IN LATE 1955, AS THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT FILM WAS DRAWING EAGER audiences at local cinemas, the BBC was facing a huge change in the structure of British television. Independent television companies throughout the country were to begin transmission that Autumn, as the ITV network. The BBC’s monopoly of television was over. ITV were actively recruiting talented people away from the BBC with the offer of more generous contracts, behaviour which the put-upon BBC saw as something akin to treason.
In response, the BBC’s attitude to its existing staff became increasingly bureaucratic and bewildering. As a government-affiliated organisation, it was already obligatory for many BBC workers, Kneale included, to sign the Official Secrets Act. The writer found himself being called to a meeting with a true figure of bureaucracy. “I met a BBC civil servant,” Kneale recalls. “He didn’t really believe in television at all. I mean, none of them did, but he patently didn’t. He felt uncomfortable to be anywhere near it. Nice man, a gentle fellow waiting for his pension, which must have arrived soon. He said, ‘Are you happy here?’ — things you were meant to ask — I said, ‘Yes, yes.’ ‘Work all right?’ ‘Yes, yes.’ ‘Nice colleagues?’ and I said, ‘George is a very nice man, yes, all fine.’ But he had this other thing, a communication, either in duplicate or triplicate. He said he was troubled about Nineteen Eighty-Four being controversial. It got into the press and bothered people and drew attention, and they didn’t want that. So I said, ‘What exactly would you be happy with? What sort of programme would please you?’ He said, ‘Oh, something that would cause no trouble nor attract attention. Not too good, and not too bad, but in the middle…’”
The writers of the slowly-expanding Script Unit were certainly not deemed worthy of respect. “Around this time, we had about four of us doing the scripts. One of them was Philip Mackie, who was a good friend. He had a lot of experience. He knew what he was doing, he was a good writer and thought there must be some future in this. There was Giles Cooper. Giles had written a lot of radio plays of great excellence. He was a very, very good writer. Giles regarded himself as an anchorman of BBC drama. So when he moved over to television, which I’m sure they disapproved of, he said, ‘Well, I’d rather like to take my copyrights with me from radio plays.’ They said ‘No, no chance. Thank you, Mr Cooper, you’re finished.’ Giles couldn’t believe it.”
Cooper’s powerful, stylish and hugely original BBC Radio dramas had included Never Get Out (1950) and The Sound of Cymbals (1955). Later, he wrote Mathry Beacon (1956), The Disagreeable Oyster (1957) and Unman, Wittering and Zigo (1958), among a whole raft of others. Such was his significance in the field that he was awarded an OBE in 1960 for ‘Services to Broadcasting’. Years later, between 1978 and 1992, a ‘Giles Cooper Award’ was presented for the best written BBC Radio drama each year. Yet, according to Kneale, Cooper had fallen foul of the BBC’s attitude to copyright ownership. “He’d been not just anybody writing plays but a man who wrote the best plays. He was an expert. He was an outstandingly good writer. And he was being treated with the sort of contempt that they tried to treat everybody with. He came round to our flat in Holland Park, and he was kind of winded. He could hardly believe what they’d done to him. So we made him sit down and have a strong drink and stay to supper. That was what the BBC could do to you. Not just any writer but Giles, who was the king. By way of pacifying him, they wangled him an OBE. Poor Giles left them shortly after and went to ITV.”
The BBC were keen not to lose Kneale, though. They offered him his first long-term contract, to join the BBC full-time for two years as a Staff Writer. But it wasn’t an offer he wanted to take up without a fight. “They came and said, ‘Would you like to continue with a contract?’” he recalls. “I said, ‘Only if you pay me a lot more money, and if, more importantly, I retain the film rights’. They said, ‘No, we can’t do that. However we do intend to take the principle to its conclusion, and any contracts we issue to writers in future, they will retain the film rights.’ Civilisation was breaking out in the BBC. So I said, ‘Well, that’s fine, can’t you just allow that retrospectively to me?’ And they said, ‘No. This will not be the way we work.’ I said, ‘Well, in that case I can’t write anything for the BBC that is an original, because you’d steal the rights.’ They were a bit cross at that being pointed out, but didn’t change their view. They said, ‘We’ve made a stand.’”
For a time, this became a stand-off between the disgruntled Kneale and the Corporation. “There was a bit of fuss about that. I said, ‘No, thank you. I’m not going to sign the contract. I am now freelance and I want to make that clear.’ They sent in contract after contract, with tiny amendments, and I’ve still got them. Never signed, never returned. Each time we had to start from zero. I had an agent who was an expert in film deals and he could smell the sort of thing they got up to, so there was no question of them grabbing the film rights. If they wanted to sell something to a film outfit, they would have to make the deal with me. They were horrified, but I had the upper hand.” As negotiations went on, Kneale looked for support, but struggled to find any. “I realised at the time that I needed help, and I called the Writers Guild. I hadn’t joined. Nor was I allowed to, because they said, ‘Well, you’ve never written any film scripts. Unless you have you can’t join us’. I couldn’t use them. So where did you stand?”
