BY THIS POINT, KNEALE HAD BEEN WORKING IN BRITISH TELEVISION SINCE the 1950s, when the industry was first becoming properly bedded-in and organised. By the late 1980s, though, it had changed almost beyond recognition. Television had become literally part of the furniture, a living room fixture and a staple of the nation’s leisure time for young and old. But it had also become a target for all sorts of pressure groups. The likes of Mary Whitehouse saw it as a potentially destructive influence, allowing programmes with sexual or violent content into the homes of vulnerable viewers. For largely similar reasons, political parties kept a close eye on any bias within the medium’s output. An arguably outdated BBC faced a struggle to remain a vital part of the television landscape, particularly as searching questions were being asked about the necessity and wisdom of the national licence fee that provided the Corporation’s funding.
One tidal change was the introduction of a fourth terrestrial channel, the independent Channel 4, in November 1982. It was intended as a cutting edge minority interest alternative to ITV. Other plans were afoot to introduce satellite and cable channels to Britain soon after. When the regional ITV franchises were re-negotiated, some companies lost out. The Midlands-based ATV only survived by mutating into a substantially different company, rebranded as Central Independent Television. Ted Childs, who had been the producer of the sprawling ITV Quatermass project for Euston Films, was appointed Controller of Drama at Central. As we’ll see, it didn’t hurt for Kneale to have an ally there.
In the early weeks of 1983, the two main channels, BBC1 and ITV, increased their broadcasting hours by launching early morning ‘breakfast’ programming. As viewer choice expanded, broadcasters faced a fight for audiences. The BBC had always been set against the notion of having an ongoing soap opera. ITV had Coronation Street, a weekly audience winner since it began in December 1960, but the BBC fought shy of such blatant ratings bait.
In truth, they had often dabbled with the form down the decades, with shows from The Grove Family and The Newcomers to Angels and Triangle, but their longevity was always rather limited. During the eighties, though, as the ratings war was ramped up, the BBC realised that they might need their own regular soap. Imported hits such as Dallas and Dynasty were all well and good, but there were great advantages to be had in manufacturing one of their own.
Therefore BBC commissioned EastEnders, a new twice-weekly soap opera to be launched on BBC1 in February 1985. One of the architects of the new soap was Michael Grade, formerly the Director of Programmes at LWT when Kinvig had been made (and nephew of ATV boss Lew Grade). In 1984, Grade had been appointed Controller of BBC1. EastEnders was formally commissioned by his predecessor, Alan Hart, but Grade was instrumental in steering the fledgling show onto the nation’s screens.
However, there were other implications of the decision to launch a soap. Inevitably production of the new show would leave a major dent in the BBC drama department’s annual budget. Arguably the chief casualty was the Corporation’s venerable Play for Today drama strand. The final entry, The Amazing Miss Stella Estelle, was shown on August 28, 1984, although new one-off plays, shorn of the Play for Today banner, were broadcast in a similar slot up until the following February. In fact, East-Enders made its debut just a fortnight after the last of these plays.
New BBC drama strands were launched — Screen One for BBC1, Screen Two for BBC2 — but these were costly, occasional pieces mostly shot on film. The heyday of studio-made BBC television drama, the environment that had nurtured talents such as Kneale, Dennis Potter and Jack Rosenthal, was over.
There had been another, more subtle change to the broadcasting climate, too. During the late seventies and early eighties, the post-Star Wars boom for science fiction and all things fantastical had doubtless helped the likes of Kinvig and the final Quatermass to get the go-ahead. By the late eighties, though, this boom was well and truly over, and as a consequence of the resulting backlash, British ‘telefantasy’ was becoming scarcer than ever before. Kneale was now unlikely to get his more speculative style of drama onto the nation’s screens. Gritty realism was becoming the order of the day.
This, then, was the broadcasting medium into which Kneale was pitched in 1986. His return to television nearly came much sooner, when he was commissioned to write a television version of science fiction author Brian Aldiss’ acclaimed first novel, Non-Stop, which was published in 1958. The novel depicts a primitive tribe who live in a brutal wilderness, in the grip of irrational worship, until a contingent is recruited on a mission to explore the outer reaches of their world. After the treacherous, eventful journey, it transpires that their home is, in fact, a vast space craft, whose flight has taken so long that the passengers have spawned whole new generations. Meanwhile their understanding of their purpose, and the nature of their home, has gradually been lost to ignorance and superstition.
“Brian Aldiss was a very fashionable science fiction writer at the time,” Kneale remembers. “The book wasn’t quite television. A good idea and everything, but not quite a television programme. It was about creatures in a spaceship, who think really it’s the world. They don’t know any better, but it’s been going round and round the universe for two centuries, and people have been born there and died there. It’s their complete world.”
The proposed adaptation was for Granada TV, the Manchester-based region of ITV. Kneale wrote the serial in full, in four parts, under various titles over assorted different drafts, namely Far, Roscard’s World and, ultimately, Non-Stop, during the period 1984 to 1988. However, it dawned on Granada just how expensive such a production might be. “I wrote a script at their request, and they were set to go on it, but they hadn’t realised how much it would cost in scenery and sets,” Kneale says. “I think that’s what broke it. They realised that they’d have had to build everything. Granada at that time must have been a bit short or something, so it didn’t proceed.” Kneale didn’t feel the loss too greatly, though. “It wasn’t a great thing, but it was all right,” he suggests.
In the event, then, Kneale’s eventual television comeback came about when Nick Palmer, formerly the producer of Murrain and Beasts, was assembling writers for Unnatural Causes, a TV anthology of seven ‘psychodramas’ for Central. Among names such as Palmer himself, Beryl Bainbridge, Sapphire and Steel creator P J Hammond, Lynda la Plante and Paula Milne, Palmer asked Kneale to contribute. He readily agreed.
The kernel of the idea for the new drama had been percolating for some time. “I’d never written one about a gentlemen’s club,” Kneale says. “I don’t belong to one and never did. Once or twice I went to something like the Savile, and was treated to a meal there. I’d got a fairly vivid impression of the Savile and the Garrick and those places.” Kneale’s piece, Ladies’ Night, would concern the casual misogyny of such institutions, and the concessions they are forced to make in the modern day. “It was a bit of sharp mockery. It was about these awful people who ran this hideous club which had been founded on the basis of shooting wild animals. The place is liberally decorated with effigies, stuffed bears and things, and the whole place smelt of decay and horror. There were no women, except when they’re forced, more or less through penury, to accept women as members. They were only there once a fortnight.”
This uneasy arrangement quickly comes to grief. “One of the more put-down members [James Tripp, played by Ronald Pickup] has invited his wife [Evelyn, played by Fiona Walker] on an overnight stay, and kills her for shame at her presence,” Kneale explains. “And he’s treated with acclaim by all the other members. They’re all very pleased. In fact, he hasn’t killed her. He’s just practically killed her, and she manages to crawl out of the place and is picked up by a set of police women, the rape detail — a newly established section of the Metropolitan police, which has not actually ever been brought into being, and perhaps should be. On this occasion, they got the entire heap of members of this awful gent’s club. They invade the premises and totally demolish it.”
