WRITING WAS KEEPING THE ENTIRE KNEALE HOUSEHOLD BUSY AT THE time. Kneale’s wife Judith wrote and illustrated another children’s book, Mog the Forgetful Cat, which was first published in 1970. The Kneale family were great cat fans, and a succession of feline pets had prowled their home. One had indeed been a rather scatty, loveable creature called Mog, and Kerr’s book was something of a tribute to him. It even came dedicated to ‘our own Mog.’ The Kneale family home is recognisable as the illustrated setting: the young son is called Nicky, and the daughter Debbie, borrowing the middle names of the Kneale’s children, whose own real life toys can be seen littering the pictured floors. Similarly, the family name is Thomas — and the bushy-eyebrowed Mr Thomas may look quite familiar.
Working in adjoining rooms on the top floor of their home, it’s unsurprising that Kneale and Kerr shared ideas. Stuck for a dramatic ending to her book, Kerr consulted Kneale who suggested that Mog could catch a burglar. (Rather fittingly, when an audiobook version was recorded many years later, Kneale cameoed in the role of the burglar).
Like The Tiger Who Came to Tea before it, Mog the Forgetful Cat grew to become a children’s classic. Over the next thirty years, Judith embarked on a whole series of books featuring the loveable feline. According to Kerr, Kneale often contributed little ideas, and came up with the titles, for her books. Discussing their relationship with extraordinary modesty, Kerr told a Guardian podcast in 2014, “I’m not basically a writer, I just picked up a whole lot from him.”
Kerr also decided to branch out into prose for older children. Many of her friends, not least her husband, had encouraged her to write about her own extraordinary childhood experiences, as a fugitive of the Nazis. Partly, she was inspired by her young son watching The Sound of Music and assuming that it illustrated his mother’s own experience. The end result, published in 1971, was the lightly fictionalised children’s novel When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. The German Jewish main character, nine-year-old Anna (itself Kerr’s given first name), has a brother, Max, and her father is a famous writer and broadcaster. Her father vanishes in secrecy, and her mother ferries her and Max from Germany in great haste, so that the family can escape the Nazi regime and be reunited in Switzerland. They continue to stay on the move, and flee through Austria and France. Kerr herself has suggested that the book was written partly to explain her own childhood experiences to her husband and children.
The novel, which Kerr dedicated to her own parents, was a tremendous success, explaining the day-to-day reality of the consequences of war from a very vulnerable, personal point of view. Sadly, her parents hadn’t lived to witness her success themselves. After Kerr’s father Alfred died in 1948, her mother Julia had stayed in Germany. In 1965, shortly after returning home to Berlin from a trip to visit her family in England, Julia suffered a fatal heart attack.
Kerr went on to write two further volumes of her story, 1975’s Bombs on Aunty Dainty (subsequently retitled The Other Way Round) and 1978’s A Small Person Far Away. Together known as the Out of the Hitler Time trilogy, their popularity stretched even beyond English-reading audiences. “She wrote them in English, of course, but they were translated into German and became best-sellers,” Kneale says. “Rather to the astonishment of older Germans, who saw the name Hitler printed on them, and could not believe it. But there was the curiosity. Children wanted to know more of what had happened, and their parents would not talk about it. Here was a book that explained what it was like to have to leave your country or you would get killed. It was hugely successful. Sales were not just in thousands, but in millions.” In that respect, Kerr’s books became a part and parcel of the post-war Germany coming to terms with its difficult past. In the process, the Kneale family found itself with two acclaimed writers as breadwinners. Indeed, Judith’s success might be said to have outstripped that of her husband.
The 1970s were something of a golden age for television dramatists. The likes of David Rudkin, Jack Rosenthal, David Mercer and Dennis Potter were creating a raft of fascinating new work just outside the mainstream, often through single-play strands such as those to which Kneale himself was now contributing. Potter, in particular, became increasingly pre-eminent. Kneale appreciated his work, albeit rather coolly. “I didn’t know Dennis Potter,” he admits. “We never met. What he did was nothing like anything I’d ever written — it’s probably much better — and we had no contact. I like his work, though. Not all of it. I thought that at the end, poor soul, he folded up. He couldn’t help it, he was ill. But he’d done excellent, very original things and those are what he’ll be remembered for.” On the other hand, Kneale had decidedly mixed feelings about his contemporaries working in American television. “Paddy Chayefsky was very good,” he says. “Someone like [Twilight Zone creator] Rod Serling was not my cup of tea, a bit too mechanical.”
Two classic children’s picture books written and illustrated by Judith Kerr.
Kneale himself was continuing to present new work to the BBC. He declined an opportunity to write for the ecological disaster drama Doomwatch, feeling unwilling to work within someone else’s pre-existing format. For some time, he’d also had an offer to contribute to a BBC2 anthology series, Out of the Unknown, which had been broadcasting well received dramas of an imaginative, fantastical bent since 1965. He eventually came up with another twisted ghost story, combining the ultra-modern with the primal and unknown. It was inspired by the then-current fascination with souped-up motorbikes. Kneale was intrigued by a shop in London’s Lower Richmond Road which was selling augmented, or ‘chopped’, bikes to the Hell’s Angel’s community, and understood the possible consequences. “I’d been reading something appalling about a man who had been killed going 180 miles an hour down the M4 on his chopped bike,” the writer recalls. “They were very fashionable at that time.” The 1969 counterculture movie Easy Rider had greatly popularised biker chic, and Kneale planned his own take on it.