In the end a compromise was reached, and Kneale signed a contract on August 4. It was to last two years, but as Kneale had effectively been working under its terms and conditions for some time, it was set to expire at the end of 1956. Philip Mackie was offered a similar contract, and together they became the BBC’s first staff TV writers: Kneale was assigned BBC staff number 96248. As well as a monthly salary, he was to be paid set fees for the delivery of new work, or a smaller fee for adaptations, and was tied to a minimum for three plays during the duration of the deal. Despite his ever-increasing reservations, Kneale still enjoyed his work for BBC TV. “The people who actually did the production, the people who work in the studios, are always fine. It’s the swine off in the upper levels, who never see any of their things going out and don’t care a damn. We didn’t have any dealings with them, but all the fellows you met in the studio, the lighting man, the sound engineers, the stage managers, the whole crew — excellent people. Lovely. But don’t go upstairs.”
On September 22, the BBC’s popular radio soap opera, The Archers, featured a destructive stables fire which killed off a lead character, Grace Archer. The reaction from the public was massive, which was a relief. The story had been a direct attempt to attract attention away from the launch of ITV that night. But without ado, ITV proved to be an immediate, widespread success with viewers. In many ways the BBC still clung to the patrician, earnest ideals of its founder, Lord Reith, whereas ITV was squarely aimed at being populist. Light entertainment shows such as Sunday Night at the London Palladium established the careers of many performers and attracted large audiences. ITV was a hit, and the BBC were keen to summon up their most powerful artillery against them.
Sure enough, Kneale was asked to write a follow-up to The Quatermass Experiment as part of his new contract, intended to be a popular strike against the independent channel. Nor did it hurt that Hammer’s Quatermass Xperiment film would hit UK cinemas less than a month before the new serial began broadcast. The time was ripe indeed. What Kneale conceived, though, was a very different work from the first Quatermass serial. Again, it would be as current as possible, but far darker, more paranoid and hunted and, in many ways, closer in tone to Nineteen Eighty-Four than the relatively straight-ahead thriller material of The Quatermass Experiment. It was a bold move.
Kneale was enthused about the project, feeling there was plenty of mileage in a follow-up if it was suitably different from the original. Sure enough, Quatermass II sees the Professor on the trail of a full-scale alien invasion, but one which is being conducted behind a veil of secrecy and covered up by some of the highest powers in the land. “In the first one, somebody was going to get into outer space fairly briskly, as soon as they could manage it,” Kneale explains. “The second one was about how, if you go up into outer space and start messing about and stirring things, you can bring something on you. But it was rather dull just to have things plopping in and being bad, so I said, ‘Let’s make it that it’s all happened a year before, so the first surprise is over and nobody believes that there was one’. Poor old Quatermass rumbles what’s going on, and he’s the one who has got to do some dirty work in showing it. When he tries, all the creatures, the Whitehall lot, had already been infected, and it is very difficult to talk sensibly to anybody in political power because they’ve all gone under. That seemed to me to be a more interesting thing to write than just creatures plopping down from outer space and that’s it.”
It also drew from the atmosphere in Britain at the time, one thick with secrecy, suspicion and arresting technological advancement. “After the war, there was a consciousness that there were dark forces around.” Rudolph Cartier, naturally enough, was assigned to produce.
Specifically, the plot follows Quatermass doggedly continuing his work with the rechristened British Rocket Group (here losing its ‘Experimental’ tag), and proposing a series of dome structures that might make the Moon habitable. To his astonishment, he discovers identical domes built in a secure establishment outside London, near a small town called Winnerden Flats. The purpose of the establishment is being kept top secret. In time, Quatermass realises that showers of artificial meteorites have been falling by Winnerden Flats for some time, containing shards of a gestalt alien consciousness. Humans under the influence of this power — many in senior government positions — have ensured that Quatermass’ domes have been built to house and nurture the alien lifeforms, and in time a full takeover of the Earth will be effected.
For a time, it was unclear exactly what this new serial would be called. Internally, the BBC referred to it as either The Quatermass Experiment Two or Quatermass Two. Eventually, Kneale settled on the title Quatermass II, although this was long before the frenzied sequelitis of the 1980s and it was unheard of, at the time, to use the now-familiar form of Roman numerals for a follow-up. To justify this, Kneale christened the professor’s new experimental rocket the ‘Quatermass II’, and as the rocket assisted in saving mankind, its elevation to title character seemed not entirely inappropriate.
The budget for the new serial was set at £7,500. Kneale and Cartier were keen to make use of location shooting as much as possible, and scouted for locations before writing had even begun. They scouted the Shell company’s Shell Haven oil refinery on the north bank of the Thames estuary. Duly inspired, Cartier received permission to film extensively at the refinery, and Kneale made much of the location’s potential in his resulting script. “We were able to get out of the studio”, Kneale says. “There had to be a place that the aliens could have built to inhabit, so we picked this oil refinery. Rudy saw all the columns and pillars and things and was determined to get them on the screen. It looked beautiful too.” Meanwhile, the serial’s fictional town, Winnerden Flats, was represented by the nearby Mucking Marshes, actually an expansive landfill site for the London area.