Ladies’ Night was directed by Herbert Wise, himself something of a television veteran, having helmed many notable productions, not least the BBC’s acclaimed 1976 adaptation of Robert Graves’ I, Claudius. It was broadcast as part of the Unnatural Causes strand on December 6, 1986. Ladies’ Night is a curious piece, comparable perhaps with Kinvig back in 1981, in that Kneale attempts to deliver character-driven black comedy but isn’t wholly successful. Although it concerns an ugly clash between the genders, the female characters are only marginally more pleasant than the males, and neither is drawn with much depth. Appearing in the key role of Colonel Waley, Kneale’s real life neighbour Alfred Burke is particularly one-dimensional, though Ronald Pickup delivers a rather more nuanced performance as Mr Tripp.
Simply put, the central joke of Ladies’ Night isn’t a particularly good one, though it does have its moments — particularly the opening scene, in which each club member must, on arrival, ceremoniously pat a stuffed aardvark named Eustace. All told it was a rather inauspicious, low-key return for Kneale to the medium of television after a five year absence. A spin-off publication by Javelin Books allowed the series’ writers, Kneale included, to retell their tales in short story form. Although it was an adaptation, it was the first short story Kneale had written since his Tomato Cain collection thirty-seven years earlier. Though no sudden literary revelation in and of itself, Kneale’s story is arguably more successful than the television version, boasting a more confident, sure-footed tone, and in particular taking the opportunity to give much-needed added depth to the character of Colonel Waley.*
Scenes from Ladies’ Night, featuring Kneale’s friend and neighbour Alfred Burke.
Kneale next piece, Gentry, was also made under the aegis of Nick Palmer and Ted Childs at Central, as a one-off under the ITV Play banner. Its concept was thoroughly contemporary: the nefarious activities that go on within London’s property market. “Again it was purely a thing that was going on at that time — a great deal of buying and selling of houses,” Kneale recalls. “Taking awful, dead, broken-down districts where you could buy a house for way below its value so that you could practically rebuild it and sell it off for a high value. The people doing that were the gentry.” Kneale’s drama built a conflict from this scenario. “This was the case of a considerably dodgy solicitor who’s managed to get a house of this sort in the East End very cheaply by abstracting money from a client’s account to buy it with,” Kneale explains. “Having bought it, he discovered belatedly, and under pressure, that it’s been a haunt of criminals and in fact there was a dead body in the bath. The criminals come back to claim money they’ve secreted in the house, so — confrontation.”
Gentry’s opening shot pans along a London street busy with large cars, well-to-do looking residents, scaffolding, plentiful ‘For Sale’ signs and a few insalubrious figures, quickly establishing a very late eighties London scene of ongoing gentrification. This sequence is an uncanny echo, tantamount to recycling, of the opening of Kneale’s earlier TV play The Crunch. Indeed, both versions ultimately have the same pay-off, namely that seemingly innocent passers-by are actually spying on events in a particular house in an official capacity.
Like the Beasts entry Baby before it, Gentry shows a young couple in unfamiliar territory getting accustomed to a new home in need of repair — and urgently, too, as in both cases the wife is visibly pregnant. But whereas, in Baby, Jo and Peter Gilkes have to deal with superstitious builders, and find something unearthly hidden in a wall, Gentry’s Gerald and Susannah are held hostage by violent criminals. Ultimately, though, something is found hidden in the walls in Gentry too: namely the criminals’ ill-gotten gains. In Baby, the threat is supernatural: in Gentry, it’s rather more earthbound.
Roger Daltry in Gentry.
Directed by Roy Battersby (who was blacklisted by the BBC at the time, it’s said, for his Trotskyist political views), and broadcast on July 31, 1988, Gentry certainly won the approval of its writer. “It was very well done,” Kneale says, “well acted, though they were choked on brick dust, I remember, trying to uncover the loot.” A well-known musician-turned-actor was cast as the chief criminal, Colin. “Oh dear,” Kneale remarks. “To my surprise and delight, they found they’d got a hero from the pop industry, Roger Daltrey [lead singer of the Who]. In fact, he was not at all bad. He’d done very little acting, but he was fine.”
Indeed, Daltrey makes for a vivid Krays-esque criminal as Colin, while Phoebe Nicholls, as Susannah, displays real, convincing steel. Duncan Preston’s Gerald, though, remains flat and one-dimensional, and Colin’s criminal cohorts suffer the same fate. Gentry is ultimately about class relations, in much the same way that Ladies’ Night before it was about gender relations. Both pieces share the same rather undercooked black comedy tone, though Gentry comes out as the more successful of the two, by dint of some strong, claustrophobic direction by Battersby and occasional compelling performances — despite a distracting, strident rock soundtrack.
Both Ladies’ Night and Gentry have their merits, but neither brought out the best in Kneale. His usual preoccupations, of the old in conflict with the new, were present and correct — in the former, the time-honoured beliefs of a gentlemen’s club at odds the standards of modern world; in the latter, renovation work unearthing a sinister secret from the past. Neither play was exactly a masterpiece, but they did see Kneale re-established as a TV writer, and more striking work would follow.
In the many years since Kneale had begun his scriptwriting career, attitudes and approaches to the industry had changed immensely. In times gone by, Kneale was happiest writing in pencil in his workroom, listening to classical music. (“Eventually,” he admits, “I found it easier to be quiet!”) His manuscript could then be sent away to be typed up. In due course, Kneale had adapted to using an electric typewriter, but the eighties had made computer word processing technology prevalent for professional writers. Kneale wasn’t particularly enamoured of these developments. “I always hated computers, partly because I came to all that too late,” he says. “I always felt they were like an alien force — like writing against a rival whom I didn’t like much. I’ve a sneaking suspicion that they’re bad for writers. I feel that myself, that they corrupt the freedom to think. I don’t trust them. I’ve got a computer, and they’re all right for letters or for articles, but for serious fiction I hate them.”
Neither was Kneale taken with the increasing use of inflexible scriptwriting concepts such as the three-act structure. “The only stages for me would be getting down a particular set of ideas,” he says. “I would never break up a story. The Americans do, it’s all Act One, Act Two, Act Three. They think of a film script as like a stage script, which surprised me very much when I first encountered it. They’d say, ‘Look, we think Act Three is a bit saggy in the end: we’ve gotta do something with that.’ But that’s why I always like to get the end set first, so I know there is an ending. Even if I change it, there’s one to fall back on.”
Still, Kneale’s writing technique itself remained unaltered. “The important thing for me was always to be absolutely certain of the story,” he explains. “There are very successful writers, lots of them, who can just start with a few sentences not knowing how it’ll turn out, saying, ‘Let my characters come alive, that’ll make the story, and someday I’ll reach the end.’ That’s a perfectly legitimate way of doing it: you can have a distinguished writer who does precisely that. I always need to know the end. I think if it’s a drama story of whatever kind, I, or whoever else, needs to know that there is an ending and how you’ve logically got to get there. I suppose that’s more of a stagey way of looking at it. I’m sure Shakespeare did that: ‘What happens to Hamlet?’ He had to know that first and work back to how Hamlet got into that position. We start by seeing ghosts and it’s all trouble after that. Whereas a pure novelist would set the characters walking and talking not knowing where they will get to. There are hugely successful novelists who do that — but not dramatists.”