His script, The Chopper, is set in a back-street motorbike garage, owned by one Jimmy Reed, housing the wreckage of a chopper formerly belonging to Pete, a biker recently killed in a crash (another entry in the pantheon of Kneale’s reckless, self-destructive youths). “It was a ghost story,” Kneale explains. “He haunts the bike, and nobody knows quite what to do.” A journalist, Lorna Venn (played by Ann Morrish), gets wind of what’s happening and arrives in the hope of covering the tale. Towards the climax, the haunting of the garage gathers pace. Venn realises that Pete’s relationship with Reed was far from happy. In fact, Pete used violence to get Reed to maintain his beloved bike, and as a consequence Reed sabotaged the bike and caused the biker’s death. The final scene shows the haunted garage erupt, the wreckage of Pete’s bike twists around Reed’s neck and kills him.
It was directed by Peter Cregeen, an old hand at BBC TV drama who had previously directed a couple of earlier Out of the Unknown entries, including the well-remembered fantasy tale Get Off My Cloud in 1969. He’d later go on to work extensively as a television producer, and become BBC TV’s Head of Serials between 1989 and 1993, at which time he had ultimate responsibility for cancelling production on Doctor Who. Coincidentally, The Chopper has another significant Doctor Who connection. The main role of Jimmy Reed was taken by none other than Patrick Troughton, only a brief time after he’d given up the star part of the Second Doctor. (In fact, it later emerged that Troughton had at this time been conducting an affair with his Chopper co-star Ann Morrish.)
The Chopper was broadcast on November 16, 1971, and is something of a neglected gem in the Kneale canon. Once again, sadly, no recording of the piece has survived. Judging from the script, though, it was an economical, effective piece, using the ‘poltergeist’ device of Quatermass and the Pit in a far more intimate setting. The terrifying events are balanced by a very light, human tone. “It was quite a funny little play,” Kneale asserts. “It was perfectly all right, nothing special. They had some nice actors who were good at comedy doing it, in a kind of dry way. I’d always used humour in things, right back to The Quatermass Experiment. You can never have too much, particularly if it’s creepy. That’s the time to use as much humour as possible.”
The BBC publicised The Chopper in the Radio Times, with a brief interview with the writer (under the glorious heading ‘Kneale on Wheels’). “It’s an exercise in the kind of ghost story I wouldn’t mind hearing myself”, he’s quoted as saying. “I find the disembodied hand in a well-lit kitchen much more spine-chilling than bats in the belfry.” The piece goes on, ‘Kneale himself has never seen anything approaching a ghost, although he’s inclined to believe there’s something in it.’ In fact, the writer has always asserted that he remains incredulous of actual existence of the supernatural. “I’ve always thought if you actually believed in ghosts you wouldn’t be able to write a ghost story,” he insists. “I make my hauntings up, I hope. Anybody who believed even a little bit would find it a bit upsetting to write ghost stories, to use it simply as material. And you’d run the risk of letting something loose from inside you that could be more harmful than some sort of spoof.”
Kneale’s writing has a preoccupation with supernatural occurrences but it’s detached and at one remove, which allows him to deal with certain themes, namely the past, and the repressed, impinging on the present, and the extraordinary materialising in everyday settings. Plays such as The Chopper are deft musings on the nature of the supernatural, without necessarily agreeing that it exists at all. The Radio Times piece suggests ‘he’s inclined to believe there’s something in it’, but in practice that’s simply a fascination with what the actual cause of so-called ghosts and hauntings might be. In his next BBC play, Kneale would address this question more directly.
In the period following his appeal to Director General Hugh Carleton Greene, Kneale’s reunion with the BBC had proved to be a mixed blessing. “I was able to do plays for the BBC, but with dwindling enthusiasm,” he admits. “It was a bad and bitter time, because I never really made friends with them again. Not the lower orders. Mr Greene was good, but there were a lot who didn’t like me at all — particularly as I’d run to the Director General. So I had quite a lot of enemies, and not many friends.” As a result, Kneale found himself accepting outside writing assignments, and striking hard bargains with the BBC as necessary. “I did quite a lot of feature film work,” he says. “That had advantages, mainly money. I didn’t miss the BBC or television at all. I worked out a kind of rule for myself, that the only things I would do on television were originals — and being paid as much as possible. Plus, they’d be made my way. The only adaptations I was doing were for films.”
In the film world, though, the scripting process was often long and arduous. Plus, it often involved rewriting the work of others, hardly a satisfying endeavour. “When they weren’t entirely happy with the script they’d got they’d say, ‘Could you come in and make it right?’” Kneale recalls. “It was the American method, really. Americans never felt they got the script right until about ten people had worked on it. But that wasn’t fun to do.” His own, rather bold approach was to insist on no further interference with a script once he’d submitted it. “I’d say, ‘I’ll write this thing for you, but nobody else. I will write it, and you make it.’ Certain times they were very happy with that. It didn’t apply to television, of course, because they couldn’t get people to write for them anyway. Not anybody with any class, anyway. A writer with any reputation steered away from them. But they certainly had assets in the way of studios, and they did eventually contact serious important actors. In the beginning no major actors would touch them. You couldn’t ask someone like Alec Guinness, say, to appear — not on television! A few years later, that had changed. Then you’d certainly get Alec Guinness. He’d be glad of the job.”
