THE MANX PEOPLE HAVE MANY WISE SAYINGS, FROM ‘S’GIARE Y JOUGH na’n skeeal’ (‘the drink is shorter than the story’) to ‘Laa er-meshtey as laa er ushtey’ (‘a day on the drink, then a day on the water’). Another, ‘Gow dty aash’, can be translated variously as ‘have a break’ or ‘take your rest’.
It’s fair to say that Kneale deserved his rest by the end of the nineties. Few people can lay claim to a career of over forty years in television. The medium itself had only just turned seventy. Barely a handful of TV professionals have been as influential as Nigel Kneale. Once he’d stepped back from his career, he was free to celebrate what he’d achieved — or rather, he was free to be celebrated by others.
As new generations discover him, more admirers are keen to laud Kneale as a pioneering, vastly original talent. In recent times, his work has become more accessible, too. His film work for Hammer has been made available on DVD and Blu-ray, as have The Stone Tape, The Year of the Sex Olympics, Beasts, Kinvig and the original TV Quatermass serials.
For several of these releases, Kneale provided audio commentaries. The DVD format allows for such material to be released lavishly and affordably (and, as Kim Newman has pointed out, in many ways it’s akin to the digital recording medium that the researchers of The Stone Tape were trying so hard to find).
There have been personal appearances, too. Despite some moments of ill-health, Kneale managed to attended notable public screenings of his work — a full weekend retrospective at Chapter Cinema in Cardiff in July 1999; a well-attended celebration at Cornerhouse art centre in Manchester in October 2001; and a career-spanning discussion, under the title My Son, Quatermass, at London’s ICA in May 2003, an event curated by another Kneale admirer, the acclaimed science fiction novelist China Miéville. There have also been memorable screenings at London’s National Film Theatre over the years, instrumental in the British Film Institute’s decision to release The Stone Tape on DVD. “That release was very, very successful, and one of the reasons that tipped us off was we knew we’d had good audiences for it,” the BFI’s Dick Fiddy admits. “We knew there was a lot of interest in it out there.”
MANY MAJOR PLAYERS IN THE MODERN BRITISH TV INDUSTRY REGARD Kneale as an underrated, pioneering genius. Scriptwriter Russell T Davies holds Kneale in high esteem. “I think he bloody believes everything he’s writing,” Davies suggests. “The emotions seem absolutely real. And there’s a massive seriousness of intent, dressed up with wonderful storytelling. His skill as a writer went far beyond the outlandish. He could map small, human intimacies with equal imagination and precision. But in all the smoke and mirrors of monsters and aliens, there’s not one — not a single on —invented to be just scary; every single creation has got something to say about the state of the world and mankind. What a combination! — honesty, invention and ambition.”
Davies made his name with major TV drama successes such as Bob and Rose and Queer as Folk, and references to Kneale’s work have crept in, however unexpectedly. “The school bully in Queer as Folk was called Christian Hobbs, because Quatermass and the Pit taught me that Hobb is another word for the Devil!” Davies reveals. “I always liked that!” Davies’ 2003 drama The Second Coming, about Jesus returning to Earth in the modern day, features a key scene wherein a hijacked football stadium, full of religious zealots and surrounded by armed police, is struck by a mysterious beam of light. Davies admits that Kneale’s ITV Quatermass serial may have unconsciously shaped the scene. “Maybe I’ve been channelling Kneale for years,” Davies suggests. “Do I owe him money?”
The members of the League of Gentlemen comedy team are also acknowledged fans of Nigel Kneale. The League’s Jeremy Dyson is outspoken in his admiration for Kneale’s work. “What he did was so potent,” Dyson says, “particularly those Quatermass serials. To have those so early in your career, it’s a bit like the Beatles, isn’t it? Television’s never going to have that impact ever again. But imagine feeling that — that the whole country was coming to a hold to watch what you did. In a way that’s something I don’t think he’s had credit for: he invented modern television. If you look at what came before, there was nothing to compare. What he was doing, I think, was taking popular cinema and realising that you could do that kind of thing on television. Nobody had done that — not in this country and probably not really in America either actually, that fusion of things.”
Dyson recognises Kneale’s unique ability as a writer. “It’s a fierce intelligence, and a particular sensibility for the uncanny, for want of another word. It’s those two things combined. It’s realising that you link one to the other and you’ve got something tremendously powerful. He’s one of those few writers who’s ideas-driven, and yet still is engaging. Because he can do character as well, although you wouldn’t think of him primarily as someone who writes character. His characters are always strong. And yet, it’s always the ideas that are at the heart of what he does.”
“I think the thing that’s most impressive is just the intelligence of it — and yet it’s intelligence combined with this popular touch,” Dyson suggests. “It’s a very rare thing, in that he was always only interested in a mass audience. There was nothing elitist about what he was doing. He wanted to communicate to as many people as possible, and yet he talked up to them. He took highly intelligent concepts and placed them bang at the heart of his work. I think whether you’re writing in that genre or not, that’s something to aspire to.”
