IN THE MID 1950S, KNEALE AND HIS NEW WIFE JUDITH TOOK A HOLIDAY to France, where they found themselves struck by the lingering after-effects of World War II: the resentment towards former Nazi collaborators and the web of affiliations and hatred between the assorted nations of Europe. They were already familiar with the shockwaves of Nazism. Judith, after all, was herself a German Jewish refugee. Kneale decided to write a TV play which addressed these issues directly. Just as The Abominable Snowman was playing in Britain’s cinemas, the BBC screened the result, entitled Mrs Wickens in the Fall. “That was a complete one-off,” Kneale says. “There was no science fiction or anything like it in there. It was about a pair of stranded American tourists, pensioners on a fairly cheapo holiday in the Loire valley. They had discovered more than they had guessed about the state of Europe after the war, and got stuck in to help.”
The main characters, Lyddie and Bob Wickens, are laid up in their hotel once Lyddie trips and injures her leg — hence that double-meaning in the title. “They were stuck there for two or three days, and people in the hotel had all sorts of echoes of the war,” Kneale explains. “There was a small boy there, who was in fact the child of a shamed French girl and an unknown German soldier. This child was treated as a piece of dirt. They all despised him; he had a horrible time. He’d been made to live in a little awful attic surrounded by souvenirs of his father and mother to shame him. The Americans realise something horrid is going on here and the sufferer, the innocent, is this poor boy who has done nothing to anybody. So they just want him out of it.” The Wickenses intervene, and seek an audience with the local Mayor. When the couple apply pressure, it’s agreed that the boy, François, can go back to America with them as their adoptive son.
“A simple story about an Autumn holiday that came cheap” asserts Kneale, “and Mrs Wickens, who’s this very nice homebody from the West.” It was certainly a change of style from the Quatermass serials that had made Kneale’s name. It works as a very gentle parable of international politics, with the hotel representing Europe and the Wickens standing in for interventionist America.
Though often overlooked as an entry in Kneale’s television career, Mrs Wickens in the Fall is an important, even pivotal piece in many ways. On one level, it was his first work for the BBC since he became freelance. But it’s also striking that, having made his name with fantastical, speculative works such as Quatermass and The Creature, Kneale looked to write something anchored in the real world at this point. He was, perhaps, at some risk of being typecast as a writer of futuristic or science fiction-flavoured drama. Despite the quality of the finished production, even he had been bewildered by the logic of the BBC calling on him and Cartier to adapt Nineteen Eighty-Four, for instance. Rather than be locked into this kind of writing, it was a canny move to try to explore beyond its boundaries.
From his earliest professional work — the short stories collected in Tomato Cain — he’d been inclined to juggle both kinds of fiction: the earthly and the unearthly. Even his early days as a television writer had required him to write everything from children’s puppet shows to adaptations of classic literature. Actually, as we’ll see, this urge to shake off the constricts of being pigeon-holed as a genre writer — no matter how good he was at it — is something which recurs in Kneale’s career time and again. So too does his preoccupation with World War II and its after-effects, but Mrs Wickens in the Fall represents his first handling of that key theme, with the possible exception of his limited contribution to Peter Ustinov’s television version of The Moment of Truth.
For all that, though, Mrs Wickens in the Fall lacks the imaginative spark that fuels Kneale’s best work, and misses some of his usual stylistic confidence. Its sentimental streak, and credibility-stretching plot, come as something of a disappointment. However, as an example of Kneale beginning to spread his wings as an original writer, it’s still fascinating.
Broadcast on August 8, 1957, Mrs Wickens in the Fall was produced not by Kneale’s regular collaborator Rudolph Cartier, but by Michael Elliott. An experienced figure in the field of television, which he combined with a parallel career as an acclaimed theatre director, Elliott went on to become one of Kneale’s key collaborators. It fell to Elliott to cast the piece, although a name was already in line to play Lyddie Wickens: namely Bessie Love, a somewhat faded former film star. In her heyday thirty years earlier, Love appeared in many musicals, and is often credited as the first person to have danced The Charleston onscreen. At first, she survived the transition from silent film to talkies, and was even nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actress in 1929 — only the second year the awards were held — for her role as ‘Hank’ Mahoney, one half of a performing sister act, in The Broadway Musical. Once her fortunes faded, though, Love moved to England, and by the late fifties she was reduced to smaller roles as ageing ladies from the American South in a variety of British films. When their paths crossed, she certainly made an impression on Kneale. “Bessie was still beautiful, although she was getting on a bit.” Kneale says. “She was lovely. But she didn’t do it.”
Love was ousted from the role of Lyddie Wickens by the incoming director. “Michael Elliott wanted to have a new face. He thought Bessie had been around a bit, as she had. So he got his new face all right — a very tough lady called Natalie Lynn who was not going to be told what to do.” Lynn, too, was an American-born actress who had moved over to England, and was far less familiar to audiences than Bessie Love.
For the play, Lynn was paired up with Canadian actor MacDonald Parke as Bob Wickens. However, Lynn had a surprise to spring on Elliott: she had humoured him throughout the rehearsals, but in the event she gave exactly the performance she wanted to give. “She pretended that she would do anything, and then on the night, when the live transmission was about to go out, she came over to me and she said, ‘Now tonight I am gonna do it my way!’ And my God, she did! The less said about that the better…”
There was a positive upshot from Mrs Wickens, though. Kneale was already acquainted with Kenneth Tynan, the legendary critic, who’d worked for a time at the BBC. Tynan saw the play, and was impressed by the writer’s work. “Ken had watched it. He rang up and said, ‘Come and work for me’,” Kneale recalls. “He had just become the principal script advisor at Ealing Films for Michael Balcon. So I went to see Ken, who I knew already, and I worked with him for a bit.”