Kneale was involved in several abortive film projects at this time. Hollywood-based producer Edward L Rissien invited him to write a film titled Possession, concerning suspenseful, supernatural goings-on between two upper-class families. Kneale found Rissien, who had also started out with a successful career in television, polite and agreeable but the script never got as far as being written before the project was abandoned.
Another failed venture was an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1965 novel A Suspension of Mercy. In this instance, Kneale found himself involved with an inexperienced film producer who’d optioned the book. “A terrible figure had turned up — I didn’t know he was really terrible — and saw my agent, and said, how would I like to script this story,” Kneale recalls. “This was a creature called Wilbur Stark. He was the father of Koo Stark, who became Prince Andrew’s lover later on. I think Wilbur saw himself getting into the royal family. This stubby little creature, who my son, who was about eight at the time, described as ‘the binman’, because he looked more like a binman than anything else!”
At the time Stark’s cinema credentials were far from impressive. From the 1940s onwards, he’d produced a whole raft of successful, albeit firmly low-brow, radio and television shows. For film, during the early seventies he produced the likes of the sleazy Love Box, Hammer studios’ Vampire Circus (both 1972) and the trashy Joan Collins vehicle The Stud (1974). Thereafter his credits were few and far between, but they did include executive producer status on the remakes of Cat People and The Thing (both 1982).
In the course of their dealings, Stark left a strong, and far from pleasant, impression on Kneale. “Wilbur fancied himself as a great Hollywood producer, but he’d hardly produced anything. I remember he and his long-suffering New York partner Jerry [Layton] came for a dreadful meal in a very trendy riverside restaurant, The White Elephant. Wilbur had booked a table for himself, Jerry and my wife and myself, and spent the whole time accosting waitresses until Jerry, who was a nice man, buried his face despairingly into his serviette, and said, ‘He’s always like this.’ He once came to our house for a party. He was a terrible figure, a hanger-on.”
Nevertheless, Kneale turned in a completed script to Stark. Highsmith’s original novel sees a television scriptwriter, Sydney Bartleby, pretending to murder and bury his wife, who is actually away on a trip — only to find that she has, in fact, disappeared, and he has become the prime suspect in the investigation. Kneale scripted an adaptation under the new title Foxy. “It was a bloody good script, actually,” he asserts. “Certainly the first half, which was the half I spent most time on, was extremely good! It was one of those stories that tends to lose its way towards the end — it can’t quite decide which way to go — but there were some nice juicy parts. In fact, it would have been jolly good if they’d ever made it, but of course they never did.”
Wilbur Stark ended up doing the project more harm than good. “Wilbur loved the script, and by some master-stroke, had sold it simultaneously to about six different film companies. He’d been posting this thing round to everybody he knew, every company from MGM down, and they all expressed sharp interest in doing it as a major feature. But that wasn’t enough for Wilbur, who just thought he was having a ball. Every time he got a company saying, ‘Yes, we’d like to do this,’ he said ‘I’ve got to get a deal to do six movies; I’ve got to be a six movie man.’ He’d never made anything at all, so they naturally backed off, saying, ‘Thank you very much’. He could have set this thing up easily, but he got so greedy that they all pulled out. They said, ‘this man’s mind is not on making a film.’ His partner was in despair. I can’t imagine Patricia Highsmith was crazy about the arrangement either. That’s the full awful horror of having anything to do with films. It’s a dirty game.”*
Fruitless assignments were often unfulfilling by nature, but Kneale had long since accepted that this was merely the way of things in the film world. “When you’re doing a film script, it’s only if you do the final script that matters. These were first draft things. It doesn’t matter how elaborately you do it. You say ‘Here you are — 150 first draft pages, all finished’; they say, ‘We’re going to shoot it’. And you think, ‘They’re going to make this one.’ Then something crops up. You find they have no money to do it with or they’re everybody’s enemy or something. And they don’t make it and it’s very disappointing. There were all sorts of things that I wrote which were never made and that wasn’t my fault, because the scripts were bloody good. That’s the sad bit, really.”
In a similar vein, director Christopher Miles had helmed a passable adaptation of D H Lawrence’s novella The Virgin and the Gypsy in 1970, and went on to plan a major version of the same author’s The Plumed Serpent. The novel follows a grieving widow, Kate Leslie, who visits Mexico during the revolution and becomes involved with a seductive soldier, and thereby embroiled in the revived Aztec cult of Quetzalcoatl. Faye Dunaway had been approached to star as Kate, with Omar Sharif lined up as her co-star. Kneale provided a full draft script. “It wasn’t bad. It was quite a decent script. Faye Dunaway rang me up one night to try and find out more about the project. She wanted to know what she was letting herself in for. It was a very shaky project. There were too many shaky hands on the wheel.”
When the project faltered, a rethink was called for. The director’s sister, actor Sarah Miles, was then offered the role of Kate, and Sarah’s husband, Cheshire-born screenwriter Robert Bolt, whose credits included Lawrence of Arabia and Dr Zhivago, provided a new script from scratch. “Robert Bolt did the script as a gift to the company,” Kneale explains. “There were two ways of doing the script. I’d done one and he could see what that was. The other way was to put all the emphases a different way, which he did very effectively.” Despite prolonged preparations to get the project made, eventually the enterprise collapsed entirely.