For Kneale, a script never starts with the characters rather than the plot. “No, I wouldn’t think so,” he admits. “For example, the thing about old Quatermass was that he never actually was that important in the stories. He had to be there as an anchorman, but the stories were often mainly about the secondary characters as it develops, they carried the load of the drama. Partly, maybe, those younger characters could take it better. You develop your own practical way of going about it as you go on writing them.”
Arguably, though, this approach shows up some of the shortcomings of Kneale’s work in this particular period. His characters were certainly never badly-written, but his ideas, and his gift for constructing a narrative, always outweighed his gift for characterisation. As his work edged towards being more character-based — and both Ladies’ Night and Gentry fit neatly into this category — this issue becomes more pronounced, and the results could be underwhelming, though never entirely without merit.
It’s worth acknowledging that some critics of Kneale’s work have singled out his working-class characters in particular as being slight or even patronising. It’s hard to dismiss this entirely, but in his defence, some of those characters fall down only by being quickly sketched rather than fully-realised. And, as we’ve seen, on occasion — in Ladies’ Night and Gentry particularly — Kneale could be accused of negative representations of almost any group — be they men, women, working-class, or middle-class. No doubt about it, his characters aren’t always likeable; but there seems to be no particular bias to this, and the characters are, if nothing else, acting as is required for them by the ideas and the narrative of the piece in question, which is where Kneale’s interest always remained anchored.
KNEALE’S ENTIRE FAMILY WAS BEING KEPT BUSY AT THE TIME. HIS WIFE Judith was continuing to delight generations of young readers with new titles about Mog the Cat, and their children were establishing successful careers of their own. Their daughter Tacy, having graduated from drama school, had appeared in several productions at the National Theatre. In the late eighties, she took roles in popular TV shows of the day such as Boon and Casualty, as well as the 1989 film Scandal about the sixties Profumo affair.
Kneale’s son Matthew, meanwhile, was following in his parents’ footsteps by becoming a professional writer. Matthew studied modern history at Oxford University, and developed a taste for travelling, eventually notching up visits to eighty-two countries over seven continents. After graduating, he’d spend a year teaching in Japan, while honing his skills as an author. His first novel, Whore Banquets, was published in 1987. The following year, it won Matthew a Somerset Maugham award — by curious coincidence, the same writers’ prize that had enabled his father to visit Italy almost forty years before. All in all, Kneale’s talent as a parent had proved to be quite as remarkable as his ability for writing.
It would have been little surprise if, at this point, Kneale had elected to retire from writing, having turned sixty-five in April 1987. Instead, he continued to be offered work, and continued to enjoy new challenges, and so pressed on. Certainly, his reputation and influence grew as new generations began to discover his work.
By 1988, the BBC had been tapping into the lucrative home video market for several years. They’d had notable success with VHS releases of vintage Doctor Who stories, sales of which registered high on the national best-seller charts. Looking to explore similar areas, they chose, among other shows, to release the Quatermass and the Pit serial on VHS, with the original six episodes edited into a compilation format, complete with an interlude halfway through. A number of scenes were trimmed or cut altogether, on advice from the writer.
The video packing states that the ‘BBC Video gratefully acknowledges the kind assistance of Nigel Kneale in the preparation of this 178 minute video edition.’ The full running time of the original serial had been over 200 minutes in total, and the scenes which Kneale elected to cut were lighter, comic, character-driven moments the loss of which wouldn’t impair the plot. “The BBC issued a tape, which I was in on, to the extent of vetting it slightly and saying, ‘We could tweak that out,’” explains Kneale. “It was very decent. They put it out and they sold whatever number of copies they made of it.”
This was, in fact, the first instance of any of Kneale’s television work being released for home viewing. But despite the modest success of the tape, it was decided against following it up with Quatermass 2. The serial existed in full in the BBC archive, but the recording technology used at the time it was made was rather crude, and Kneale felt unhappy with the result. “The old Quatermass 2 thing was never up to any kind of high standard,” Kneale suggests. “Apart from anything else, it’s not up to technical standards of today, to the quality of stuff that’s now obtainable.”
The influence of Quatermass lived on, though. In 1989, the BBC axed the ailing Doctor Who, which had by then been on air for twenty-six seasons. Curiously, one of the final stories, 1988’s Remembrance of the Daleks, pays homage to the series’ roots. Set in London in 1963, it sees the Doctor working in tandem with a small hand-picked military outfit to defeat the Dalek menace. During one scene, a member of the team remarks, ‘I wish Bernard was here,’ to which another replies, ‘British Rocket Group has its own problems’ — as though such things are simply part and parcel of the fictional Doctor Who universe, though they’re never mentioned again.
The story’s writer, Ben Aaronovitch, was responsible for a further Doctor Who adventure the following year, entitled Battlefield. A blend of Arthurian legend and hi-tech sci-fi, it centred on an ancient spacecraft submerged deep under water. By Aaronovitch’s own admission, as he later told Doctor Who Magazine, this stemmed from a desire for the story to be “a bit Nigel Kneale-y. You know, the past comes back to bite you in the arse”. Aaronovitch and the show’s then-script editor, Andrew Cartmel, gave the embryonic story the nickname of Quatermass and the Lake. Even as the show faced extinction, then, Doctor Who was tipping its hat to the adventures of Professor Quatermass — and Aaronovitch, it’s worth noting, has since become a leading sci-fi novelist in his own right.
In 1983, author Susan Hill wrote a novella called The Woman in Black, a homage to the classic Victorian ghost story tradition. It features a young turn-of-the-century solicitor, Arthur Kipps — a sly reference to H G Wells’ celebrated hero of the same name — who is dispatched to the coastal village of Crythin Gifford to settle the estate of a deceased widow, Mrs Alice Drablow. In time Kipps discovers that the restless spirit of Drablow’s late sister is restlessly haunting the empty property.
In 1989, Ted Childs, in his capacity as Central TV’s Controller of Drama, found himself considering potential new projects. “I was looking around for suitable books we could adapt as television films,” Childs recalls. “Producer Chris Burt suggested the Susan Hill novel.” Childs secured the rights to adapt the story for television, and knew of an ideal writer for the project. “I believed Tom Kneale would be a good choice as adaptor, given his understanding of the dark side of human nature”, Childs says.
Thus Kneale was commissioned to adapt The Woman in Black for Central. With customary application, he completed a full, workable draft in ten days. On advice from his agent, Kneale held back from submitting the script for a little while, in case Central might think that a satisfactory job couldn’t possibly have been done in such a short space of time. In the event, this caution resulted in a delay, and the project almost fell through when Central feared that the script wouldn’t been finished on time. In fact, it was something of a masterpiece, one of Kneale’s best-realised adaptations.
The writer is disingenuous on the subject of adaptations. “If someone lands you with the story, you have to work hard at it and pick out the right bits and make it go, but it’s not the same as having made up the story,” he says. “Susan Hill’s original book was very decent. I was putting in things that aren’t even thought of in the book, like a wife and family.” In fact, Kneale’s telling of The Woman in Black transforms the source novella into a skilled descent into unease and terror, often by altering the whole shape of the tale.