Ealing had once been a major force in British cinema. Their portmanteau horror classic Dead of Night became hugely influential, and far more importantly, they had become indelibly associated with idiosyncratic comedies, such as Kind Hearts and Coronets, Whisky Galore and The Ladykillers. (The last two were directed by Alexander ‘Sandy’ Mackendrick, who went on to become a friend of Kneale’s. They even discussed the possibility of a collaboration, but it never came to pass). In a beleaguered, cut-throat film market, Ealing were struggling to survive, and Tynan had been taken on in the hope of launching some radical new projects.
At Ealing, Tynan struck up a working partnership with Seth Holt, who had been Ealing’s trusty film editor, before making his directing debut for the studio in 1958 with Nowhere to Go, a stylish crime thriller set in contemporary London, complete with a jazz soundtrack. Based on a novel by Donald MacKenzie, it was scripted by Tynan and Holt, and is often regarded as the least typical of the films Ealing Studios produced.
Kneale worked on two film projects for Tynan at Ealing, and Holt was the intended director of both. One was an unnamed piece concerning poltergeist activity. Kneale has said he intended it to be a “creepy one… more personal and psychological than Spielberg’s film, more like early Stephen King.” (The film in question, 1982’s Poltergeist, was in fact produced and co-written by Steven Spielberg but directed by Tobe Hooper — though it’s long been rumoured that Spielberg had significant uncredited directorial input.)
At this point, Kneale had rarely dealt with the subject of the supernatural directly, other than for the radio play You Must Listen and a handful of stories in Tomato Cain. The Ealing film wasn’t to be, though. “We never even got it to the first stage of a treatment,” Kneale admits. “It was just talk.”
The other Ealing project came far nearer to being produced, but still didn’t quite make it to the big screen. Tynan suggested making a film version of William Golding’s celebrated novel Lord of the Flies. Working closely together, he and Kneale put together a proposal for Ealing boss Michael Balcon. “Ken and I worked out our ideas for a script, and I wrote a very long treatment,” Kneale remembers. “We showed it to Michael, who was still there, precariously. He was dead keen. He said, ‘Let’s start next week!’”
Kneale and Tynan proposed major changes to the Golding’s novel, though. The public schoolboys were to become state schoolboys, and they weren’t to be stranded alone. “Ken and I had long conferences about it,” Kneale says. “The novel is about upper crust English schoolboys, who find themselves stranded on a desert island during some unstated war. It’s really about humanity’s behaviour under stress. It’s a beautiful book, very well characterised, so I was very keen to do this and so was Ken.”
Kneale felt there was another possible change which couldn’t be ignored. “There was one obstacle. I said, ‘Well, what about the girls? Because you can have the story just as it is, but wouldn’t it be richer if we saw what girls would do? Not grown-up girls, but nine-year-olds; the boys are only about that age. They’re all under puberty age so that wouldn’t be a factor. They wouldn’t be chasing each other around the scenery. How would they get on? And wouldn’t that be more representative of how humanity behaves itself under stress rather than just being about little English public school boys?’ Ken was all for it, and I wrote the script on that basis, and it worked very well. But it only went as far as a very elaborate first draft.”
Suddenly the future looked extremely bleak for Ealing, and it was hoped that Lord of the Flies might at least be the studio’s last hurrah, but even that wasn’t to be. “They were all set to go straight off to the South Seas or somewhere and do the thing… and then they went bust. I seem to get that a lot! Michael was very upset.”
In the event, after Nowhere to Go, Ealing Studios produced just one more film, Harry Watt’s Sydney-based thriller The Siege of Pinchgut, as part of an abortive deal with the Associated British Picture Corporation in 1959. After that, Ealing was no more.
A film adaptation of Lord of the Flies did arrive in 1963, though. “When Ealing abandoned it, they had to return all the rights to William Golding, who resold them to Peter Brook, the stage director. Peter wrote his own script, mostly by the simple device of lifting all the dialogue out of the book. That’s all he bloody ever did, and his film was terrible. It was so bad that when Ken Tynan saw it, he went and sought Brook out and yelled at him, denounced him in front of everybody.”
Despite these disappointments, Kneale was discovering that he had contacts and admirers in the film industry. One such was Tony Richardson, previously the director of Kneale’s Chekhov adaptation for television, Curtain Down. Richardson had been employed by George Devine, who’d starred in the adaptation, as a director at Devine’s new Royal Court Theatre. One of the new plays Richardson had discovered and debuted was Look Back in Anger, John Osborne’s celebrated study of contemporary relationships and masculinity. Richardson was keen to launch his career as a film director with a big-screen version, and Osborne was enthusiastic. With the express purpose of achieving this, Richardson and Osborne, together with Canadian-born, British-based producer Harry Saltzman, formed their own company, Woodfall Film Productions. Saltzman, though, felt strongly that the script adaptation needed to be right. It was Kenneth Tynan, then on the rebound from Ealing, who suggested to Woodfall that Kneale was the man for the job, and Richardson’s previous work with the writer convinced him of the wisdom of the idea. Since the last days of Kneale’s BBC contract, Richardson had been pressuring him to join the production. Once he was free to do so, Kneale provided an entirely new script adaptation of the play. “They’d had a big run of it on the stage and wanted to film it,” he says. “Osborne had authored a film script which he couldn’t get launched — I don’t know, but I think it was probably too stagey. Tony knew I could do film style stuff, so I wrote him a film script of it.” After his fruitless dealings with Ealing, Kneale finally secured his first credit as writer of a film script — at least, one that he hadn’t simply adapted from his own original television work.