The BBC remained keen to employ Kneale, especially as an old friend — Christopher Morahan, who had directed The Road and the ill-starred remake of Nineteen Eighty-Four — was now in a position of some power. “Chris had risen to be the head of drama,” Kneale recalls (the specific title that Morahan held was BBC TV’s Head of Plays, from 1972 to 1976). “He said, ‘We could do with a Christmas play’. I said ‘Yes, I could do that.’ ‘We want a ghost story’, he said — in a rather tired way. I said, ‘Only if we could do a ghost story which had an altogether different twist — such as going at a ghost with science’. He said ‘Oh, yes, let’s do that!’”
As Morahan recalls, “When I was Head of Plays I asked him to come and do another play.” Morahan summaries Kneale’s proposal as being “about a house which has its own history built into its stones: what happened in the house has been collected and lies hidden in the building. It has a scientific presence, which is a fascinating idea.”
In many ways, what Kneale was proposing was a modern day counterpart to The Road: a team of people turning cutting edge technology on a haunting, and the state of the art being confounded and defeated by the ancient and mysterious. “It was set in the home of an electrical institute where they are investigating phenomena and they’re working towards developing new technologies. They find they’ve got a ghost on their premises, and they decide to crack it. And that’s what it is — a very, very elaborate sort of ghost story.”
The blurring of old and new was developed further by the setting. The company in question, Ryan Electronics, have taken on a sprawling, crumbling mansion, Taskerlands, as a research centre. As such, the newest technology imaginable is shipped into a building with a great deal of history. In itself, this owed something to the genesis of the piece during the writing process. “It took a bit longer to write than unusual, because there was quite a lot of technical stuff,” Kneale says. “I remember I went down to the BBC’s research headquarters. It was an old country house in Surrey, called Kingswood Warren. It had been, in its day, rather grand, and the BBC had bought it for research and divided it all up into little compartments.”
A sprawling Gothic mansion house, most of which dated back to the 1840s, Kingswood Warren had been taken on as a centre for the BBC’s Research and Development department in 1948. All manner of major technological innovations in broadcasting had been created there, and continued to be until the BBC’s operations relocated in 2010. At the time of his 1972 visit, Kneale recalled, “they had people there working hard on new developments in television. I just came in as a layman. They were all very nice and I was shown everything. It was a lot of stuff about simplifying images on television which you could do just by turning a knob, you could have half as many pixels or something. And turn another knob and half as many again, until you got a thing so simplified it looked like a woodcut. Things like that, which were essential and probably very good things to research. It gave quite a good idea of the sort of place that would fit the story, and then I left it to them.”
Even the researchers Kneale met at Kingswood Warren had an impact on their fictional counterparts. “The sort of impression you got of the folk who worked there was a boyishness,” Kneale recalls. “They were very cheerful. It was all rather fun to them, which is a very clever way to go about doing that sort of heavy research. You should be able to take it lightly, otherwise it’ll sink you. They were nice chaps — and so we got some very nice chaps for the TV version.”
For the production itself, the BBC filmed at a location very similar, and indeed very close, to the one Kneale had visited — one with its own links with pioneering technological research: Horsley Towers in Surrey. “They found a very good house indeed,” Kneale says, “rather better than the BBC’s one, also ancient early Victorian. It had belonged long ago to a woman called Ada Lovelace. She was Lord Byron’s daughter. She had long gone, obviously, but what was interesting was that, by pure chance, she had sponsored Charles Babbage.”
Today Babbage and Lovelace are regarded as perhaps the earliest pioneers in the field of what we now know as computing. During the 1820s, over 100 years before Alan Turing constructed ‘Baby’, the first stored-programme computer, mathematician Babbage built an automated ‘Difference Machine’ for performing basic calculations. As well as funding his research, Lovelace wrote a theoretical programme for one of the more complex calculating machines which Babbage designed. As such, she holds the position of the world’s first computer programmer, and Babbage as the visionary who first designed one — at least, as far as early nineteenth century technology would allow. “He was the inventor of computers, more or less, but at a time when there were no electronics, nothing. He made them out of steel and you wound them up. So that’s where they shot it. They used this rather strange and wonderful old house, with its chapels and things, for background filming, with the rest being done in the studio.”
The assigned director, Peter Sasdy, was new to Kneale, but their working relationship was a good one. “Peter was a man I hadn’t known before, who had a lot of experience in television, since the beginning,” Kneale says. “He was a Hungarian. He worked for Hammer, too. That was the only time we ever worked together on anything, and mostly he was happy on his own.” With some irony, Sasdy adopted new BBC technology for the play. It was made entirely on video, as opposed to film, and within a few years the technique became standard BBC practice.
The studio sets needed to be populated with convincing technology, which the ever-frugal BBC provided via an internal source. “In addition to their research establishment, the BBC also had another research place somewhere off Oxford Street — very central — where they kept computers,” Kneale says (most likely in reference to the BBC’s White City building on Wood Lane). “Now the computers at that time were enormous. They’d half fill a room. They carted one down to the studio very kindly and it was genuine. This was the latest state of the art stuff. It doesn’t look very state of the art now, but it was then. Jane Asher had to do a lot of work on it, playing a computer expert. She was bashing away at this machinery. She was extremely good.” As a child, Asher had, of course, appeared in Hammer’s Quatermass Xperiment film, but Kneale was prepared to overlook that matter. “She was only six then. I’m sure she didn’t remember anything about it. She’d grown up a lot!”