The key members of the team who had made the first serial were reunited. Along with Cartier and Kneale, Reginald Tate agreed to return as the professor. “When we got to the second Quatermass, naturally we got on to Reggie, and said, ‘We’ve got this ready for you.’ He read the script and said yes, he’d love to do it, all set… and then he died, just like that.” Suffering a heart attack outside his South London home, Tate collapsed and died on August 23, 1955, at the age of fifty-eight. At the exact moment of crisis, Kneale was out of the country. “Judith and I were in Paris having a brief break, and when we picked up the continental Daily Mail, it said, ‘Reginald Tate drops dead’. So — desperation. We got back straight away to London and found Rudy tearing his hair out and seeing who was available as a replacement. Not many were at that time of the year. The ones who had any acre were all abroad.”
With less than two months to go until transmission, Cartier’s stress was understandable. Eventually, though, a suitable, available actor was found: John Robinson, a forty-six-year-old Liverpudlian who had built a respectable career balancing theatre roles with film, TV and radio work. “John Robinson played fairly modest things; he was like a bit player,” Kneale recalls. “He was quite distinguished in what he did, but he didn’t do a lot. He was very nice. He was very upset about the technical terms he had discovered were in the script. He said, ‘I can’t learn technical terms. I’m not good at it.’ So he did his best and he worked and worked and worked on them and he never managed to make it very exciting but it was all right.” It seems Robinson never felt entirely comfortable working with the curiously remote Cartier. Nor, it seems, was Robinson alone in his wariness. Welsh actor Hugh Griffith, in the key role of Quatermass’ technical assistant Dr Pugh, was similarly taxed by some of the detailed dialogue, so his co-star Monica Grey was sure to remember his lines for him too.
Each episode was afforded five days’ rehearsal at Mansergh Woodall Boys Club in St John’s Wood before going to the BBC’s Lime Grove studio for camera rehearsals, and broadcast to the nation on the Saturday evening. Alexandra Palace was, by that time, being phased out as BBC TV’s main studio: within a year, it was being used for news broadcasts only, and went on to become the headquarters of the Open University’s TV output. The BBC’s as yet unfinished Television Centre made an appearance in the new serial, though, with its boiler rooms pressed into service to appear as the secretive factory in later episodes.
As ever, Kneale had allowed his imagination free range in writing the scripts, safe in the knowledge that his resourceful producer would bring the result to the screen. For the conclusion, Kneale had Quatermass and Pugh travel into space by rocket. The setting itself was a challenge. “Our designer had run out of money”, Kneale says. “He’d spent all his money on the early episodes and when we got to the last one, I said, ‘OK, build me a satellite spaceship’. ‘What with?’ he laughed. ‘I’ve got a rostrum here and some carpet!’” Worse still, Kneale’s astronauts had to be seen dressing for their journey. “The end was really a horror which I’d wished on these poor creatures. They had to dress in spacesuits, in vision! You really couldn’t be more unkind to actors than put them through that, and of course they were as hot as hell because they were in a studio which was over-lit. It had to be — it was the kind of lighting they had then because the cameras were so weak. The heat that was being projected on them was a nightmare, and in that heat they had to get into their spacesuits. They had help putting them on. By then, we had two technical men [Jack Kine and Bernard Wilkie] who became special effects experts. They were very good indeed. These two who had made the spacesuits had to get onto the set in vision to dress the poor actors in what they had made. It was the only way we could possibly do it, because they knew how to manoeuvre these terrible rubber suits and get them on. It should never have happened. Today there would be no question. You don’t do it like that, but there’s no live television so the problem wouldn’t arise.”
scenes from Quatermass II, featuring John Robinson, Monica Grey and Hugh Griffith.
The first of the six weekly episodes went out live at 8pm on Saturday October 22, 1955, exactly a month since ITV had launched. Each episode was repeated the following Monday night, but, thanks to advances in the relevant technology, this simply involved reshowing a recording of the initial broadcast, rather than restaging it entirely. It was one of the first BBC television dramas to benefit in this way.
It’s still a rarity for a follow-up to match the power of its predecessor, but in rethinking Quatermass entirely, Kneale’s tale was remarkable, a masterly exercise in paranoia. Whereas the first Quatermass serial had shown the professor working, for the most part, with a dedicated team, he was now hunted and alone. Arguably, the serial’s highlight was the fifth episode, The Frenzy, in which Quatermass and a group of men from Winnerden Flats seize control of the plant control room. Almost the entire episode is played out in confinement, as the sinister owners of the plant lay siege to the room. The tone veers from dark satire — calming muzak is piped in via loudspeakers — to genuine horror: a voice (actually Kneale himself) attempts to bargain with the group, two of which bolt out in the hope of being spared. Minutes later, it’s clear that the oxygen supply pipes have been blocked — with the bodies of the men who escaped. It’s here, perhaps, that the echoes of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Orwellian oppression were strongest. Looking back, even Kneale was struck by the sequence: speaking to the BBC’s Late Show in 1990, he remarked, “This is about as socially conscious, and politically conscious, as I ever got in these things.”
scenes from Quatermass II, featuring John Robinson, Monica Grey and Hugh Griffith.