Osborne’s play was renowned for its seething, claustrophobic power, relying on lengthy, impassioned speeches. For the film script, Kneale understood that the same effect couldn’t simply be replicated. “The play was quite a mouthful,” he says. Instead, the story would have to be opened out, fleshing out characters who’d merely been mentioned in the play. This wasn’t to the liking of Osborne, who writes in his autobiography, ‘Kneale had made a reputation as a skilled writer of science fiction with his creation of the enormously popular Quatermass series. It was soon evident that though he readily accepted the task, the material was not much to his liking. He and Tony decided to ‘open it up’. It seemed to me they were ripping out its obsessive, personal heart.’
Regardless, Kneale was very taken with the calibre of the cast Richardson assembled. For a fraction of his standard fee, Richard Burton took on the lead role of Jimmy Porter, with Mary Ure as his wife Alison, and Claire Bloom as Alison’s best friend, Helena, with whom Jimmy conducts an affair. Elsewhere in the cast in smaller roles were Donald Pleasence, who’d featured in the BBC version of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and George Devine, the Royal Court Theatre boss himself. Kneale, though, felt Burton was perhaps a little old to play the lead, and considered that this marred the film’s overall effect.
For the newly-minted role of Ma Tanner, often mentioned though never seen in the play, Richardson cast ageing theatrical doyenne Edith Evans. Evans’ performance proved to be one of the great pleasures of the finished film, but there was a downside to offering such a respected actress a relatively minor part. “The play had an awful lot of incidental talk about this character Ma Tanner, which I didn’t think would work in the film,” Kneale remembers. “I said, ‘We must see her.’ And so they got Edith Evans for the part and said, ‘Well, now we must have some lines for her’.” The writer therefore turned his attention to beefing up the Ma Tanner scenes. (Osborne claims in his autobiography that, after much protesting, he was allowed to rewrite, among other things, much of Ma Tanner’s dialogue.)
Kneale still had a crucial role to play where Edith Evans was concerned, though. When the legendary actress came in to shoot her scenes, director Tony Richardson found he was too busy keeping to schedule to accompany her afterwards, and the writer was charged with the task. “I had to entertain Edith Evans and Richard Burton. We had a very good lunch.” Indeed, perhaps a little too good. It only drew to a close when a well-refreshed Burton took exception to being prevented from ordering more wine, and the party left discreetly.
While well regarded, Woodfall’s film version of Look Back in Anger, released in the UK in May 1959, never had the impact that it did on stage. But aside from launching Richardson as a major director, it helped to forge a new wave in British cinema: influenced to a degree by the French Nouvelle Vague work of Truffaut and Godard, it was entirely contemporary and concerned with thoroughly modern living, however low-key and sordid. This so-called ‘kitchen sink’ approach didn’t delight all viewers, but it was a revolution in home-grown film-making. Within the next few years the likes of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and A Kind of Loving followed in its wake.
It’s perhaps worth considering, though, exactly how close Kneale felt to the material here. Osborne’s play had launched the phenomenon of the ‘Angry Young Man’, but Kneale didn’t exactly fall into that category. He was happily married, settled in West London, a successful writer branching out into new areas of work and on the brink of turning forty. Clearly, he brought expertise and a sense of invention to the job, and did it very well. But in terms of the development of his writing, it’s tempting to suggest that this kind of film work wasn’t especially dear to his heart. He would have hated having to write Quatermass serials for the rest of his days, but for all that, his own original work bore his style and preoccupations in full effect. The film version of Look Back in Anger was deftly written, but it’s hard to find much of Kneale himself showing through.
Nevertheless, Kneale had developed a good working relationship with the film’s redoubtable producer, Harry Saltzman, and it was Saltzman who persuaded Kneale to accept a return engagement almost straight away. The producer had optioned Osborne’s next play, The Entertainer, in which Archie Rice, a tenth-rate seaside comedian, reflects on his altogether underwhelming life. Rice had provided a meaty role on stage for acting legend Laurence Olivier. James Cagney was considered to star in the film version, but Olivier was keen to repeat his performance, and Saltzman agreed. The producer also wanted the capable Kneale handling script duties once more. “Harry said, ‘Let’s do The Entertainer — I’ll pay you much more’. And he did!” remembers Kneale. “The only catch was that I hadn’t seen the play. In fact, when I did, I didn’t like it. But I wrote a script and Harry was happy with it. Again, I’d opened it up. Then I met Olivier, who said ‘You’ve cut some of my best lines!’ So we had to put them back in…”
Coincidentally, the film was distributed by British Lion, now headed by Ealing refugee Michael Balcon. Tony Richardson also returned to direct. The cast, again, was top notch. It provided debut film roles for Albert Finney and Alan Bates, both of whom would become luminaries in the decade ahead. Other roles went to promising young talents such as Daniel Massey and Shirley Anne Field, and established actors Joan Plowright and Thora Hird (herself something of a Kneale veteran, having appeared in the Quatermass Xperiment).