Writer Kim Newman points out that Kneale is sometimes guilty of double standards in this respect. “One of the things that’s interesting about Nigel,” Newman observes, “is that he’s often adapted other people’s material, all the way back to George Orwell and John Osborne. But for someone who’s complained about how his own work is treated, sometimes he’s quite free in the way he treats other writers’ work. He was very offended at the notion of Susan Hill using the name ‘Kipps’ from H G Wells as the hero of The Woman in Black, and so he decided not to use it and to change the hero’s name to Kidd. I’m sure if somebody thought that Quatermass was a silly name and changed it, he’d be furious!”
In adapting the novel, Kneale expertly moulds The Woman in Black to suit his own concerns. In classic Kneale style, Kidd has the latest technology at his fingertips: an electric lighting set-up in the house, and a cylinder recording machine. But the march of progress is foiled by a lurking malevolence from the past. Just as voices have been recorded onto the cylinders, the tragic events on the causeway — the violent death by drowning of a child — has been imprinted onto the area itself, to replay over and over again, not unlike the ceaseless haunting in The Stone Tape.
Herbert Wise, who’d previously directed Ladies’ Night, reunited with Kneale to make the new piece, casting Adrian Rawlins as Kidd and Clare Holman as his wife Stella. Veteran character actor Bernard Hepton appeared as Sam Toovey, a pillar of the community who looks out for Kidd.
The drama aired on the night of Christmas Eve 1989, but was rather lost among the assorted ITV regions. “The film was not well scheduled,” Ted Childs opines, “and did not achieve as many accolades as it deserved — a common complaint from ITV producers!” And yet, there was no denying the strength of the work itself. “I thought Tom did a great job,” Childs says. “I was very pleased with the quality of performance and standard of production value that Chris Burt and Herbert Wise achieved.”
Kneale concurs. “It’s pretty good, actually,” he admits. “It was perfectly well done — good acting and direction. It’s a very creepy thing. It’s about a haunted causeway, in effect. The haunted house itself is right at the end of the causeway, and not a lot happens in it except that lights go out and things like that. But the causeway itself — in thick mist, which meant a smoke machine working overtime — was really creepy. You were blinded by what was ostensibly fog. You could hear an awful rendering of an accident, of people falling into the water where they would drown, and that really worked.”
For author Stephen Gallagher, The Woman in Black rates among Kneale’s very best work. “He took a novel that was essentially a slight pastiche of Victorian horror and turned it into a solid and cinematic piece of drama,” Gallagher suggests. Writer Jeremy Dyson agrees. “The book is very, very conventional pastiche,” he argues. “Nicely done, but it doesn’t really affect you in the same way because you’re at a distance from it, because the technique is very self-conscious. His adaptation is something completely different. He just gets to the essence of the story and it gets you in the gut. It’s partly because it’s just so well done, too. Credit to Herbert Wise, but you know, it begins with the script. What he’s done with the structure, paring it down. His brilliant touches as well, like the wax cylinder; just the atmosphere of it. There’s all this craft that’s gone into making that work.”
Scenes from The Woman in Black featuring Adrian Rawlins and Pauline Moran.
Writer and performer Mark Gatiss is similarly fulsome in his praise of Kneale’s adaptation. “It’s marvellous,” Gatiss says. “For a late piece of work in his career, it’s just immaculate. It has everything that you associate with him, I think. He knows how to frighten people, but in a very literate way. All those little moments. My favourite line is when Adrian Rawlins is talking to Bernard Hepton [in Sam Toovey’s car]. Rawlins tells Hepton that he’s a solicitor dealing with Eel Marsh House, and says ‘I expect to be in and out of there for several days.’ And Hepton just says, ‘Do you now.’ Wow! — very much opening a crack onto a larger truth. It’s fantastic economy. The atmosphere and the writing are just wonderful.”
Despite some slight reservations, Kim Newman also regards the drama very highly. “I think it certainly has a problem with the ending, and the book has too,” he suggests. “Nobody’s ever really been able to resolve it, but I think it’s an impressive piece of work.”
Despite its strong reputation, the TV version of The Woman in Black has rarely been seen since its initial broadcast. Not, thankfully, because the tapes were wiped, as TV companies had long since grasped the benefits of storing extensive archives. Rather, it’s because a rival adaptation of the book has stolen much of its thunder. Playwright Stephen Mallatratt scripted an economical stage version which debuted in December 1987 at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough. In February 1989 it was taken to London’s West End, and swiftly transferred from venue to venue before fetching up in August 1989 at the Fortune Theatre near Covent Garden, where it still remains to this day. “It was more or less simultaneously done as a stage play, which is still running, incredibly,” Kneale says. “I went to see it out of curiosity. They’d done a decent job on it, but it was extraordinary that they did it in an entirely different way from our film. For one thing I had a whole village to play with, and they had a bare stage and a cast of two. That way you can save a lot of money!”
Undoubtedly the success of the theatre production had played its part in the television version getting made. However, when Central bought the TV adaptation rights, it was a condition of the deal that it should not be in conflict with the stage version. As a result, it was shown once and released for a brief period on VHS, after which it effectively disappeared. “They put in — and from their point it was absolutely right — that it should not be shown on television in competition with the stage version,” Kneale confirms. “Nobody lost anything. The two were so unlike. The whole idea, apart from the title, was completely different. It was interesting that they could be so different, but they were, and they’re both quite successful.” It’s unfortunate, though, that, as a consequence, yet another of Kneale’s most impressive television pieces is largely unavailable.
On a happier note, Kneale had, by now, firmly established himself with Ted Childs at Central Drama, as part of a pool of freelancers. At the time, Central was riding high on the success of the upmarket crime drama Inspector Morse, which had been running since 1987. Childs had been inspired to develop a sophisticated whodunnit series by the popularity of BBC1’s Miss Marple. As a result, Zenith Productions, an independent subsidiary of Central, acquired the rights to author Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse sequence of novels, featuring the pint-swigging detective at work among Oxford’s dreaming spires.
Later, the recurring character of pathologist Dr Laura Hobson was introduced to the series, as played by The Woman in Black’s Clare Holman. But first of all, Central found their Morse in well-loved Salford-born actor John Thaw. (Kneale remembers the possibility being mooted of him writing an episode of Inspector Morse. “It was,” Kneale says, “but I didn’t do it. It was just talk.”)
Central were keen to nurture their relationship with Thaw, and Ted Childs was on the look out for potential new vehicles for their star. To that end, Central bought the rights to Kingsley Amis’ 1984 novel Stanley and the Women. John Thaw would star as the eponymous Stanley Duke, whose seemingly idyllic and successful life is belied by his labyrinthine, troubled relationships with the opposite sex, and his young son Steve’s descent into paranoid schizophrenia. The result would be a blackly comic drama. Chris Burt, who’d previously produced The Woman in Black, was assigned to produce, and Childs and Burt knew exactly who to commission as adapter.
Kneale had long been an admirer of Amis’ work, and it seems that the feeling was mutual. In the introduction to New Maps of Hell, his 1960 collection of essays about the history of science fiction, Amis had singled out Kneale’s work for particular praise, writing, ‘Nigel Kneale’s three Quatermass serials on BBC television have been the most adult science fiction likely to be encountered on a screen on any size.’
“Way back in the sixties, when the Penguin versions of the Quatermass stories came out, Kingsley had given them very glowing reviews,” Kneale recalls. “I’d never met him at the time, but we had a kind of contact.” The two had, in fact, been born within a couple of days of each other. The offer of the Stanley and the Women project greatly appealed to Kneale. “It’s a very decent book, which I liked, and so I agreed to turn in it into a series.”