Dyson’s League of Gentlemen colleague Mark Gatiss feels just as strongly about Kneale. “I remember seeing on a documentary that he has the original Quatermass Experiment rubber glove monster,” Gatiss says. “The idea that it was just perishing in a bag, when it should be in the Smithsonian as far as I’m concerned, is just extraordinary. I really do believe this and I think it’s an absolute scandal. It’s not too much to say that he invented popular television. Quatermass arrived like a rocket into the schedules. When you consider the incredible blandness of television drama at that time, and there it was: the first really kind of mass audience thriller. It’s outrageous that he’s never had more recognition, I think.”
Gatiss is an unabashed admirer of Kneale’s writing style. “It’s those quiet moments — like the old character in the pub in Quatermass 2 who says, ‘I courted a girl from Winnerden Flats. Married her…’ I adore those,” Gatiss says. “It’s just brilliantly written and completely real. Similarly, in Baby, when the workman says, ‘Thing like that would had to have been suckled…’ They just make your hair stand on end. He just had this amazing economy, rooted, I think, in his Manxishness, this facility for real language, which is breathtaking at times.”
Gatiss points out Kneale’s great skill for writing within established genres, and yet subverting them for his own ends. “It can’t be a coincidence that most of his stuff is in fantasy of horror and sci-fi,” Gatiss argues.”I think the great thing is that within that, it’s always about people; always people’s stories. At every stage where he runs up against what would be the sci-fi cliché, he turns it on his head. Really he invented that. His ear for real dialogue, especially dialect, I think is just incomparable. Comparisons to H G Wells are not odious.”
For Gatiss, Kneale’s gifts have never been properly acknowledged. “He is a genuine seer. I think it’s quite remarkable the extent to which he predicted the disintegration of broadcasting and society. I do think that if he’d chosen something more straight, if I can use that word, he would be up there with Dennis Potter in the popular imagination, but he stuck to his guns. I think it’s a fascinating way of trying to communicate his thoughts and beliefs and stories. I think it’s a shame that it’s probably forever going to have some slightly anoraky context. Shame on the BBC and the world for not recognising him more!”
Gatiss and Dyson confess that they too have referenced Kneale in their own television work, but more through stray lines and in-jokes than outright parody. “With the League, his influence is much more the quality of his writing,” Dyson explains. “There are certain things that have found their way in. If not quotes, they’re ‘in the spirit of’.”
Gatiss is, in fact, one of Kneale’s most high-profile admirers, and has been active in his support for the venerable writer. In his capacity as a modern TV writer and performer, he has tried to launch several projects celebrating Kneale’s work. Back in 1992, before the League of Gentlemen brought him to public attention, Gatiss paid his respects to Quatermass in an oblique manner. He was commissioned to write an original novel for Virgin Publishing, part of a series of new adventures of Doctor Who, the TV version having been axed by the BBC. Gatiss’ story, Nightshade, has the time-travelling Doctor land on Earth in 1968, and encountering a retired actor, Edmund Trevithick, who had starred as the intrepid Professor Nightshade on British television many years ago. To his horror, Trevithick seems to be bedevilled for real by the fictional alien foes he faced onscreen.
“Obviously, Nightshade was a complete homage to Nigel Kneale,” Gatiss admits. “When I started out, I envisaged it as like a Christmas ghost story or something, a Stone Tape-like thing: ‘What if an actor was haunted by the monsters from his TV series?’. Originally I think [the fictional series] was going to be much more like Doctor Who, but then I thought, with the setting and everything, it has to be Quatermass. It was certainly never intended as a Quatermass rip-off; I just wanted to play with all the things that really appealed to me about it.” Gatiss peppered the Nightshade novel with Quatermass parallels. “There were a lot of things like the references to Trevithick’s daughter getting killed on an autobahn [a similar event is recounted in Kneale’s 1979 Quatermass novel]. At the time I had an original Betamax copy of Quatermass and I was obsessed with it!”
Another of the Doctor Who New Adventures authors went even further: Lance Parkin’s The Dying Days, published in 2007, features a cameo by an elderly professor character, refered to as ‘Bernard’ and ‘Professor’, who is first introduced, interruptedly, as ‘-ermass’. By Parkin’s own subsequent admission, this was meant to be the John Mills incarnation of Quatermass, but this coy, cheeky appearance managed to subvert any tricky rights issues.
Writers in many fields are only too happy to confess to the influence Kneale’s work has had on them. Comics writer Grant Morrison was too young to have seen the original TV Quatermass serials, but grew up adoring the film adaptations. “They were the ones that really impacted on me. I just thought they got better and better,” Morrison says. “They started off good and then got really good. Quatermass and the Pit is just one of the best stories ever. I think Kneale came up with some real archetypal science fiction myths, the notion of the buried spaceship and the alien life-form coming back from space along with the crew. All these things have been used again and again and again but they’re really primal stories and Nigel Kneale did a lot of them first.”