Whereas Osborne had mostly taken a back seat when Look Back in Anger was filmed, he insisted on being much more hands-on this time round. It’s understandable that Kneale found this situation limiting. He’d proved himself to be a skilful, intelligent adapter of existing literary works, without needing George Orwell or Emily Brontë breathing down his neck. “Osborne picked my script to bits,” he admits. In the end, Kneale and Osborne were credited onscreen as having co-written the adaptation. In addition, Olivier, the eminent star, was still keeping a keen eye on his lines, especially if he perceived any which had got him laughs on stage were being sacrificed.
Richardson chose to shoot the film on location in the seaside town of Morecambe, whereupon Morecambe Town Council went to aggravatingly great lengths to make the town look its best, actually hampering filming in the process. Then, when the footage was assembled, an early cut ran to three hours. The job of cutting it down fell, ironically, to editor and Ealing graduate Seth Holt, still waiting to pursue his career as a director. “It never looked right,” asserts Kneale. “Instead of being fast moving, it became a slow film cut up.”
Sadly, The Entertainer, released in the UK in July 1960, was to be Kneale’s last work for Tony Richardson. Under the Woodfall Films banner, the director went on to make other key films in the British new wave movement. A Taste of Honey and The Loneliness of a Long Distance Runner were adapted, respectively, from a play and a novel, but scripted by their original authors. In 1963, Richardson and Woodfall had an award-winning success with a film of the picaresque eighteenth century novel Tom Jones, adapted by none other than John Osborne. In due course, Richardson went to work in America. “I lost touch with Tony,” admits Kneale ruefully. The Osborne adaptations were prestigious credits for Kneale, without a doubt, but in practice working on them had been rather a mixed blessing.
On a happier note, they provided him with a hefty income at a vital juncture. Kneale and his wife Judith became parents for the first time, to a daughter, Tacy Deborah Kneale, born by emergency Caesarean section on January 3, 1958. Judith had left the BBC to look after the new baby and fatherhood proved to agree with Kneale very nicely.
The writer hadn’t entirely abandoned television, although oddly many of his credits from the late fifties required no input from him. At that time, the BBC were cheerfully reusing earlier scripts Kneale had written — his adaptations of Golden Rain and The Cathedral — but these were simply standard restagings, and Kneale had no involvement in them. More impressively, his script Mrs Wickens in the Fall was bought by American TV network ABC, and remade for US audiences. Kneale’s first credit for that particular market since the 1951 TV adaptation of his short story Essence of Strawberry. “It must have been done through my agent,” Kneale explains. “They’d probably got a list of recent productions in England and picked this one out as having been… God knows what! I suppose they saw it as a vehicle for an ageing but famous actress, which of course it was not intended to be, and certainly wasn’t in England.”
The remake aired on June 18, under the bland new title The Littlest Enemy, in a sponsored slot, ‘The United States Steel Hour’, with a star name as the bold Lyddie Wickens. “They’d got Mary Astor,” Kneale recalls. “She was very, very prolific. She was in hundreds of films. A lot of bad ones too, I should think, but she had been very famous.” The slot was for one-hour dramas, and so Kneale’s script was drastically edited. Indeed, not all the running time was made up of drama. It was regularly punctuated by adverts, exhorting the audience to show their support for the American steel industry. “What astonished me was, I was sent a copy of the script they used,” recalls Kneale. “I couldn’t imagine really what they could advertise about steel, but they did. They had cut my script to tiny ribbons. It wasn’t that Mary Astor got the lines — she didn’t. The Steel Hour did!”
Indeed, the end result was punctuated throughout by, for examples, lingering images of a suspension bridge, with a voice-over declaring, “This is the five-mile bridge spanning the Straits of Mackinac, the bridge that sceptics said could never be built… But built it was — by the American Bridge Division of Unites States Steel. USS means the best possible steel at the lowest possible price!” Kneale was not impressed. “Enormous commercials, half a page long, boasting about steel,” he says. “My story was just a kind of commentary instead of a plot, reduced to nothing. The Steel Hour men had taken it over completely.”
The drama, directed by Don Richardson, featured Frank Conroy as Bob Wickens, Lili Darvas as Mme Charcot, and English ex-pat Jean Marsh as the unfortunate mother, Cecile. Kneale himself was given only a ‘story by’ credit, whereas one Lois Jacoby, a specialist in the field of American TV drama, is credited as ‘writer’ (which seems rather rich, given that Jacoby had merely hacked down Kneale’s original). The experience provided Kneale with an alarming early insight into the mighty film and television industries in the States. “This was the first I knew about how they worked in American television, and I made up my mind I would never ever again have anything done on a television network in America,” he says. “A film, that’s a different story. But not to be treated to this humiliation of having your play ripped to bits, and practically thrown in the waste paper basket, in order to get sponsorship from some probably now bankrupt company, United States Steel: yuck, yuck, yuck! It was enough to put you right off America…”
Nevertheless, Kneale was keen to do some more original work, and his next undertaking was couched in familiarity. Collaborating once again with Rudolph Cartier, he was charged with creating a new, third Quatermass serial for the BBC. This time, as a freelancer, Kneale would retain the rights for his work lock, stock and barrel. As with Mrs Wickens in the Fall, the initial inspiration came from living in the aftermath of the war. Walking around London, Kneale took note of the vast rebuilding programmes still taking place in the city, as whole areas had been destroyed in German bombing raids nearly twenty years earlier. Building sites and cranes were everywhere. What might be discovered, Kneale wondered, if one dug right down into the earth? His idea went much further than the simple notion of physical unearthing. What might the human psyche be found to contain, deep down, if one looked?
