on a host of contemporary issues: rocket travel research, lingering fears of wartime bombing raids, even outside broadcasts from Westminster Abbey. The elements would have made the piece extraordinarily vivid to audiences of the time. It was fast-paced and balanced thrills with a dash of humour. It was a quantum leap from the usual broadcasts of theatre productions. Television drama was evolving, and Cartier and Kneale were right at the cutting edge.
A suitable tone was set by the titles for each episode, formed with a basic ‘dry ice’ effect, and the chosen theme — Mars, Bringer of War, from Gustav Holst’s The Planets suite, a piece of music which was both conveniently ready-made and effectively nerve-jangling. Cartier was quite capable of providing workable solutions to problems posed by Kneale’s script. For instance, one episode saw the deteriorating Carroon hiding out in a fleapit cinema with a largely pensionable audience, watching a hokey 3-D sci-fi movie entitled Planet of the Dragons. “Now, how do you do 3-D in a live black-and-white studio?” asks Kneale. “Problem! Rudy Cartier said, ‘I will do it’. And he found a way. All the little cutaway scenes of the awful things on the Planet X he shot twice over and superimposed one image on the other, so you got 3-D. It looked just the way it should and it worked 100 per cent. I wouldn’t have believed it, but it did.”
It’s intriguing that, within the first Kneale piece which could be described as science fiction, Planet of the Dragons pops up to take a strong swipe at some of the shortcomings of the genre. Excerpts of the film’s dialogue, as heard within the episode, are intentionally toe-curling: “No sign of Captain O’Casey. I guess he must have gotten his . . . from that dragon,” growls the gun-wielding Space Lieutenant to his trusty Space Girl, going on to add, rather wistfully, “There’s a new world waiting to be built right here, Julie. Some day . . . maybe on this very Planet of the Dragons . . . kids’ll be able to sit down in a corner drugstore, same as back home.” This particular stance of Kneale’s, of working within a genre without being an uncritical fan of it, would recur throughout his career.
The parodic Planet of the Dragons is also one instance of the humour in the serial, often overlooked, but which is dear to Kneale’s heart. The crash-landing of Quatermass’ rocket is of most immediate concern to Miss Wilde, the pensioner whose house it demolishes, who takes great pains to see that her cat, Henry, is hoisted to safety too. (Kneale speaks fondly of this performance by Katie Johnson, “the little old lady to end all little old ladies”, who found immortality soon after as Mrs Wilberforce in the classic Ealing comedy The Ladykillers). Later, Miss Wilde’s neighbour, Len, is wont to overstate his role in the rescue, when prompted by his wife before the news cameras.
Kneale’s technique involved dropping in these lighter character-driven scenes to humanise proceedings. “There was another scene where a couple are wandering through St James Park,” he says, “and they look across the water and something awful, that we don’t quite work out, is going on. The girl never stopped wittering about how many children she would like once they get married, and his mind is distracted by what he thinks he might have seen on the other side of the water. Now that, for me, worked 100 per cent. I didn’t care a jot about whether somebody had some awful mark on their face or got overtaken by something. Those things don’t matter. That’s routine. What matters is a scene you don’t expect to see, which is an old lady watching a 3-D film or a besotted girl wondering about her marital future. They matter. None of the rest of it mattered tuppence.”
The unsettling nature of the serial drew the attention of the press. “There was a very nervous review, in a London newspaper,” Kneale recalls. “It was very alarmed. It said, ‘The BBC were trying to upset everybody last night. If they go on like this, where will we end? Think of the children being exposed to this violent stuff.’ In fact it wasn’t very violent at all. Most of it was just out of focus!”
The ambitiousness of the script caused several headaches, and on occasion the resourceful Cartier and Kneale found themselves seriously up against it. “We had two designers and they were, frankly, a bit ashamed of it,” Kneale admits. “They said, ‘This is funny. Science fiction?’ They put their noses in the air. So not surprisingly there was nobody dedicated to doing any special effects at all. They made the scenery. It was all right. A broken house, things like that. All fairly simple stuff, but the designers showed no commitment to it. Each tried to avoid being trapped having to do it all by the other. They were perpetually dodging and escaping and they didn’t want to be slumming with science fiction. That’s the way they saw it.”