With an initial title of Breakthrough, redolent of both the supernatural and the scientific simultaneously, the play was first considered as an entry in a new BBC supernatural drama anthology, Dead of Night, under esteemed producer Innes Lloyd. Eventually though Kneale’s play, retitled The Stone Tape, was hived off and afforded special status, albeit still produced by Lloyd and his team, including script editor Louis Marks. It was broadcast on BBC2 at 9.25pm on Christmas Day 1972 — minus the anthology banner, though almost exactly a week after the final entry of Dead of Night and in an identical time-slot. Notably, though, it ran to a feature length ninety minutes, whereas the other Dead of Night entries ran to just fifty minutes.
The Stone Tape’s central concept — namely that emotionally-charged events can be ‘stored’ within the fabric of a building, and replayed years later, resulting in so-called ‘ghosts’ — wasn’t unique to Kneale, and had been floating about as a pseudoscientific theory for some years. But in dramatising this theory, Kneale’s play did much to popularise it, and the term ‘stone tape theory’ is now commonly used in reference to it.
It’s easy to see The Stone Tape as a refinement of the ‘haunting’ themes previously raised by Quatermass and the Pit and The Road — specifically, the idea of trying to apply science and reason to the supernatural. There’s also a subtle link, buried away on the soundtrack. The array of unusual sounds were tailor-made for the production by the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop, just as the earlier projects had featured the department’s experimental sounds. Here, the sounds were provided by a small team — the Workshop’s co-founder Desmond Briscoe, who had previously provided special sound effects for Quatermass and the Pit, and newcomer Glynis Jones. Workshop archivist Mark Ayres suggests, “what probably happened is that Desmond ‘directed’ the sound project, coming up with ideas and planning it out, while Glynis did most of the actual creative work.” Between them, they provided electronic sounds and music for the programme; as Ayres points out, more technology was available to the Workshop than for earlier productions: “They would have had the EMS synthesisers, more advanced filters and mixing techniques”.
It’s canny of Kneale the storyteller to place such store in the power of sound in the piece, and the sterling work of Briscoe and Jones adds much to the mood. Unlike the earlier Kneale dramas they had worked on, this wasn’t a rare opportunity for the Workshop to showcase their abilities: the department was now a fixture at the BBC. This new assignment fell between episodes of The Goodies and Frontier in Space, another Doctor Who adventure. (Indeed, by this point, the time-travelling Doctor was celebrating ten years on the small screen.)
Kneale declares himself well pleased with the play’s use of radio-phonics. “That was outside my province, but it was very effective stuff.” Indeed, overall, Kneale regards The Stone Tape as perhaps his very best work. “Oh yes, it’s a good one. I mean, that’s not to say it’s perfect. There were things we could have improved, of course. As always, seeing it again you think, ‘Oh God, what a pity we’ve got that in’ or ‘Somebody’s voice should just have been a bit louder there.’ But they did it very well.”
It’s difficult to overstate just how significant The Stone Tape is within Kneale’s wider body of work. As a writer, he will forever be associated with Quatermass, but that encompasses an assortment of TV serials and film adaptations. The Stone Tape stands as perhaps Kneale’s single greatest achievement: a brilliantly conceived, impressively realised self-contained one-off piece, distilling many of his key themes, tropes and preoccupations. It was by no means the end of his writing career, but in truth he’d never quite scale such heights again. It can’t hurt that, while many of Kneale’s BBC plays are now missing from the archives, The Stone Tape still exists and so can continue to reach admiring new viewers.
Kim Newman has vivid memories of seeing the play as a boy, and of being aware of the writer’s reputation. “When I sat down to watch it, I knew who Nigel was, which is unusual,” Newman says. “I mean, apart from, say, Dennis Potter, you didn’t tend to know who wrote television.” Today, Newman rates The Stone Tape as his personal favourite of Kneale’s work. “It gets better and better the more I see it,” he says.
Writer Jeremy Dyson, who first found fame as part of the League of Gentlemen comedy team, is in awe of this example of Kneale’s imaginative storytelling. “He makes this connection between science and the supernatural, which is such a genius, brilliant thing to do,” Dyson asserts. “It’s remarkable that it hasn’t been done more, really, but you know this instinctively as a child, because as a child, if you like the fantastic, you’re drawn to both. There was an overlap, and you knew that. But Kneale was the only writer I’m aware of who really articulated that and actually fused the two. Really they’re both metaphors for the dark side of the subconscious — forces that are larger than ourselves, within ourselves. Kneale combines the two and uses one to illuminate the other.”
For Dyson, The Stone Tape represents the pinnacle of this strain of Kneale’s writing. “I think he does something remarkable,” Dyson says. “He strikes a note that’s so resonant that it just circumnavigates your intellect and gets you on a much deeper level, which is why The Stone Tape is I think somehow greater than the sum of its parts. You watch it and it just has this impact on you, rather like being in the room itself. Extraordinary piece of work.”