It’s commonly accepted wisdom that sequels are no good. They’re usually driven by commercial demands for more of the money-making same; they revisit the formula of a hit without the element of surprise and, usually, with less originality. Artistically at least, sequels often mean diminishing returns. Impressively, then, that the third Quatermass is often judged to be the finest, and quite possibly Kneale’s greatest achievement.
Thanks to his relentless drive for originality, the new serial managed to stay fresh, in relation to its predecessors. The Quatermass Experiment had featured an onscreen alien ‘invasion’. For Quatermass II, the invasion was, to a large degree, already well underway. In this third outing, Kneale proposed that an invasion had taken place long, long ago and, a total success, shaped the entire nature of mankind. As Kneale once explained, there are only three decent variants on the alien invasion scenario: “We go to them; they come to us; they have always been here.” Quatermass and the Pit explored the third option, and thereby a classic science fiction story archetype was forged.
The story tells of construction work in London uncovering a mysterious capsule. Quatermass is called in to assess whether it might be some kind of rocket, or even a bomb. He discovers that the location — Hobbs Lane — has long been associated with supernatural phenomena. Slowly, the capsule begins to cause such phenomena on a startling scale. When opened, it is found to contain dead, atrophied beings from another world. In fact, they are Martians. Quatermass deduces that visitors from Mars have visited the Earth down through the ages and influenced mankind’s development. In effect, they have left their race imprint on humanity, and many of our most primal, destructive urges stem from the Martian visitors. Indeed, what we understand as the supernatural is simply the Martian strain within us. As the serial proceeds, the power of the capsule grows exponentially, and these bizarre, destructive forces are released en masse.
Prior to broadcast, the new serial went by two different titles. Internally, the BBC referred to it as Quatermass III; it seemed natural as the successor to Quatermass II, but was quickly dismissed as being just too obvious. Kneale himself wrote the serial under the stark title The Pit. The two were eventually conflated; the end result, Quatermass and the Pit, strikes a pleasingly mythic note.
Nevertheless, the number three retains a special significance in the serial, and this may even have helped spark some of the ideas behind it. In the world of myth and religion, ‘three’ can symbolise the Christian holy trinity or the three main gods of ancient Babylon. Three, as the song goes, is a magic number: Shakespeare introduces Macbeth with the gathering of three witches. Even children’s fairy stories are awash with the number: three little pigs, three billy goats, three magic wishes. In mathematics, Pythagorean theory is constructed around the triangle. And, of course, the Manx symbol, the Tree Cassyn Vannin, consists of three conjoined legs.
Fully aware of the significance, Kneale builds the mythological power of three into his third Quatermass serial. It has a core of three contrasting main characters — Quatermass, Roney and Breen. Inside the unearthly capsule, three dead Martians are discovered, and each has three legs. (So too did the Martian fighting machines of H G Wells’ War of the Worlds, a Kneale favourite and another major influence here.) It’s also worth noting that The Quatermass Experiment began with the cataclysmic launch of a rocket containing three pilots, mirroring the Martian capsule exactly.
In terms of production, one of the first hurdles was a familiar one: a new lead actor was required. John Robertson had not really made the role of Quatermass his own, besides which, he proved not to be available in any case. “He was busy,” recalls Kneale. “I imagine he had other things to do.” (By 1964, Robinson was starring in R3, a short-lived and suspiciously Quatermass-like sci-fi series about a secretive government research centre).
The vacant part was first offered to leading theatre actor Alec Clunes, but he declined. “So we went back to the man who had been Rudy Cartier’s first choice,” reveals Kneale, “André Morell. He was the first choice of all, and he was, by now, ready to do it, which he hadn’t been originally.” So it was that the Morell, the impassive O’Brien from Kneale and Cartier’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, finally took on the role of the put-upon professor. Many now consider Morell’s finely-judged performance to be the definitive Bernard Quatermass.
Kneale’s script also necessitated the return of the journalist character Fullalove from the first serial; the original actor Paul Whitsun-Jones wasn’t free to appear, and Brian Worth took the role instead. Another late addition to the cast occurred when Miles Malleson, cast as Quatermass’ associate Roney, had to pull out. His replacement proved a hit with Kneale. “We got a marvellous Canadian actor called Cec Linder. He later had parts in a couple of James Bond movies. He was a great character. He brought a racy vitality to it. I’m sorry we couldn’t have made more of Cec to show him off, but we killed him off…!”
Once again, Kneale and Cartier requested that the BBC maintain a shroud of secrecy about the serial’s content in their dealings with the press to ensure maximum impact on broadcast. Television budgets had risen drastically since the early 1950s and this time out, the producer/ director spent a total of £17,578 over the six episodes. This was to be the most ambitious Quatermass serial yet.