Acclaimed horror author Ramsey Campbell recalls this scene distinctly, if entirely secondhand. “The first time I was actually aware of something that proved to be by Nigel Kneale was when I was nine-years-old, in late 1955.” Campbell says. “I was at primary school, and I remember one morning several of the kids in class coming in talking about the thing they’d seen the previous night on television. And one of them said — I still remember pretty well the words he used — how the monsters stuffed somebody up a pipe and his blood came spilling out. I remember thinking, ‘Never — they’re making this up . . . never would you see this kind of thing on television’. That imprinted itself on my mind as a very powerful, nightmarish image at a very early age, even though I’d never seen it.”
In all, reception to the serial was somewhat mixed. Kneale himself enjoyed the experience, despite mixed feelings about shooting at the Lime Grove studios, “with less primitive equipment, with cameras that actually focussed, but that ‘feeling’ was gone.” The feeling in question was the sense of immediate audience contact that the home-spun environs of Alexandra Palace had afforded. Another critic of the serial was the BBC’s controller of programmes, Cecil McGivern, who sent a memo to Cartier, expressing the opinion that “this is not nearly as good as the first Quatermass serial” and making mention of “far too complicated dialogue, incidents which were improbable… and far too little action”. In fact, the memo was forwarded to Kneale himself, who responded, “I have tried to make this serial as effective as its predecessor, but in a quite different way. A logical extension… atmosphere is all important”. Kneale went on to quote from a review in the Daily Mail, which praised the serial, observing that “this grafting of the extraordinary to the commonplace is an old trick — H G Wells used it to great effect — and I congratulate Mr Kneale on perceiving there is no better trick.”
The dome monster in the BBCTV Quatermass II.
By the standards of 1955, the serial was an epic, on a grander scale than British television drama had attempted before. There’s plentiful location shooting, and enough extras to lend a sense of scope to the piece. Arguably, though, it has more than its fair share of failings. Perhaps its biggest problem is the final episode. After the highs of The Frenzy the previous week, with the Winnerden Flats plant destroyed, the climax can only be an anticlimax. The flight of the Quatermass II rocket to destroy the asteroid is, as Kneale has highlighted, very underwhelming onscreen. Whereas the writer’s own resourcefulness had achieved so much with a leather glove and some foliage during the denouement of The Quatermass Experiment, here the limited special effects — moreover, the limited remains of the budget — don’t sell the drama of the rocket’s mission at all. Sadly, this does mar the effectiveness of the serial overall.
Audience figures for Quatermass II were certainly impressive, with an average of 8.4 million viewers across the six episodes, peaking at nine million for the final instalment. It is vividly imaginative and has many memorable moments. The cast, though, is a very mixed bag. As the professor, John Robinson is a stiff, uncertain, and ultimately rather unconvincing presence. Monica Grey, as his daughter Paula, gives a stilted performance, too. It’s said that her casting was not Cartier’s doing, but rather boiled down to the fact that her husband, Val Gielgud, was then the BBC’s head of radio drama, and had indeed been the head of the television drama department until three years earlier. (With heavy irony, Grey’s brother-in-law was therefore Val’s younger brother John Gielgud, one of the most highly celebrated actors of his day.)
But then, it wouldn’t do to overlook better performances elsewhere in the cast. Hugh Griffith, fresh from Peter Ustinov’s The Moment of Truth, makes for a fine, engaging Leo Pugh, and there are many actors playing more modest parts who went on to great success later in their careers, among them Wilfred Brambell, Roger Delgado and Melvyn Hayes. Evidently, Cartier was something of a talent spotter.
Despite his deep admiration for Kneale’s achievements as a writer, academic and critic Julian Petley feels Rudolph Cartier’s role in the success of Quatermass is perhaps in danger of being overlooked. “I think Rudy was always really the undervalued side of the partnership,” Petley says. “The very first time I went to see Nigel, he said, ‘You really must interview Rudy Cartier: a lot of this is down to him’. Nigel has always paid tremendous tribute to Rudy. Obviously they were a very good team together. Rudy really did have that kind of filmic sense, which I think is why the Quatermass serials are so good: they’re just bursting out of the television screen really. Rudy’s other work that I’ve seen for television has a tremendous breadth and sweep about it.”