When it came to the climactic scenes with the monster in Westminster Abbey, Kneale found himself stepping into the breach. “I did the special effects myself, because there was nobody else to do them and nobody wanted to. There had to be a big showcase of some sort at the end. I appealed to the designers. I said, ‘Can’t you help?’, and they said, ‘You wrote it — you do it’. So I did.”
His solution was nothing if not resourceful. “I remember going to the country with Judith in a truck and we gathered all sorts of pieces of foliage. Stole it, I suppose. That had to be the substance of the monster. I got a pair of leather gloves and we dressed them, Judith and I, with rubber solution, and stuck bits of foliage on. There was a thunderstorm going on overhead that night, with terrible crashes and water coming from the ceiling, but we carried on and we made bits of necessary special effects. I find them still quite effective.”
That wasn’t the half of it, though. In the serial, Kneale’s sixty-foot hybrid monster was to appear high up on the interior wall of Westminster Abbey, which wasn’t going to be easy to achieve. “We weren’t allowed to do anything outside the Abbey itself but we did get the standard handout photographs of the interior that they sold at the door. One of those was blown up the size of about three or four feet, and had two holes drilled into the plywood it was made of and I stuck my hands through the holes! — and waggled them on cue. So my hands were on show the next night. The funny thing was, it worked. It shouldn’t have done but it did. I was watching on a monitor what my hands were doing, and the thing was not to do anything. Just the natural anxious shaking of the hands probably did the trick. It was extremely sinister. Really creepy and dangerous. This thing that was sixty feet high and spreading, and you believed it. I believed it.” Kneale and Kerr were assisted in staging this effect by Victor Carroon himself, that is, actor Duncan Lamont, who attended the broadcast despite his onscreen presence no longer being required. Keen to be of some use on the night, Lamont helped the couple to prepare the prop for its grand debut.
All told, The Quatermass Experiment was an unqualified success. Not only was it a change of pace, and subject matter, for British television drama, but a very popular one, too. Over the six episodes, it achieved an estimated average audience of 3.9 million viewers. The audience for the final episode was estimated at five million. To put that into context, the average evening’s television audience at that point was estimated at around 2.25 million viewers — less than half of what The Quatermass Experiment’s final episode drew.
However, within this sense of achievement, there proved to be a large disappointment. Cartier requested that all six episodes be telerecorded, to be used within the recaps at the start of each episode, and for trailers. There was even advanced discussion about selling the serial abroad. Canadian station CBLT went as far as scheduling a showing. But after the first two episodes were recorded, it was judged that the results were of too poor a quality to reuse, and, much to Cartier’s annoyance, the BBC decided not to carry on for the rest.
Despite the primitive resources available, Cartier and Kneale had pulled it off. Kneale is still full of praise for the cast. “It was really held together by the acting. [Duncan Lamont] was a very good actor. That was the primary thing, to give something to the actors.” It had been an exciting, exhausting few weeks for the team. “When the thing was over,” recalls Kneale, “we escaped onto the terrace outside the studio and looked down on the streets and houses below, and if they had been watching any television they would have watched us, because there wasn’t any alternative. So those who had the little H-shaped aerials were the people who could have been our viewers. It made for a friendly feeling, that our friends down there may have watched us tonight. And this feeling also, rather like having done a performance in a theatre, that you knew the audience had watched you.” This fruitful collaboration had also firmly established the team of Kneale and Cartier. “I worked with Rudy, I suppose, on more projects at the BBC than with anybody else. We did that one, and in short order we found ourselves working on another one, and another…”
The Quatermass Experiment as it appeared in the Radio Times, week commencing 12 July 1953.