It was scheduled to be shown over the Christmas period, a high-profile slot, and the BBC made its most cutting edge facilities available to Cartier. Back in 1954, the Corporation had acquired the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, situated, as the name suggests, on the bank of the Thames. Formerly, it had been the property of actor-producer Jack Buchanan and had been much used within the British film industry. When the BBC took it over it was already well equipped for contemporary film-making, and it was here that the new Quatermass production would be staged. “Technology was improving all the time,” Kneale says. “The BBC were trying to keep pace, and the Riverside Studios were very decent indeed. We thought, ‘Here we go!’ And yet it was annoying, because these were things we should have had six years ago.”
The new studio space afforded the production team many exciting possibilities, particularly as it was being used in tandem with the Ealing Studios for more complex sequences. Designer Clifford Hatts used the room to solve one of the chief problems presented by the script, namely that the main set would feature the ever-deepening pit of the title. “The designer built an enormous set and filled it with mud. As they were supposed to be digging deeper as the story progressed, they simply raised the surrounding scenery higher, which appeared to make the bottom of the pit go deeper. Very clever. It worked extremely well.”
In the time since the second Quatermass serial, the BBC’s fledgling special effects department, led by Jack Kine and Bernard Wilkie, had become experienced and adept. They were now called upon to realise Kneale’s vision of a haunted building site, dead Martians and a living space vehicle, all of which they achieved with aplomb. Wilkie and Kine made effective, resourceful use of flash powder, paraffin wax and basic vacuum-formed models. “They were pretty good”, recalls Kneale admiringly. “By now they had a team of special effects men, who had a lot of ideas. Yes, they were fine.”
The Martians produced by Wilkie and Kine were especially effective and memorable. As guidance for their design, Kneale suggested that Kine seek out a curious, unearthly 1954 painting of a lobster by his artist brother, Bryan, and Kine was duly inspired. (When the serial was over, Kneale was presented with one of the models, and to this day, it resides at the top of the Kneale family home.)
The BBC had also established another department for realising unusual ideas. As the special effects department was to vision, so the Radiophonic Workshop was to sound. It began in April 1958, initially to provide special sounds for radio, but was beginning to be involved in TV productions. By and large, their work for television had been providing odd sounds — literally — for the likes of Sputnik, Eurovision, You Take Over and The Jack in the Box. More significantly, workshop founder member Daphne Oram had lent her talents to a TV play, Amphityron 38, but this latest assignment was to be on an entirely different scale.
Department head Desmond Briscoe was assigned to create special sounds for the entire serial, many of these forefront in the drama, and key to a scene’s effectiveness. Using filters and tape treatments, Briscoe synthesised several extraordinary sounds, not least a whooping screech, somewhere between the sound of a bird and an insect, that accompanied the psychic activity caused by the Martian capsule. According to Workshop archivist Mark Ayres, there was some discussion of a full original soundtrack being provided by Jimmy Burnett, then on a six-month attachment to the department. *
In the event, though, this idea was rejected, and instead Briscoe created strikingly original sound effects alongside treatments of tracks from a stock music library. One such library piece, Mutations No. 1 by Trevor Duncan, received unprecedented exposure when it became the serial’s theme.
The original BBC television version of Quatermass and the Pit, featuring André Morell and John Stratton.
Quatermass and the Pit proved to be unsettling, staggeringly original, and gripping on a grand scale. The impact the serial had on its audience has passed into legend. Seven million watched the first episode on Monday December 22, 1958, and eleven million watched the final instalment five weeks later. By contemporary standards, that’s a remarkable viewing figure. At the time, it was sensational. It represented around a third of the potential viewing audience. To put it another way, of all the people in Britain who had access to a TV set, virtually one in three was watching by the end of the run. The whole country, according to legend, stopped to watch it. Publicans, it’s said, dreaded the weekly broadcasts because they wiped out their business. It was a common story. When Quatermass and the Pit was on air, the country stopped to watch. Today, a serial with a science fiction flavour would be marketed directly at a young, cultish audience, but this was popular, mainstream viewing for all.
The central concept of Kneale’s serial, that aliens had influenced the development of life on Earth, became a familiar one over time, but in 1958 it was relatively fresh. There are certainly strong parallels with H G Wells’ lesser-known late-period novel Star Begotten, first published in 1937, in which the protagonist, popular historian Joseph Davis, becomes gripped by the notion that a dying race of Martians are bombarding the Earth with cosmic rays in order to rewrite the genetic coding of mankind. Ultimately, the idea proves to be groundless, and the supposed Martians never make an appearance. But it’s quite possible that the central notion lodged somewhere in the imagination of Kneale, himself, as we’ve seen, a great admirer of Wells.
The BBCTV version of Quatermass and the Pit, featuring André Morell and Anthony Bushell. Top left: producer Rudolph Cartier prepares a scene with the cast.
Some observers have suggested a kinship with Kneale’s approach and the writing of ‘weird fiction’ maestro H P Lovecraft, but Kneale himself denies any influence, on very simple grounds. “I’ve never read any Love-craft!” he insists. Later, the writings of Erich von Däniken, most notably his 1968 book Chariots of the Gods?, popularised the notion of visiting extraterrestrials guiding the evolution of mankind, which also greatly informs Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, released the same year. Many, Kneale among them, have remarked on the appearance of an unearthed alien object in a pit which plays a pivotal role in Kubrick’s film. The influence of Kneale’s serial, as we’ll see, was both long-lasting and wide-ranging.