During the new serial’s run, Cartier was driven to complain about a sketch in the Bob Monkhouse programme, featuring Monica Grey herself and the Winnerden Flats guards in a jokey context. Cartier felt this was undermining and inappropriate. The producer also received a private letter from one Audrey George, who was due to enter an Anglican Convent in Dublin before the broadcast of the final episode. George enclosed a stamped addressed envelope and asked if she could be sent a synopsis of the conclusion, rather than spend the rest of her life never knowing what happened. “Please consider this request confidential”, she wrote, “as people about to enter the religious life are not supposed to be so interested in such gripping drama”. Possibly, it was a trick by the press, from whom Cartier had withheld details of the serial. Either way, he gave Miss George the benefit of the doubt and sent her the synopsis as requested.
In the aftermath of the success of the new serial, Kneale found his talents caught in another battle for audiences, namely the newspaper circulation war between the Daily Express and the Daily Mail. “It was immediately after we’d put the thing onscreen,” Kneale recalls, “and they said, ‘Can you do us a serial?’ Each rang up, and my agent bid them up against each other… to an amazingly small sum.” The Daily Express were the victors, and asked Kneale to come up with a new prose serial. However, his customary wariness of prose writing blocked any inspiration. “In the end, in a very depressed sort of way, they said, ‘Oh well, write the thing you’ve just put on the telly.’” So it was that a illustrated prose serialisation of Quatermass II began daily publication. It wasn’t to last, though, as the Express’ enthusiasm waned after a few days. “One day they rang up and said, ‘How much more is there?’ I was only halfway through, and they said, ‘Can you wrap it up?’”
Nevertheless, and unsurprisingly given the attention the serial attracted, it wasn’t long before Hammer were making enquiries about the film rights. The Quatermass Xperiment had done brisk business both in Britain and the States. It’s hard to underestimate the impact the film had on the future of Hammer. Although it wasn’t their first thriller venture — not even their first dabbling with science fiction — it quickly struck the studio bosses that providing scares for grown-up cinema-goers was a sure-fire winner, and a niche they could make their own.
The immediate consequence was a follow-up or sorts by the name of X the Unknown. Jimmy Sangster, then a Production Manager at Hammer, helped brainstorm the bulk of the ideas for the project and was entrusted to write the screenplay, his first writing credit. (In due course, he would become an extremely prolific scriptwriter for Hammer and pen many of their key productions). X the Unknown is based around a infinitely more cod-scientific concept than The Quatermass Xperiment ever was. Trading on very voguish fears about radioactivity, it concerns a pile of subterranean slime which seems sentient, and which destroys all in its path as it hunts for radioactive materials. In collaboration with the Army, an atomic scientist, Adam Royston, seeks to stop the killer slime. The similarities to Quatermass are obvious, and indeed entirely intentional. But while Professor Royston has to stop the destructive, living mass just as Professor Quatermass had sought to stop the alien fungus, there is no extraterrestrial element in X the Unknown. It’s closer in tone to the pathological fear of atomic science that bore Godzilla than any serious engagement with science fiction concepts. This actually detracts credibility from the film in practice, because — although it avoids all mention of outer space intelligences — it never really gives any explanation of exactly what’s animating the unstoppable slime.
Blacklisted American director Joseph Losey was attached to direct, before his supposed Communist leanings became known to Hammer’s bosses. They asked him to step down before explaining to the assembled production that Losey had come down with pneumonia. He was duly replaced by Leslie Norman, whose son, cinema critic Barry Norman, became the laconic presenter of the BBC’s Film review programme for many years.
Obviously, the very title X the Unknown was an attempt by Hammer to echo The Quatermass Xperiment. But seeking to go the whole hog and produce an outright Quatermass sequel, the studio actually approached Kneale with a view to inserting his professor as the film’s main character. Kneale refused, though, denying us Quatermass and the Slime and any number of potential follow-ups. There would be more Quatermass to come from the Hammer stable, but after his disappointment with The Quatermass Xperiment, Kneale was not about to sit back and watch while others piloted his creation for a second time.
1956 was the final year of Kneale’s contract as a BBC television script writer. It was a bizarre twist, though, that the contract had given him both job security and more freedom. He was obliged to provide three plays for the BBC during the period it covered; the Quatermass II serial had been classed as two, and most likely The Creature was retroactively counted as the third. The matter caused quite some consternation in the BBC’s contracts department at the time. Internal correspondence questioning the precise quantity of Kneale’s output noted that “the question of the Kneale contract is under discussion at the highest level”. He had, after all, become one of their star writers, arguably the first in British TV history.
But, true to his word, Kneale was unwilling to provide a host of new work only for the BBC to snaffle the rights for themselves. Besides, he had other offers waiting for him beyond the Corporation. “At that time,” Kneale says, “we all felt really that really, television will never be paramount. By the time I actually left the BBC I was getting £1,000 a year. What they paid you for a script compared to what you could get if you did a film script… and of course, a film looked much more stylish — and it wasn’t live, so the actors had time to find out what they were doing. The whole thing was much more under control so I thought, ‘Well, as soon as I can, I’ll get into films.’”