In practice, though, it wasn’t the easiest book to adapt. Many of the characters were intentionally contentious, and the views they espouse weren’t the usual mainstream TV fare. Stanley’s dealings with the fairer sex, presented in the first person, were heavily laced with misogyny, for which reason many observers, Amis’ son Martin among them, had derided the novel. The plot structure has its flaws, too. In planning to rework the material, Kneale decided to deal with the original author direct. “I think Kingsley had sort of lost interest towards the end of the story,” Kneale says. “He just wrapped it up. So I tackled him about this. I said, ‘We can do much more with the ending. I’d rather like to do a completely changed structure on that.’ He was slightly taken aback, but he agreed.”
Another major stumbling block was the character of Stanley’s troubled son Steve. “He’s a schizophrenic youth who imagines all sorts of things that do not relate to reality,” Kneale explains. “It’s a big element in the book. He has a fixation that it’s the Jews who are causing everything to be as awful as it is. I talked to Kingsley about it and said, ‘How can we get away with that one?’” Steve’s delusions about a global Jewish conspiracy simply weren’t appropriate in a popular TV context, and the two writers discussed the problem. “Kingsley said, ‘It doesn’t matter what he says, because he’s mad.’ I said, ‘We know he’s mad, but at the same time you put that onto the screen and you’re going to have the Holocaust men knocking on your door.’” Amis was forced to agree.
Instead, Kneale proposed a new obsession for Steve, namely that what we call Hell is situated in the sun, and that a race of beings had fled there from the Earth in Biblical times — but were about to make a catastrophic return. “I’d hatched that idea a long time ago,” Kneale says, “that if you were going to situate Hell somewhere, it would be in the sun”. Kneale put the idea to Amis. “I said, ‘I’ll change it into what I do know about, that he’s a fantasist about things from outer space who are all coming to the Earth and doing bad, instead of Jews.’ Kingsley said, ‘Well… I don’t mind.’ And I said, ‘It is important, because this character’s going to stick out a mile in the production.’ He said, ‘But he’s only a figment, he’s not a very real person,’ and I said ‘He bloody will be among people giving star performances.’ And Kingsley said, ‘Oh, yes. Well, we’d better change it and bring in the things from outer space’ — who are just about as unreal and totally imaginary as the anti-Semitic thing. But if you want to introduce a linking character with a mad fantasy, you’re going to turn that character into a very important part of the story.” Intriguingly, then, Kneale’s take on Stanley and the Women melded both the viewpoint of a misogynist male, with shades of Ladies’ Night, and the viewpoint of a UFO conspiracy theorist, with shades of Kinvig.
John Thaw in the title role for the Kingsley Amis adaptation Stanley and the Women.
The part of Steve was played by Sam West, a relative newcomer from an acting background. “It was Sam’s first big part. He was too young to have done very much. His talented parents were Timothy West and Prunella Scales, super people, and very, very good actors indeed. Sam had inherited all the talent, and portrayed the part excellently.” Elsewhere in the cast, Geraldine James, Sian Thomas, Sheila Gish and Penny Downie portrayed Stanley’s phalanx of women. “There were a lot of ladies in it, which pleased John Thaw!” Kneale says. “He tended to rather like picking his female leads, and he was very good at it. He knew the ones he would get on with best.” On the other hand, it’s said that Thaw never quite hit it off with Kingsley Amis himself. The director of the serial was David Tucker, who had recently helmed the hit BBC2 series A Very Peculiar Practice, and would re-team with Thaw in 1993 for the much-derided BBC1 serial A Year in Provence.
While far from vintage Kneale, Stanley and the Women was a great showcase for the writer’s exceptional skills as an adapter, and it was clear that, with the team at Central, Kneale was still adept at working on modern TV drama. Kneale found himself involved in the media launch for the series. “I remember this press conference that Central ran,” he says. “They’d invited the cast, of course, and they invited Kingsley Amis. All the publicity seemed to have turned around into an argument about whether Mr Thaw was happy with such an anti-feminist sort of tract.” With the attention elsewhere, Kneale drifted away. “I found Kingsley sitting by himself at a table and not being taken the slightest notice of in a different room. So I sat down and we had some tea while this nonsense was going on.”
The four episodes of Stanley and the Women aired on ITV from November 28, 1991. Both the scriptwriter and the novelist were satisfied with the result. “It was perfectly well done, and it all worked,” Kneale says. “Kingsley was the first to admit it, he went along with it completely and was very happy with the end product. Then when he was writing in the Sunday Times, he said that it had been his favourite version of any of his novels, which was very nice of him!”
At this point, Kneale was struck with a story idea that he felt would make an excellent TV serial — this time, one that he would originate. The inspiration, though, was an actual historic episode. In June 1629, a Dutch ship, the Batavia, had been making its maiden voyage for the East India Company to Java, when it hit a reef and was shipwrecked off the coast of Western Australia, near what is now Perth. The survivors were hardly home and dry. One of the ship’s crew, Jeronimus Cornelisz, led a brutal mutiny and set himself up as the group’s charismatic, influential leader, but proved to be a borderline psychopath. “They got under the total influence and control of a sort of madman,” Kneale explains, “a religious maniac creature who wanted to found them as a sort of colony of like thinkers to himself, and did in fact go a long way towards doing it.” In effect, the group became a pseudo-religious cult, and in due course, a massacre broke out among rival factions which few survived.
Kneale proposed the idea for a drama about these events to Ted Childs, who was suitably enthused, and commissioned it as a six-part serial for Central. “Tom did a great job,” Childs says, “basing his script on the only real source work, accounts compiled in the seventeenth century.” The serial, called simply Batavia, was due to go into production in 1992. The chief hurdle which the project faced was the sheer expense involved. The scripts required filming onboard a period ship, and an extensive location shoot in Australia. Clearly, Central would need to bring in partners and co-funders.
Not surprisingly, the first place they looked for such partners was Australia itself. “The people in Central TV thought this would be an exciting one for them,” Kneale says, “but they wanted the Australian company, Grundy, to come in on it, and provide money and facilities, because it was part of Australian history — which seemed to make very good sense.”
Reg Grundy Productions, then best known as the makers of lightweight Antipodian soap opera Neighbours, dispatched an executive to England to discuss the project. “The boss of Grundy was brought over here, and they put on a splendid lunch for him,” Kneale recalls. “He listened to it all, and he said, ‘Well, we can’t afford to do it on our own. We need money from other companies, such as the Dutch, or possibly German.’ So he went off and set about stirring that up.”
Raising funding from the co-production proved to be difficult. In the meantime, Kneale’s full scripts were sitting waiting. “It was completely written and all set,” Kneale says. “As soon as you get a big ship, though, you’ve got complications of every sort. I’d been through that many years before with Lewis Gilbert on HMS Defiant, so I could see that this wouldn’t be easy. It was certainly workable, but they would need the cast and facilities setting up on a deserted coast, because the coast there was deserted at the time it all happened. That would have been a complication, getting stuff in from Sydney, or at the very least Perth, to shoot every day. Not an easy one.”