At its core, Kneale’s serial drew on issues that were highly topical, a quality that informs most of his writing. On a simple level, it concerned the rebuilding of cities and the march of urban Britain. But on a more primal level, the idea touched on violent societal conflict. The notion that man might judge his fellow man and seek to destroy him was again extremely current in the age of race riots and rampant nationalism.
It doesn’t take a qualified psychologist to read into Kneale’s notion of digging deep down to find the unearthly source of man’s most primal urges. It’s a story about the subconscious, and the human fascination with the supernatural. Lying buried in the recesses of human nature are a swarm of destructive desires, instilled by the Martian heritage. A Freudian reading would recognise the buried capsule as a phallic object — not least because, in the climactic scenes it spews forth a torrent of evil. (Similarly, the rocket in The Quatermass Experiment crash-lands in suburbia and unleashes infection and death…)
There’s also the matter of Dr Roney’s remarkable invention, the ‘optic-encephalograph’. Investigating the phenomena fuelled by the Martian capsule, the device is used to form images from the brain, from memory and imagination, on a monitor screen. It a rare example of Kneale stretching credibility by postulating something seemingly beyond the capabilities of modern science. Yet it is a perfect metaphor for what the writer was doing with the medium of television, taking images from his mind and transferring them onto a screen. Indeed, the entire serial, with its depiction of the nation being transfixed as one by the alien influence, is mirrored by the spell that the show cast upon the viewing public.
In terms of Kneale’s writing, this serial covered new ground. Today, he’s perhaps best known as an imaginative, speculative storyteller, but up to this point he’d dealt mainly with the trappings of science fiction; often this has been intended to frighten, but the cause was always scientifically possible. It wasn’t since a handful of stories in Tomato Cain, and the 1952 radio play You Must Listen, that Kneale had tackled the issue of the supernatural, or the ghostly, head on. In many ways, then, the serial, with all its imps, demons, poltergeist activity and horned beasts, represents something of a turning point in his writing. Hereafter, Kneale would deal increasingly with tales of ghosts and hauntings. It’s this, perhaps, which makes Quatermass and the Pit so very distinctive, ground-breaking and influential: by grafting elements of supernatural horror and science fiction together, Kneale effectively created an entire new subgenre.
The writer himself is wary of labelling the serial as supernatural, though. “There wasn’t anything really supernatural in it,” he insists, “not in the sense of bogie-bogie X-Files things. It explained what the supernatural really was, which wasn’t supernatural at all. The very opposite. It was something people couldn’t possibly understand, something totally unfamiliar. A far cry from the supernatural.” Rather than being a supernatural tale in the traditional mould, then, Quatermass and the Pit is an examination of what we understand by the supernatural, subverting, as it goes, the tropes of ghost story fiction.
Its impact was enormous. One astonished young viewer was Stephen Gallagher, later to become an acclaimed British novelist and scriptwriter. “I’ve a very vivid memory of being at a family party thrown by my aunt and uncle,” Gallagher says, “and the whole thing coming to a halt while a little black-and-white TV was rolled out and everyone watched Quatermass and the Pit. I can’t have been more than four years old. The impact was two-pronged. First there was the spectacle of almost every adult in my life being spellbound for the entire half-hour. Then there was the matter of what I saw on the screen. I doubt that I could have made any sense of the story, but I was totally gripped by the atmosphere. I wasn’t so much scared as awed . . . Even now, when I remember it, my point of view’s no more than two feet off the floor.”
Another contemporary viewer transfixed by the serial was Dr C P Lee, now a respected cultural historian. “I have very strong and long-lasting memories of Quatermass and the Pit,” Lee explains. “It totally affected me and lived within my head. It was a milestone in my viewing habits. I was nine, I think, and it was definitely a behind-the-couch job. I watched it at home. It was absolutely astonishing. I can remember cowering, peeking out from between my fingers, at certain bits of it. Certain visual images stayed forever — the leaping Martians and the ground rippling beneath the man as he lay on the floor.”
As well as the more obvious thrills, Lee found the concepts within the serial lingered. “Being a good little Catholic boy, obsessed with history, these idea of the Devil and Hobbs Lane and grounding the force with iron, of good and evil, some kind of spirituality… these made a major impression on me. I’m hard pressed to think of any drama piece that had quite such an impact on me. That’s quite a sweeping statement but a true one nevertheless.”
The state of television in Britain back in 1959 allowed for a genuine mass audience to be involved in a viewing experience. “In those days there were only two channels and therefore everybody watched certain things,” Lee points out. “Nowadays, if things on television connect people, we call them water-cooler moments, but it tends to revolve around things like reality TV shows. Whereas in the earlier days of television you’d get on the bus the morning after a show had been on and people would be talking about it, about the ideas behind it. There would be intelligent discussion about a mutually shared experience. It’s to Kneale’s credit that he was able to involve that many people in a shared experience, which kind of mirrors what he was talking about in the piece anyway.”