In April 1956, Cartier restaged Arrow to the Heart, the adaptation that first brought him together with Kneale. But that simply involved shooting the existing script for a second time. Kneale wasn’t involved at all. “It wouldn’t have needed me. Rudy was perfectly capable. It was his pet, so he would have just put it on.” In effect, Kneale simply sat out the end of his contract and undertook a spot of moonlighting.
As of January 1, 1957, his ties to the BBC were severed, and he didn’t consider negotiating a new contract. He was now entirely freelance, although he continued to have a presence in the building. “They still gave me the use of the office which I’d occupied, although technically I wasn’t being paid anything. It was handy, because I was still working with producers like Rudy and others down the corridor, so I had somewhere to have conferences with them rather than having to make a ceremony of arriving each time. But purely that. I didn’t belong to the BBC any more. I’d finished.”
Kneale had already been approached with a couple of film offers. “I was getting pressured by Tony Richardson to help him with a couple of things,” he recalls. Richardson, who’d directed Kneale’s Chekhov adaptation Curtain Down for the BBC, was keen for Kneale to script his film-directing debut, but not before the writer had cleared his existing commitments. Perhaps surprisingly, they were for Hammer studios.
The Quatermass success had instigated a rethink of direction for Hammer. Potential new horror projects were actively sought, and the classic film monsters, popularised by Universal Studios in the 1930s — Dracula, Frankenstein, mummies and werewolves — were ripe for a modern treatment. They were also safely out of copyright. By the end of 1956, Hammer had struck a major new US distribution deal for its pictures, and production had started on The Curse of Frankenstein, the first of their celebrated Gothic horrors. It was written by X the Unknown scriptwriter Jimmy Sangster, and starred Cartier/Kneale veteran Peter Cushing as the titular Doctor. The studio was beginning to find its own very lucrative niche, but the Hammer heads remained aware that Nigel Kneale’s TV work had played a key part in the turning-around of their fortunes.
When the BBC sold the film remake rights for Quatermass II and The Creature to Hammer, Kneale exerted what pressure he could to be involved in the process. Although he was in the final months of his BBC contract at the time, Kneale was allowed to do script work for Hammer. Besides, the results wouldn’t see the light of day until the contract had expired. Val Guest was again brought in to direct the Quatermass sequel; Kneale himself adapted the serial into a screenplay, which Guest is credited with refining thereafter. Hammer boss Tony Hinds had been involved in Kneale’s initial draft of the script, but Kneale insists that Hinds had just as much hands-on involvement in the whole scripting process as Guest, who struck him as more dedicated to his golfing commitments than to the fine art of screenwriting.
The result, with its title tweaked to Quatermass 2, is much more faithful to the television original than the previous Quatermass adaptation. It’s hardly surprising there are such similarities, though: the Shell Haven refinery, that proved to be such a memorable setting for the serial, permitted Hammer to return for the film version, which Hammer augmented with matte paintings to increase the scale yet further. The BBC even allowed some of their original costumes to be reused. “The whole thing was largely copied from the television serial,” Kneale remarks, “and produced as hurriedly as possible.” Kneale’s script makes some significant changes, though. The roles of many of the characters are juggled around, and some — like Quatermass’ daughter Paula, and his assistant Leo Pugh — are lost altogether, whereas Lomax, from The Quatermass Experiment, returns for the film, but hadn’t had for the TV serial.
Scenes from Hammer’s Quatermass 2, starring Brian Donlevy.
The film production had more than twice the budget of its predecessor — £92,000 — not least because Hammer had struck a US distribution deal for the Quatermass films with United Artists, $25,000 of which covered the fee for the sequel’s lead actor. Despite Kneale’s objections, it was decreed that the star of the first film should return for the follow-up, and Brian Donlevy got his second shot at Quatermass. It’s lucky, really, that the ideas and atmosphere of Quatermass II are so strong; just as John Robinson had essayed a rather bland Quatermass in the TV serial, so too Donlevy manages to be even less appealing here than in the first film. His lack of interest in proceedings does show through in the end result, but thankfully doesn’t impair it too much.
The actor’s behaviour on-set — particularly tales of his drunkenness — often colours anecdotes of those who saw him at work on the production. Kneale himself made a point of visiting the set to see how things were proceeding. “The first time I met Donlevy,” he recalls, “he was drinking around Bray studios somewhere, swallowing gin like it had just been invented. He was quite amiable. He hadn’t the faintest idea what any of it was about. It wasn’t of interest to him, but he knew he was going to get paid what he’d asked for. He was not a creature you could respect, nor did anybody. He’d simply given up acting some years before and turned to drink. For the second one they’d hired a terrible rat-hole little studio, built to do commercials in, somewhere near Elstree but not too near, in case they were spotted.”