As an economic measure, Kneale was asked to rework the existing scripts, and reduce the running time. “It was written for six parts and they said, ‘Well, let’s make it in four, because it’ll be cheaper,’” Kneale says. “So I remember doing this, rendering it down to four. We had to leave quite a lot out, but yes, it was possible.” But it was to no avail. “They couldn’t raise Dutch and German money on that either,” the writer recalls. The union of Central and Grundy faltered, and the necessary hefty budget simply couldn’t be found. “In fact, doing something like Neighbours is much more Grundy’s class of stuff,” Kneale suggests. “In the end, it was cheaper just not to make it.” Ted Childs suggests that the subject of the serial contributed to its downfall. “ITV considered the theme too bleak for popular television,” Childs admits, “and the project was shelved.”
There had been abandoned projects before, of course, but Kneale had expended a great deal of time and energy on Batavia, over the course of researching, writing and revising the scripts. History, indeed, was a subject that was of particular interest to him, but only rarely had his produced work dealt with it. Curiously, just like the historical, seafaring Crow before it, Batavia capsized.
There were more offers of film work, but these bore little fruit. American producer Jon Davison, formerly an associate of John Landis during Kneale’s spell in Hollywood in the early eighties, had since had great success with the film RoboCop (1987), a blend of violent action and satire, the success of which spawned a sequel, RoboCop 2 (1990). Davison approached Kneale to come up with ideas for an original feature film script around this time, but the project never got further than the discussion stage.
Closer to home, Kneale struck a deal with the British company Zenith Productions. Initially a subsidiary of Central Television, Zenith had been responsible for several hit home-grown films of the day, such as Insignificance (1985), Prick Up Your Ears, Wish You Were Here and Personal Services (all 1987), as well as major television shows including Central’s own Inspector Morse. The company commissioned Kneale to script a remake of the 1950 British thriller So Long at The Fair, concerning a girl whose brother vanishes seemingly without trace at the 1889 Paris Exposition, and her increasingly desperate attempts to solve this mystery.
The script, updating the tale to the present day, was written by Kneale in full. “It had been made as a film years before with Dirk Bogarde and Jean Simmons,” he says. “It did look a bit dated — fine in many ways, but dated — and there was a feeling that it was time to do another one. They just wanted to use the central idea, and update all the mechanics around it. It was just one of those that didn’t get made, that’s all.” Kneale dealt with the project’s directors, but it was dropped before it progressed further than a script.
Another fully written adaptation was of James Herbert’s best-selling 1988 novel Haunted, concerning Professor David Ash, a debunker of all matters supernatural, who is invited to an apparently ghost-infested house. Clearly, Kneale had demonstrated his suitability for this particular job with his adaptation of The Woman in Black. His old associate Lewis Gilbert was directing the new production, but Gilbert dithered with Kneale’s version of the script (which had been titled David Ash in honour of the main character). “Lewis had a book by James Herbert, the Rats man,” Kneale says. “It wasn’t very exciting or very new, but Lewis had rather taken to it. He already had a very good script, I thought, written by somebody else, and had decided against it and not made it. He decided against the one I did as well. I didn’t greatly miss it. I thought I’d got it, and it would have worked, but in a fit of vanity, Lewis decided to do it a different way. Too bad.”
When Gilbert eventually made the film in 1995, Kneale’s work had been abandoned and an entirely new script credited to Gilbert himself along with Tim Prager and Bob Kellett. “In the end, Lewis changed all the casting and got two American youths, who I think were very cheap, to do a script for it,” Kneale explains. “It lasted just one week in the cinemas, and sunk, and was never heard of again…”*
Over the Atlantic, a new TV series, The X-Files, was fast becoming a cultural phenomenon. First airing from September 1993, it followed a pair of shadowy FBI agents, Mulder and Scully, investigating all manner of unearthly and supernatural goings-on. Quite apart from the unintentional similarity to Kneale’s own unmade Push the Dark Door, the series shares many approaches and concerns with Quatermass, The Creature and The Stone Tape. The makers were, in fact, admirers of Kneale’s work. Indeed, he received a call from the X-Files production team, asking if he’d be interested in writing for the show. “A creature rang up at what must have been a very early stage, when they just started,” Kneale remembers. “I said no. That was that. I said, ‘This is the worst kind of science fiction — for me, anyway. It’s stuff I wouldn’t write, and there were too many hands in it’.” Nor was the writer impressed by the series’ stars. “I said, ‘You’ve got two non-actors there, and I’m not keen to write for them!’”
British television received a double blow on June 7, 1994, when two of its most estimable talents died on the very same day. Dennis Potter’s death received a great deal of media coverage, somewhat overshadowing the other: at the age of ninety, Rudolph Cartier had also passed away.
Things continued to change over at ITV. A new franchise, Carlton, staged a takeover of Central. Ted Childs opted to give up his post at the drama department, but stayed on with the new company in a freelance capacity. Childs, as executive producer, launched a successful new series for Carlton, Sharpe, in 1993. Like Inspector Morse, the source was a sequence of popular novels in this instance by Bernard Cornwell. Set during the Napoleonic Wars, the series follows the adventures of the spirited, wayward Major Richard Sharpe (played by Yorkshire-born actor Sean Bean). Although not meant to be anything more than entertaining hokum, Sharpe was a lavish undertaking, independently produced for Carlton by Celtic Films and Picture Palace Films. It was shot on location in Turkey and the Crimea, it attracted several major actors and writers.
The VHS cover for Sharpe’s Gold starring Sean Bean.
In 1995, Kneale was asked to contribute a script adapted from Cornwell’s original novel, Sharpe’s Gold. It was, in fact, only the second Sharpe novel to have been published, back in 1981. “It was just straightforward,” Kneale says. “Somebody got onto me and said, ‘Would you like to do an episode of Sharpe?’. I wasn’t doing anything else at the time, so I said ‘Yes’ and did it. I knew they were well done, and interesting.” Nonetheless, ever inventive — and wary of writing around other people’s ideas — Kneale quickly abandoned the source novel. “I didn’t use much of it,” he admits. “I used the first ten pages, I think. Then I had an idea which would be more fun to do. It was all about magic by the time I was through with it.” Kneale’s episode is certainly more intriguing than the standard derring-dos which generally populated Sharpe. On Cornwell’s own website, the author shares reminisces about each of his novels, but confesses to having only vague memories of Sharpe’s Gold, never having reread it: ‘Watching the video is no help in reminding me what’s in the plot because the story on the TV programme bears absolutely no resemblance to the story in the book — weird.’
Needless to say, Kneale, then at the age of seventy-three, was in no great rush to attend the location filming, which took place in the Ukraine. He was generally pleased with the result, but for one disappointment. “The final scenes, that I had clearly written as occurring at night, were shot during the day, because they couldn’t shoot at night,” he reveals. “There was no electricity out there, no power for big lighting. But it was done really rather well, actually. It had good people, and I enjoyed doing it… allowing for the fact that towards the end, it should all be blacked out!” Directed by Sharpe mainstay Tom Clegg, and produced, like The Woman in Black and Stanley and the Women before it, by Chris Burt, the feature length Sharpe’s Gold was first broadcast on April 12, 1995. In the years since, the series has been sold extensively abroad, and released on home video and DVD. All in all, then, it is perhaps one of the most accessible pieces of Kneale’s work, in every respect.