Another of the serial’s great strengths is its use of a particular narrative trick, sometimes described as the ‘onion layer’ structure, which is now widely associated with Kneale and his work. Simply put, most narratives with a mystery element are destined only to disappoint viewers. Once the mystery is unveiled and resolved, the sense of anticipation is gone, usually dispelled by a prosaic explanation. Kneale’s approach is to peel back one layer of the mystery only to reveal a larger, more fascinating mystery beneath, and to sustain this throughout. Hence, here, the discovery of a buried capsule ultimately results, after a series of revelations, in the entire human race being endangered and our understanding of its very nature being upended. A sense of anticlimax never enters into it. Sure enough, Kneale went on to deploy this structure several times in slightly different forms, most notably, and effectively, in The Road and The Stone Tape. Here in Quatermass and the Pit, though, it has the element of surprise, and all the impact that implies.
In all, it’s virtually impossible to overstate the impact of the serial, and the regard in which it was held by viewers. If it was The Quatermass Experiment which first made Kneale’s name, then Quatermass and the Pit was the masterwork which would guaranteed his reputation down the ages. Judith Kerr, discussing her husband’s Quatermass serials on a BBC Imagine . . . documentary in 2013, stated outright that Quatermass and the Pit “was the best of them”. In an exchange on Twitter in 2014, author Philip Pullman called it “the most enthralling TV serial I’ve ever seen,” and said of the subsequent Quatermass script books, “I read them to pieces.”
The repercussions of Quatermass and the Pit began to be felt almost immediately after broadcast, often in rather unexpected ways. In the week after the final episode was shown, the landmark serial was referenced by two leading BBC comedies of the day. Firstly, on the radio by The Goon Show, once again, in the episode The Scarlet Capsule, a comic simulacrum of the serial’s plot featuring Harry Secombe as ‘Quatermass, OBE’. And secondly, on television by Hancock’s Half Hour, in the episode The Horror Serial, in which Tony Hancock was seen scared out of his wits by the final instalment of the Quatermass tale, and subsequently calling out the authorities to examine a mysterious object he’s found buried in his garden. Kneale could only feel flattered by the quality of these pastiches. “If a series is shown which, like Quatermass, attracts a certain amount of attention, somebody has a go at it,” he says. “Well, the Goons were excellent people: they were funny and I loved their work, so it was quite an honour to be sent up by them. Spike Milligan was very clever. He was fairly unbalanced, I think, which is probably why his humour was so original. The Goons I thought were brilliant. Very genuinely, inventively funny. They were wonderful, so I enjoyed that! I missed the Hancock one, but again he was very good: a very, very clever man.”
For Kneale, though, there was a strict limit. “When it got down to the level of [minor-league radio star] Charlie Chester, well, I stopped that. I really did,” Kneale says. “He was going to do an enormous number, like fifty-two half-hours, for radio, playing a character called Professor Quite-a-mess.” Sure enough, the comedian’s current radio series, That Man Chester, launched a comedy mini-serial component entitled The Quite-a-Mess Three Saga. Chester himself didn’t star as the professor, though: that honour fell to Deryck Guyler, who had in fact played the lead role of Dr Clement Foster in Kneale’s 1950 radio play (and first ever professional script), The Long Stairs.
Regardless, Kneale was far from impressed. “I got onto the bosses of the BBC and said, ‘You can’t do this! I know the BBC will destroy its own product, we’re used to that, but I will never write anything for you again unless you stop this.’ So they did. They made the producer rewrite about forty episodes. He must have nearly topped himself. But it was a different thing with the Goons!” Nevertheless, for years to come, a host of comedians, from Frankie Howerd and Jimmy Edwards to The Two Ronnies, staged spoofs of Quatermass. For a time, such sketches virtually became a British comedy standard.*
Despite its massive success, the serial proved, quite unintentionally, to be the last teaming of Kneale and Rudolph Cartier. At first, other collaborations were mooted — among them, some reports suggest, a television adaptation of The Kraken Wakes, John Wyndham’s epic, apocalyptic 1953 novel about an alien invasion launched from beneath the sea. In the event, though, this came to nothing, perhaps capsized by its sheer ambition.
Invitation to the cast and crew wrap party for Quatermass and the Pit. Illustration by Tony Hart.
As Kneale explored other opportunities, Cartier continued to work for the BBC, directing for ongoing series such as Z-Cars and Maigret during the 1960s, and mounting several powerful television dramas on the horrors of World War II, such as 1962’s Doctor Korczak and the Children, 1964’s The July Plot, and 1965’s The Joel Brand Story. Perhaps most notably, though, he experimented with bringing opera to television, and his BBC productions such as The Saint of Bleecker Street (1956), Strauss’s Salome (1957), Tobias and the Angel (1960) and Bizet’s Carmen (1962) proved hugely successful. “He moved into opera”, recalls Kneale, “great big German operas, but I had nothing to do with them.”
He and Kneale both lived in the same part of London and remained friends right up until Cartier’s death on June 7, 1994. After Quatermass and the Pit, he never again directed a new Nigel Kneale script; but their partnership had achieved an extraordinary swan song.
*Indeed, there had even been a moment of comic levity behind the scenes of the original serial. After transmission of the final episode, cast and crew were invited for celebratory drinks in the Bandroom of the Riverside Studios, with the personal invitations, headed ‘Quatermass and the Pit Episode 7’, showing the Martians carousing around their capsule while waving wine glasses. The illustration in question was the work of BBC arts presenter Tony Hart.
*Notably, during this period Burnett assisted the Workshop’s Dick Mills in the creation of the classic Goon Show sound effect Major Bloodnok’s Stomach.