The facility in question was the New Elstree Studios, run by Edward and Harry Danziger, whose clients liked to frequent the Plough Inn pub on Borehamwood High Street. “Donlevy was around, gyrating between the studio and the pub. I saw him come back. He was so full of whisky he could hardly stand up. He staggered over to the set and looked dazedly around. They held up an idiot board with his lines on and he said ‘What’s this movie called?’ and they said, ‘Well, it’s called Quatermass 2’. He said, ‘I’ve got to say all that? There’s too much talk. Cut down some of the talk.’ He tried to read it and he had to have go after go after go, so crippled with drink he hardly knew who he was…”
The Hertfordshire new town of Hemel Hempstead, parts of which were still in the process of being built, appeared in the film as Winnerden Flats, Other scenes were shot on the Chiltern Hills in Buckinghamshire — including, it’s said, the moment Donlevy rather came unravelled while shooting the climax. Kneale recalls, “There was a scene later on location — I wasn’t there, but he was up on a hill. There was a wind machine set-up representing the fearful wind of the rocket take off. And his wig blew off. He had never admitted to having a wig, and then they all got off to search for Mr Donlevy’s wig…” Altogether, it wasn’t a prestigious enterprise or one that Kneale felt proud to be associated with, although he admired some of the talents involved. “They had a few really good actors, like Bryan Forbes, who was fine. The poor soul must have wondered what on Earth he was doing in it. He must have been a bit hard up at the time. I talked to him about it later and said, ‘What were you doing?’ He shook his head and said, ‘Well, it was a job’.”
The film provided Julian Petley with his first exposure to Kneale’s most enduring creation. “The very first Quatermass which I saw was the film of Quatermass 2, on a late-night double bill when I was a student at Exeter University,” Petley recalls. “In those days, they used to have a lot of late-night horror double bills. It was on with X the Unknown, which was also very good. In those days I’m afraid we used to light a joint up in the cinema… and enjoy the films! I remember thinking to myself, ‘I wonder if this film would be as good if I wasn’t stoned?’ — because I was really very struck by it, particularly the opening sequence with its very, very edgy music. Some years later I saw it on television and thought, ‘No, my initial reaction was absolutely spot on.’ I still like it very much indeed. It’s one of my favourites.”
In fact, as Petley points out, the film doesn’t differ too greatly from the TV source serial at all. “When I saw the television version of Quatermass II, which wasn’t until much later, one of the things that really struck me was that so much that’s wonderful about the Hammer Films version is just a complete lift from the television versions,” Petley argues. “They used the same locations down in Thames estuary, the refinery. Parts of it are shot for shot, like the figure of the guy who’s got burned in the tank coming down the gantry. Actually, I think the scenes filmed around Shell Haven in the telly version are even better than the film. You’ve got that wonderful scene in the television version which isn’t there at all in the film, of the family being taken away from the beach and you later hear them being shot. Also, there’s the scene with the old tramp they discover, which is almost like something out of Samuel Beckett, and you’ve got the tremendous use of music. For me, the television version is infinitely better.”
The ending is again changed — Quatermass doesn’t get to pilot his rocket into space, but rather his assistant launches it at the asteroid by remote as a dying act — but then, the climax to the TV serial was one of the least satisfying elements of the whole thing. The film version works as a neat, taut retelling of the serial, and it provided Hammer with another money-making international success. In the US, United Artists again renamed the film, this time as the nondescript Enemy from Space. The film went on release in the UK in June 1957, and drew enthusiastic audiences.*
Also, around this same time, someone very close to Kneale was also breaking out as a writer. His wife Judith had done assorted pieces of script doctoring for the BBC, with her multilingual talents coming in especially useful for translations of foreign works. In essence, her casual role was very similar to that which Kneale himself had held in his earliest days in television: doing odd-job writing work. In time, she trained to be a script editor, and then sought to become a scriptwriter. By her own admission, her husband helped along the way. To avoid accusations of nepotism, though, she chose to be credited by her maiden name, Judith Kerr. (This carried its own problems, of course. Kneale’s old colleague George Kerr, it had to be stressed, was no relation.)
Kerr’s BBC script work included translation/adaptation duties on The Fugitive and The Cold Light, two July 1956 entries in the Sunday-Night Theatre strand, both of which were directed by Rudolph Cartier and based on original German-language plays. In mid-1957, Kerr found herself commissioned to adapt a novel as a full six-part serial. The novel in question was John Buchan’s The Huntingtower, about the adventures of one Dickson McCunn, a retired Glaswegian provisions merchant who gets involved with the fortunes of a self-appointed pseudo-Boy Scout group calling themselves the Gorbals Diehards. Concerned that her grasp of Scots dialogue wasn’t strong enough, Kerr agreed with Dunblane-born department head Donald Wilson that he would add in necessary Scottish touches to the dialogue.
The resulting serial was broadcast live from the BBC’s Lime Grove studios from June 16 to July 21,1957, a staggeringly warm environment fit to melt candles in one night-time scene. James Hayter starred as McCunn; other roles were taken by Richard Wordsworth — Hammer’s Victor Carroon in The Quatermass Xperiment — and Scots actor Frazer Hines, who had appeared in X the Unknown, and would be a future assistant to Doctor Who.