Whether by accident or design, much of Kneale’s work that followed Sharpe had a powerfully reflective quality. In 1995, Kneale scripted a TV series adaptation of A Small Person Far Away, the novel his wife Judith had written to conclude the trilogy of childhood memoirs, as started by When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. Kneale corresponded about the project with a prospective director, Paul Marcus, and the adaptation was offered to independent franchise Granada, but they declined. Instead, Kneale turned to remembrances of his own younger days — albeit in a less overt fashion. It would involve a pretty remarkable reunion.
It had been over twenty years since he had written for the BBC. Nor had there been any approach for him to do so, although the writer himself wasn’t unduly troubled by this. “The more I worked for ITV, the less I could work with the BBC,” he recalls. “They were given to taking offence. But I just wanted to write scripts: I didn’t care who did them, as long as there were some talented people involved.”
In 1995, an offer finally came through for Kneale to work for the BBC again, courtesy of Paul Quinn, then a staff radio producer in the BBC Arts Unit. Quinn explains, “The new millennium was looming and BBC Radio 3 was planning a major cultural history of the twentieth century, decade by decade. When it came to the 1950s we made various documentary programmes on literary and artistic movements of the period. We also wanted to look at how the mood of the period was reflected in, and inflected by, its popular culture. I proposed that we look at some of the decade’s obsessions, fears, paranoia, upheavals, and Cold War preoccupations through the eyes of one of its iconic figures — Professor Quatermass. In the summer of 1995, I rang up Nigel Kneale, and he was keen to be involved. Radio 3 liked the idea and commissioned the series for 1996.” It was to be Kneale’s first experience of writing for radio since his play You Must Listen had been made way back in 1952.
It should be acknowledged at this point that, over the course of his long career, Kneale had developed quite a reputation — and frankly, it wasn’t always glowing. His writing talent was never remotely in doubt, but in some quarters he had become known as a difficult person to work with. It’s perhaps unsurprising, given his propensity for strong opinions and his habit of openly expressing them, he often rubbed colleagues up the wrong way. To be fair, he developed good working relationships with regular collaborators such as Rudolph Cartier, Michael Elliott and Don Taylor — none of whom are still with us, and so aren’t able to give Kneale a character reference. His long, happy marriage to Judith Kerr is definitely a mark in his favour, too. But within the industry, his reputation certainly did proceed him. Ted Childs, who had engaged Kneale’s services so frequently for ITV in later years, tactfully admitted to writer Richard Marson, “[Kneale] was a trifle eccentric, but I liked him and he was clearly a very imaginative and creative screenwriter.”
Christopher Morahan, who collaborated with Kneale on several occasions, gives some interesting insight into the situation when he suggests that, as a writer, Kneale “had a very clear idea of what he intended. It’s one’s job, really, as a director, to find out what the intention of the writing is. You’re working as a partnership, and a director is an interpreter as well. Therefore it should be the person who writes the original script who has the right to be able to criticise the work that you’re doing, because he might just want to change or two things, or just make observations about how it’s being done, and you have to listen to that.”
Before he approached Kneale, then, Paul Quinn was made aware of his mercurial nature. “I have to say, in all honesty, that when I announced my intention of producing this project, various people at the BBC advised me against working with Nigel Kneale. He had a reputation for being difficult, obstructive, embittered, cantankerous. This didn’t put me off — genuinely creative people are often difficult. And, contrary to the forewarnings, on the whole I found him enthusiastic, generous and co-operative. He was clearly and rightfully proud of his legacy.”
Proceeding with caution, then, Quinn managed to develop a good working relationship with Kneale. “Though always pleasant to me, I have to say that it did become clear as I listened to his anecdotes that he bore a lot of professional grudges,” Quinn recalls. “It is fair to say that he didn’t suffer fools gladly — and that he seemed to see them everywhere he turned, which was kind of sad. On the whole, however, I found his rather curmudgeonly personality endearing. To my face, at least, he was a model of collaborative courtesy and dry wit. But, having heard him slate so many of his former and absent colleagues, I had no illusions.”
Kneale certainly seems to have enjoyed his collaboration with Quinn — “a bright creature”, the writer remembers fondly — in piecing the programmes together. Essentially the idea was to blend new dramatised scenes of Professor Quatermass with flashbacks to his adventures. (“I’d already killed him off, so it was a retrospective,” Kneale observes delightedly.) It was hoped to use archive material from the original serials for the ‘flashbacks’. Kneale recalls, “The producer said, ‘It’s all in the BBC archives, The Quatermass Experiment, Quatermass 2 and Quatermass and the Pit. I’ll find it, and we’ll just do the linkage bits, the framing, and then I’ll get all of this good stuff out of the archive.’ Then, when he came to do it, there wasn’t any. Incredibly none of it was any good. Nobody had ever bothered to look.”
Of course, only the first two episodes of The Quatermass Experiment were ever recorded for posterity, and the sound quality of that and the Quatermass 2 telerecordings weren’t always of a high enough standard for broadcast. Quinn, though, remembers the genesis of the series somewhat differently. “At the outset, I had wanted, and tried to persuade Nigel Kneale to write, a ‘new’ Quatermass linking narrative, as it were, that would connect things together. My suggestion was to have Professor Quatermass recount some hitherto unrecorded adventure.”
Quinn’s suggested title for this new tale was Quatermass and the Ultimate Conspiracy. “As the series progressed, this would interweave with the archive material and comprise a kind of occulted history of the decade. Thus, actual events of the 1950s — evoked in newsreel segments and interpreted in Kneale’s commentary — would be juxtaposed with and infiltrated by a new, but typically Quatermass, science fiction adventure involving extraterrestrial invasion and establishment cover-ups.”
However, Kneale himself wasn’t keen on the idea, as Quinn recalls. “Unfortunately, Nigel at that stage of his life no longer had the energy or inclination to construct a new story; he preferred to revisit Professor Quatermass’ previous adventures. Also, to be fair, saving the world three times was probably enough for any man! So we adjusted to make it a series of memoirs that drew on the three classic TV series. We kept the part-documentary/part-drama element, but now the drama part was simplified: Nigel decided to imagine an older, haunted Quatermass visited by a young reporter, to whom he would fitfully and agitatedly recount his three great adventures.”
Woven together with these strands was nonfiction narration courtesy of Kneale himself, contextualising the Quatermass serials with life in fifties Britain. Quinn recalls, “In preparing the series I conducted informal interviews with Kneale about the 1950s and the writing of the series, and then later on we’d condense and record his reflections on how this decade shaped his writing.” The resulting examples of Quatermass’s historical context — rocket testing, the Cold War, race riots — were reflected in the material which Quinn brought in to use in the finished programme.“I’d dig out newsreel from a BBC archive outpost in a far-flung suburb, bring it over to Nigel and play it to him,” Quinn says. “He’d listen through and shape or amend his commentary section accordingly.”
Kneale, though, is dubious of the wisdom of this approach. “Somebody had the idea that, at that time, I had reacted to various things happening in Europe or the world and that’s where it all came from; that events such as the Hungarian Revolution had sparked thoughts. Well, it didn’t — but that’s what they had in mind!” he says.