It was only years later that comics writer Grant Morrison realised the significance of Nigel Kneale. “Things like The Stone Tape were really creepy and very memorable,” Morrison says. “Just brilliant images. That scared the hell out of me! I didn’t know it was Nigel Kneale for a long time, but then I discovered that loads of the plays that I’d seen had been his stuff, and of course that made sense.”
The BFI’s Dick Fiddy admires the piece, but has his reservations. “I’ve seen it a lot of times now. I can remember seeing it when it first went out and I found it very, very scary then, but far less so now,” Fiddy opines. “To tell the truth, I don’t think it’s aged well. The idea is fantastic, that somehow stone can hold on to personalities or situations and this is what ghosts are. This sort of scientific explanation for the supernatural and mythology is very typical of Kneale’s work. I think that really does work still, and it’s got wonderful performances — Michael Bryant, Jane Asher, they stand out well — but a lot of it’s studio bound, and it doesn’t look as good as it might do. I think he’s done better stuff.”
In some ways the piece is actually a throwback in terms of the writer’s development. At a time when he was pushing his writing into new areas, The Stone Tape is a refinement of familiar themes, established way back in Tomato Cain stories such as Minuke, and the radio play You Must Listen. It also harks back to the ‘team in peril’ format of the Quatermass serials. But the writer, by now, was extremely adept at dealing with such themes, and The Stone Tape is rightly regarded as among his finest achievements.
More television work was to follow, too. Weeks before his latest play had even been shown, Kneale was commissioned by the BBC to write a new four-part serial, bringing his Professor Quatermass back to the small screen after almost fifteen years.
The precise genesis of the new serial has grown rather hazy over time. Possibly it had some connection to the fourth Quatermass film that Hammer proposed in 1969, although that had progressed no further than an early discussion stage. More likely, Kneale was aware that the BBC were open to the prospect of a return for the troubled professor, and the ideas behind it had slowly percolated in his imagination. Kneale himself is no longer sure who first forwarded the suggestion. “It’s hard to say,” he admits. “It was probably in the wind, I should think. My agent may have suggested it to them. Anyway, I thought of a story, and I said, ‘Let’s make it quite different from the previous three’, and obviously it had to be. A lot had happened since the last one. It was a different world, a much seedier world.” After all, the key quality of the fifties serials had been their thoroughly contemporary setting: different, in fact, from one another, despite being set just years apart. This, then, would pitch the professor into the seventies.
The serial — never formally named, but known variously as Quatermass IV or simply Quatermass — was to reflect troubled times. Kneale drew on many current events for inspiration. Now man had walked on the Moon, the American government had curtailed the multibillion dollar Apollo space programme, while staggering amounts of money were being spent on the Vietnam conflict, which continued to claim huge casualties, and the ongoing ‘Cold War’ with Russia. In the midst of this, the two superpowers were planning, rather uneasily, to co-operate on a prototype space station, Skylab. Since 1960, OPEC — an affiliation of the world’s oil-producing companies — had been putting intense pressure on the Western world over the price of their much-needed fossil fuel resources. Consequently, by 1973, the West was undergoing an energy crisis, and Britain was beset by strikes and power cuts. Many observers predicted that the crisis would worsen, resulting eventually in a total breakdown of society. It was feared that ownership of the fuel supply could spark devastating wars.
Kneale’s proposed new serial, then, would see an elderly, frightened Bernard Quatermass set adrift in a near-future extrapolation of this strife-ridden early 1970s world. As society capsizes, the Americans and Soviets would be pouring funds into space exploration, and in his expert capacity Quatermass would be drawn in when catastrophe threatens. Feeling alienated among young people, he would nevertheless long to connect to them. Indeed, Quatermass’ only concern is for his missing young granddaughter.
As ever, the conflict of the old and the young was a keen concern for Kneale. At the time, the young people of the West were rejecting the establishment of their parents’ generation which had instigated the war in Vietnam, assassinated world leaders, or else fallen, like Nixon in America, into total disrepute. The young generation elected to turn on, tune in and drop out, often seizing on a drug-enhanced lifestyle, finding their own modes of dress and speech, and embracing New Age spirituality inspired by Eastern mysticism. Indeed, the hippy movement was like a more good-natured version of the cult of the Grads that Kneale had conceived in The Big, Big Giggle.
For this new serial, the writer took the idea a step further, creating a near-future in which young folk joined together to call themselves ‘Planet People’. This curious cult would roam the countryside, seeking out places of gathering, from ancient stone circles to football stadia, in the hope of visitation from an unpredictable white light. By their understanding, the recipients were transported to another, better world. In fact, they were being harvested as field specimens by a far-off alien force. Like the Grads, the Planet People would therefore be — albeit unwittingly — enthusiastically suicidal, and sing simple rhymes to demonstrate their togetherness. But the Planet People would have a darker side, inspired by the grimmer sidelines of hippy culture. Like Charles Manson and his homicidal ‘family’, a rogue pack of Planet People, under the leadership of the charismatic Kickalong, would be quite capable of murder.
Once Kneale had submitted a full set of scripts, the BBC appointed a producer, Joe Waters, to the project. At that time Waters was a mainstay of the BBC’s trusty police drama Dixon of Dock Green. The show had been running continuously since 1955, and Waters had been in place as its producer since 1969, turning his hand to directing occasional episodes, too. It took a well-earned break for most of 1973, and so Waters was assigned to the embryonic new Quatermass project, where he began drawing up a detailed budget. It was hoped to co-fund the serial with an overseas television station, an approach that the Corporation was generally beginning to move towards.