Hammer’s The Abominable Snowman, starring Peter Cushing and Forrest Tucker.
The adaptation was a veritable hit, but Judith had found the writing process difficult, particularly as she had been pregnant at the time. In fact, tragically, she suffered a miscarriage. Having completed the project, Judith might have pursued a TV writing career of her own. She garnered one more major scripting credit, translating and adapting Marcelle Maurette’s French-language play L’Affaire Lafarge as The Trail of Marie Lafarge for the BBC’s Sunday-Night Theatre in December 1957, with Kneale regular Yvonne Mitchell in the title role. Then happy events intervened: soon after, she learned she was pregnant again.
In August, hot on the heels of their Quatermass II adaptation came Hammer’s film version of The Creature. The ambiguous original title wasn’t to be kept. “The Creature seemed a nice vague term,” Kneale says, “but they wanted to be more literal.” For a time, it was considered calling the film The Snow Creature, but it was eventually released in America under the title The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas, and in the UK, more simply, as The Abominable Snowman.
Though it made perfect sense for them to snap up the film rights to Kneale’s latest work, in the event Hammer purchased them rather late in the day, and the adaptation was made at quite a speed. Almost inevitably, Val Guest was engaged to direct. Several actors from the TV version were brought in to reprise their roles for the film. Arnold Marlé returned as the Lama, and Wolfe Morris as Kusang. Peter Cushing had already established himself with Hammer by starring in The Curse of Frankenstein, and so it was an obvious choice to ask him to repeat his performance as John Rollason. Instead of the TV version’s Stanley Baker — himself, ironically, a well-known film actor — Hammer secured American actor Forrest Tucker as the duplicitous Tom Friend. Although the studio was once again obliged by its distributors to cast a US name, this wasn’t another case of the Donlevys. Indeed, Kneale saw Tucker’s performance as having equal merit as Stanley Baker’s. “Baker played it as a subtle, mean person, Forrest Tucker as a more extroverted bully”, he observes, “but they were both good performances and I found very little to choose. Tucker was, I think, an underrated and very good actor.”
Kneale had provided his own script adaptation, not greatly different from the TV original, which, at ninety minutes, had been almost exactly as long as the film. There was greater opportunity for snowy location shooting, which Guest undertook in the French Pyrenees, and therefore scenes of mountaineering peril could be realised far more convincingly than in a live TV studio. Aside from the mountain shoot, the production was blessed with an impressive Tibetan monastery set, which was later resourcefully reused as the lair of the fiendish Fu Manchu. “They shot the whole thing down in Hammer’s Bray studios”, Kneale recalls, “and it looked good, it really did.”
The new script also widened out John Rollason’s interests, and giving him an assistant, Peter Fox, and a feisty wife, Helen. Guest, at the time, was directing features at a furious rate with military precision. He took it upon himself to rework Kneale’s script prior to shooting, excising much dialogue that he deemed unnecessary.
Many years later, Val Guest told film historian Tom Weaver, “As I had to direct it, I had the final say on what happened. And I had to do all sorts of nips and tucks, because we could never have got away with it [Kneale’s original script] — people would have been up and out of the cinema. A brilliant writer. but one who writes stuff as though you were reading it in a book.” Of Kneale himself, Guest said, “He’s a brilliant guy and he’s had an enormous success with all these things — and he hates every minute of them. There’s something rather twisted there, and it’s sad that he doesn’t enjoy the fruits of it all.” (According to Guest, the reason Kneale persevered with the Hammer versions of his work despite hating them so much was simply, “Money. Money.” — though this rather flies in the face of the many occasions when Kneale would turn down work he didn’t like.)
Scenes from Hammer’s The Abominable Snowman.
In particular, Kneale and Guest disagreed on the subject of the yeti itself. The writer was adamant that the audience needed to see something of the creature in the climactic scenes, but Guest insisted that a glimpse and a shot of its eyes was sufficient. Thankfully, Hammer achieved this with makeup and uncommonly tall actors, and no midget doubles were necessary. (Ironically, the film’s trailer makes a great deal of the promise of seeing the yeti in the actual film.)
The Abominable Snowman is eerie and effective, with a notably evocative score by Humphrey Searle. Although never a crowd-pleaser on the scale of Hammer’s Quatermass films, in many ways it’s a more satisfying piece, and much underrated. Nor is it completely without its influence, either. The scenes of lost members of the expedition calling out to their colleagues across the wastelands — which turns out to be the yeti luring the survivors to their doom — seem to be reprised in the phenomenally successful The Blair Witch Project. Although Kneale had largely enjoyed the experience, he was weary of retracing his steps by turning existing TV scripts into films for Hammer. He wanted to write something original, and had several ideas which he planned to propose to the BBC — one being for a brand-new third Quatermass serial.
*In 1957, Kneale received the notable honour of being named ‘Manxman of the Year’ back on the Isle of Man.