Kneale was happier with the casting. Emma Gregory played Mandy, a journalist who arrives unannounced at Quatermass’ home to quiz him about yesteryear. As the voice of the professor himself, the BBC brought in Andrew Keir, who’d made such an impact in the role back in Hammer’s Quatermass and the Pit film, not least on Kneale himself. In the event, though, Keir was rather unsettled by the shifting shape of the piece. “Andrew was very concerned that it should be done properly,” Kneale recalls. “He was offended by this thing of saying, ‘Oh, it’ll all be in the archive, we’ll just pull bits out’, and then just being used as a link man. But he was very patient and very good.”
According to Paul Quinn, Kneale was a very active, hands-on collaborator on the project. “He was involved in all aspects of the preparation, and sat in on the recording of the dramatic sections. I was happy to solicit and take his notes for the actors — indeed, his background, of course, was in drama and mine in documentary, so his comments were most welcome. He professed himself very happy with the recording, and gave Andrew Keir a lot of reassurance.”
The end result, broadcast with the title The Quatermass Memoirs, is something of a mish-mash. The linking scenes that Kneale wrote for Mandy and the elderly Quatermass never really get chance to come to life, and the clips are sometimes jarring. (As Keir had starred in none of the original BBC serials, whatever footage was used had to avoid any actual dialogue from Bernard Quatermass, as the part was being played by other actors.) Intriguingly, the final scenes refer to a broken-down society and Quatermass’ search for his granddaughter, implying that they take place just prior to the events of the concluding Quatermass TV serial.
However artificial, Kneale’s narration sections are the most compelling part of the radio production. The established Quatermass theme music, Holst’s Mars, The Bringer Of War, is used throughout, and the strident, alarming tone of the music, coupled with Kneale’s recollections of fifties fear and paranoia, is effective and evocative. A relatively minor enterprise, comprising just five fifteen minute instalments, The Quatermass Memoirs made little impact on the writer himself. “It was typical radio. That’s why I did it, really,” he says. “God knows, it wasn’t a very important sort of thing, just a way of using up fifteen minutes of their tape time.” The experience did little to reconcile the BBC and the writer. “The BBC just didn’t care tuppence about what they were doing, because they really don’t know what they’re doing, certainly not in radio.” Sadly, the production proved to be Andrew Keir’s last acting job. “Andrew died the following year, which was very sad. He must have been pretty ill when this nonsense was going on.”
To Paul Quinn, Kneale appeared to be satisfied with the finished series. “He seemed very happy at the time, and that’s what he told me to my face. I was a little disappointed to hear something a few years back to the effect that Kneale had expressed regret about having a documentary aspect to the series. I was disappointed because he knew from the very outset of the series, and before he signed a contract, that this would be the case — it was broadcast in a documentary strand! — and because he had collaborated so enthusiastically on that aspect of the project. Nevertheless, it was a fascinating experience, great fun to do, and Nigel Kneale was unquestionably an important and singular figure in the history of British popular culture.”
THEN APPROACHING HIS MID SEVENTIES, KNEALE WAS LESS AND LESS EAGER to take on writing work. Around this time he did some initial development work outlining several new ideas — a piece entitled Children; Bligh (about Captain Bligh of the HMS Bounty); and Increase of Robbers — but could find a home for none of them. (The last, for instance, was offered as a TV project to Carlton, who turned it down.) On the other hand, he didn’t balk at turning offers down. That was his initial reaction to being asked to write for Kavanagh QC. A Central TV series, it had been conceived by Ted Childs in 1995 as a new vehicle for John Thaw, as the venerable Inspector Morse had finished its regular run, although new ‘specials’ continued to appear. As James Kavanagh, Thaw played a well regarded criminal advocate whose time was divided between the courtroom and his eventful home-life.
At first, Kneale was supremely nonplussed. “I was asked to write a story for them, but I thought it wasn’t really very important, and not worth writing,” he admits. “I thought it was tedious, and obsessed with legality.” When Childs persisted, Kneale found inspiration in a subject close to home. “I said, ‘If we’re going to do one, let’s do it about something that really matters, and for me the worst and most important thing that’s ever happened is the Holocaust. If you could get a reflection of that, that’d be worth doing.’ Very reluctantly they agreed to do it, because they were very frightened of the subject. They thought it would be treading on all sorts of toes, Germans, among others. It’s sensitive stuff. And I said, ‘I know it’s sensitive stuff, let’s do it!’ That’s the reason for doing it!”
Kneale had, of course, spent much of his adult life happily married to Judith Kerr, a German Jew whose family had only narrowly escaped an unthinkable fate at the hands of the Nazis. The late Rudolph Cartier had fled Germany for similar reasons. Throughout his career, much to his own distaste, Kneale has been pigeon-holed as a ‘horror’ writer, which he disputes. “Real horror,’ he asserts, “would be something else. It would be Auschwitz.”
Ancient History, Kneale’s script for Kavanagh QC, sees James Kavanagh pitted against one Alexander Beck, a seemingly harmless family doctor originally from Poland, who is being tried as a Nazi war criminal. Assorted witnesses present very different portraits of Beck. To some, he is a kind, helpful man, whereas others give testimony to the abominable experiments he conducted at the concentration camp in Dachau. It’s a supremely well-written, thought provoking piece of modern TV drama, with a depth and power rarely seen in mainstream television. Kneale clearly understands the complex themes involved, and handles them masterfully. It’s also a restatement of the writer’s recurrent preoccupations: something old and buried surfacing in the present day with a disruptive effect, and the power of belief. Unlikely as it seems to draw a line of descent from Quatermass and The Stone Tape to Kneale’s sombre Nazi war crimes drama, they are all identifiably the work of the same writer. There may have been some falling-off of sheer originality in Kneale’s work in later years, but his ability to tell a strong, compelling tale never deserted him. Whereas most of Kneale’s best work is driven by ideas, very powerful and personal emotions are at the heart of Ancient History.
The episode was made as part of third series of Kavanagh QC, and directed by Tristram Powell, with well-known character actor Frederick Treves as Beck, and Warren Mitchell as Avram Rypin. It was broadcast on March 17, 1997. “It was very well directed by Tristam Powell, who was equally devoted to it,” Kneale says. He was particularly impressed by the performance of a newcomer, Rob Marni, as Yitzak Shapiro. “The character who was born in Israel was actually played a young actor from Jerusalem. He came over and played himself, really, and was very good. People were a bit awed by Warren Mitchell. They thought, ‘He’s so funny he might just make it accidentally funny.’ But he didn’t, he did it beautifully. He was very good indeed. It was fine. It took it about as seriously as it could be.”
On April 22, 1997, just a month after his Kavanagh QC episode was broadcast, Kneale turned seventy-five years of age. His family threw a lavish party to celebrate the occasion. Though not premeditated or intentional, in effect he retired from writing thereafter.
*Curiously, the story christens one character who goes unnamed onscreen: a lower-rung member of the club is called Alan Partridge. This was some five years before Steve Coogan’s comic creation of the — undoubtedly coincidentally — same name was launched on BBC Radio 4.
*In the interests of fairness, it should be noted that Prager and Kellett are both British, and have a great deal of experience between them — though it’s just possible that Kneale was referring to the writers of some unknown, abandoned subsequent draft of the Haunted script.