During the spring of 1973, Kneale worked at rewriting the scripts, and the BBC visual effects department began shooting test footage. When the Department of the Environment refused permission to use Stonehenge for location shooting, the BBC considered building their own mock stone circle. The budget was now estimated at £200,000. In an uncanny replay of the fate of The Big, Big Giggle, the BBC grew wary of producing the serial, considering the material excessively dark — not to mention very costly. “I wrote it, and they just simply found it too expensive,” Kneale says. “And it was very expensive, there was no question about that. It required either using or building a Stonehenge, and an awful lot of outdoor shooting, which is always expensive. A lot of extras, a lot of people indeed. I think there also was a feeling against it that it really wasn’t what the BBC wanted to say. It didn’t suit their image at that time; it was too gloomy. So they decided not to do it. It simply died.”
By late summer, the serial had been shelved by the BBC. Producer Joe Waters had gone some way towards appointing a complete technical crew for Quatermass project, but in the event returned to Dixon of Dock Green, the first episode of a new series being broadcast in December 1973. As per their contract with Kneale, the Corporation maintained an option to go ahead with the new Quatermass through to 1975, but made no attempt to do so. The writer was left with a fully-scripted fourth Quatermass adventure. In due course, it did earn its keep. In the meantime, though, Kneale’s dissatisfaction with the BBC began to stew.
Around this time, Kneale was particularly enthused about a project he was developing with his sometime collaborator, director Michael Elliott. Working closely together, Kneale and Elliott devised an almost experimental one-off drama about a middle-aged couple, Tony and Hana Brice, who make ends meet by passing along classified information, to which the husband is privy in the course of his job, to a foreign power in exchange for money. The story would be told almost exclusively from the viewpoint of the couple’s adolescent son, Stephen. The boy is right in the throes of puberty, and his parent’s mysterious behaviour fits easily into his already perplexed view of the world.
Stephen encounters an older woman, Mary, whilst passing time on the local common, and their friendship develops into a secret affair. When his parents learn of this, they panic that the woman might be investigating their illicit dealings, and trying to infiltrate the family home. They announce to Stephen that they are all due to leave the country at short notice; but Stephen passes this information along to Mary. Sure enough, when the Brice family car arrives at the ferry port as planned, Mary is waiting with a contingent from Special Branch — and has them arrested. Kneale called this new piece Cracks. “It was a notion Michael Elliott and I had,” Kneale recalls. “He was rather taken with the idea. I wrote a script, and he was going to direct it.”
First, there was the matter of where Cracks might find a home. In October 1970, the BBC had moved The Wednesday Play to make way for midweek sports coverage. Now resident on Thursday nights, the strand was reborn as Play for Today, and Irene Shubik, previously the originating producer of Out of the Unknown, took the helm. She duly commissioned Cracks from Kneale, with Elliott attached as director. But soon after submitting the finished script, a marked departure from his usual style and subject matter, Kneale was informed that it wouldn’t be being put into production. Possibly Shubik was taken aback by the different style in which Kneale was writing. Perhaps she felt uncertain of the content — a tale of everyday, suburban spying, and a schoolboy who conducts an affair with an older woman. But then, Play for Today prided itself on tackling powerful, controversial material.
To this day, Kneale believes the BBC had their own reasons for rejecting Cracks, namely their strained relationship with the play’s intended director. “Michael was never an easy man,” Kneale acknowledges. “He always got people’s backs up. This was at a time when Michael was falling out with the BBC. In his time there, he’d made too many enemies, because he knew what he wanted and they didn’t like that. They found him arrogant, I suppose, although he wasn’t. We knew him well. He needed a lot of reassurance. [The BBC] don’t take chances if they can possibly help it.”
Alongside his television work, Elliott had maintained his parallel career as a theatre director — indeed, a very highly respected one. During the late 1960s, he’d developed a good working relationship with fellow director Braham Murray in Manchester, co-founding the 69 Theatre Company which staged productions at Manchester University Theatre to great acclaim. The company’s ambitions grew, and when Elliott’s dissatisfaction with television work boiled over, matters came to a head. “Michael quit the BBC”, Kneale says. “He’d had enough. They just never got on. He was too much of an intellectual for them. I suppose he offended them, trod on toes, but he didn’t care.”
Instead, Elliott threw his weight behind the Manchester company, who established a new, permanent venue in the city centre’s grand Royal Exchange building, which was standing empty under threat of demolition. “So he left them and went off to establish the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester. He was happy running that while things moved on.” Thus Elliott became one of the five founding artistic directors of the company: as it happens, one of his four fellows was James Maxwell, who had previously starred as Sir Timothy Hassall in Kneale’s 1963 TV play The Road (and whose ghost, rather fittingly, is now said to haunt the Royal Exchange building).
Elliott continued his stellar working relationship with the Royal Exchange up until his death of kidney failure in 1984. He made just one return to television, directing a major production of King Lear starring Laurence Olivier, which was shown in 1983 during the early months of Channel 4. Unhappily, though, this exile from TV also meant the end of his working relationship with Kneale. They remained friends, but never collaborated again.*
It’s striking, though, that Cracks represents a new direction in Kneale’s writing. It’s much more low-key and intimate than, say, The Road or The Stone Tape. The characters, rather than the central concepts, drive the piece. For all the talk of spying and subterfuge, it’s the tale of a family, and a young man growing up within it. It’s tempting to suggest that it’s somehow more personal to Kneale than much of his previous work. His children were then approaching adolescence, and the family lived by a large common, not unlike the one featured in the script. Perhaps the writer was looking closer to home for inspiration, rather than into wider society. Although the script went unmade, this evolution in Kneale’s style would continue. He didn’t mourn for Cracks too much. “When Michael left the BBC, it just lay on a shelf,” he says. “One thing dies and another thing pops up. It’s no good grieving about the one you quite liked, but which didn’t go…”
Despite the loss of Cracks, his writing was moving inexorably in the direction of more intimate, contemporary material, and the BBC was still finding work for Kneale. Following on from the success of Dead of Night, BBC producer Innes Lloyd and his team were embarking on a string of six new dramas under the banner title Bedtime Stories, wherein children’s fairy stories would be reinterpreted as the framework for original adult dramas. Variously broadcast around the 10pm mark on BBC2 through March and April 1974, the series included Alan Plater’s contemporary spin on Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and similarly Andrew Davies’ The Water Maiden, and John Bowen’s The Snow Queen.
“There was a series of stories based on old folk tales,” Kneale recalls. “They wanted one more to fit in, and I wrote one based on Jack and the Beanstalk — although there was no Jack and there was no beanstalk. It was all entirely psychological.” Kneale found himself rather intrigued by the concept, “looking for the truth behind fairy tales, in the theory that there was some sort of adult truth behind every one of them. I picked Jack and the Beanstalk, which was full of symbols and things like that.”
Rather than accentuating the fantastical elements of the tale, Kneale used it as an entirely metaphorical framework for a thoroughly modern day piece. Adolescent Jonathan Weir (played by Martin C Thurley) lives with his middle-aged mother Linda (Stephanie Bidmead), on the verge of leaving home and still feeling the loss of his father, Duggie (Glyn Owen). Jonathan’s memories of Duggie, who died when the boy was only three years old, are understandably muddled and unclear. In flashback, from the child’s point of view, Duggie is seen as a towering, cruel man to be feared: a giant. Most of Jonathan’s memories involve the boy shinning up a table leg and peering over the top to observe his parents, or of happy times with his mother being disrupted by his drunken, unpleasant father. He even fears that he was partly responsible for Duggie’s death.
But as Jonathan begins to investigate the truth for himself, and seek out his late father’s friends, he realises his memories have been distorted by his overbearing mother’s hidden agenda. In fact, Duggie was a kind and loving man, driven to distraction and drink by his fractious relationship with Linda. Linda, it seems, never wanted a child, but Duggie doted on him. Duly transformed, Jonathan resolves to leave home, and in his imagination he finally makes peace with his now much-missed father.
In short, precious little of the familiar fairy story remains in the play. Kneale uses a few metaphorical associations from the tale to spin out an entirely new piece. The opening scenes, for instance, see Jonathan on a train journey to a university interview, only to be dissuaded from pursuing an academic path by a nosy fellow passenger. This parallels the fairytale, in which, Jack, on his way to market, is persuaded instead to return home with a handful of magic seeds.
Increasingly, then, Kneale’s work was moving away from an emphasis on fantastical ideas and towards an emphasis on domesticity and character. Much like the unrealised Cracks, this was a small-scale drama, of troubled families and a problematic childhood, rather than a tale of outlandish events impacting on a wide cast of individuals. More than ever before, Kneale was moving into an area of intimate storytelling where the single human face was pivotal. And yet, Kneale’s focus remained the conflict between the old and the young. In the event, though, the BBC’s production of the script was a little botched. “They did it rather nervously, but quite well,” Kneale considers. “But the series was originated by them, not me.” Directed by BBC TV drama stalwart Peter Ciappessoni, and with small roles for fine actors of the ilk of Peter Jeffrey and Liz Smith, Jack and the Beanstalk was broadcast on BBC2 on March 24, 1974, but made only a limited impact on the viewing audience. It’s now lost from the BBC’s archive, and despite following closely after the highly-regarded Stone Tape, it’s one of Kneale’s least-known original dramas.
Once again, Kneale had grown decidedly disenchanted. Over two years, two fully written scripts for the BBC — Cracks and the fourth Quatermass serial — had been shelved late in the day. Even Jack and the Beanstalk had been produced, he felt, in a somewhat lacklustre fashion. Having not long since re-established his working relationship with the Corporation, it had now soured again. What happened next wasn’t, it seems, especially premeditated or seen as final. Simply, Kneale was approached to contribute a script to a new drama strand for independent television over at ATV. But he accepted the offer — and after Jack and the Beanstalk he never wrote a television script for the BBC again.
*It should be noted that Wilbur Stark did end up credited as executive producer on a little-seen German language film adaptation of Suspension of Mercy, shot in Canada in 1989. Kneale’s screenplay was not used: the new version — entitled Der Geschichtenerzähler, that is, The Story Teller, under which title Highsmith’s novel had been published in the US — played very fast and loose with the source novel.
*Elliott’s daughter, Marianne, followed in her father’s footsteps and became a leading theatre director herself, with major credits including the hit stage adaptations of War Horse and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