Morrison gladly attests to the influence Kneale has had on his own work. “All that stuff was definitely a really big input for me,” he says. “The idea that every story had a brilliant concept and started out from something really original was a big inspiration. Every one of them builds off this really simple, brilliant idea: we are descended from the Martians, we are food for aliens… every one of them’s just a great little concept. It’s a mythical quality for me. The stories are so tiny, but I feel they’re myths for the age of science. That’s what he’s created. People have been riffing off him for a long time. There’s something eternal about Quatermass.”
Another major figure from the comics world, writer Warren Ellis, is also an unapologetic Kneale fan. Writing on his personal blog site in 2006, Ellis praised Kneale as “one of my great influences; as a kid in the 1970s, before the fourth and final Quatermass starring Sir John Mills, my father bought me the paperback scriptbooks of the original three Quatermass serials . . . I was obsessed with those things for years, and have them still. They taught me untold amounts about dialogue, pacing, and the grounding of the unreal in the real.”
Writer and novelist Frank Cottrell-Boyce says that he admires Kneale’s work “hugely”, singling out “the ability to bring a feeling of mundane reality to the fantastical — the [John] Wyndham effect.” Meanwhile, American scriptwriter Dan O’Bannon reckons Kneale’s writing owes its strength to “a haunting imagination. That’s the way I would see it. A strong sense of imagination, plus a certain quality about it that hooks your mind or feelings, and a gift for character that’s unusual in science fiction.”
Above all, academic and writer Julian Petley values Kneale’s “imagination — getting TV drama away from literary adaptation. He’s got a breadth and a depth of vision which I think is unusual. There’s a slightly dystopian vision in Nigel, I think. There’s a theme of a distrust of youth, which I find interesting. It must have been very unfashionable at the time he was doing things like The Chopper and Bam! Pow! Zapp! But it’s not just thematic. I think it’s the care with which he draws characters; the way he places them in their surroundings. It’s making the unbelievable believable, which I think is a tremendously difficult thing to do. That’s where his great originality lies. He’s got tremendous breadth of interest, too… and apart from that, he’s a nice guy!”
Kim Newman considers that Kneale “just has more ideas than anyone else. Not only that, but he always roots this stuff in a solid sense of society and character. I always believe his people. And he’s very good on specifics; he writes British stuff. It would be absurd to remake Quatermass and the Pit set in New York. It just doesn’t work.” That’s not to say, though, that this was never a possibility.
In fact, Quatermass and the Pit next surfaced in the Nottinghamshire village of Cropwell Bishop, when Kneale gave his permission for a live outdoor version of his serial to be staged in a gypsum quarry during August 1997. Adapted by Peter Thornhill, and starring David Longford as Quatermass, this version came courtesy of Creation Productions Ltd, a site-specific theatre company co-founded by the musician Paul K Joyce, most widely known as composer of the theme to the children’s TV series Bob the Builder.
All told, the power of the Quatermass serials continues to be felt. Their plots are regularly plagiarised by everything from the 1999 Johnny Depp film vehicle The Astronaut’s Wife and the 1997 ITV drama The Uninvited to the 2003 BBC series Strange and 2017’s science fiction thriller movie Life. The rights to the Quatermass serials themselves, though, lay among the embers of Hammer studios for many years. The ailing company went into receivership in 1979, but was then revitalised under the leadership of one Roy Skeggs, who had previously been the producer of many late-period Hammer Films. Skeggs’ brainchild, the Hammer House of Horror TV anthology show, helped to save Hammer’s skin. Kneale, though, refers to Skeggs darkly as “the awful remnant.” This antagonism can be traced back to when Skeggs managed to take control of the company. “Skeggs was the office junior, and through bankruptcy he became the boss,” Kneale explains. “Hammer went bust and they closed it all. It fell into the hands of their two accountants, and Skeggs raised a bank loan to bring it back to life. Hammer Films rise again, and he would be the great producer — an upraised clerk.”
Skeggs tried to negotiate with the major American studios, to strike deals to remake the Hammer back catalogue, but found it less easy than he’d hoped. “He was acting the big producer, but he never produced anything. He got in so many tangles with things he’d sold and half-sold. Then they’d discovered he’d didn’t have the rights to something and they had to scrap the contract that they’d half-signed.”
In 2000, Skeggs sold the Hammer back catalogue on to PR mogul Charles Saatchi. “Saatchi was a fan of Hammer’s films when he was a small boy. He said to Skeggs, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to remake all the old Hammer Films? I’ll buy the rights from you, the lot, for a tidy sum.’ Skeggs said yes. And that’s the end of the awful, awful Hammer Films story…”. (As we’ll come to see, though, Hammer was the studio that wouldn’t die.)
Various attempts have been made to launch remakes of the Quatermass stories. The first, back in 1993 before the Saatchi/Hammer buy-out, was a surprisingly faithful new version of the Quatermass Experiment TV serial (rather than Hammer’s film version), planned by Richard Donner’s production company for Warners. The script was provided by long-time Quatermass fan, Alien writer Dan O’Bannon. “Dick Donner’s company had acquired the rights to do remakes of Hammer’s films,” O’Bannon says. “I was asked if I wanted to try writing one of them, and immediately jumped on The Quatermass Experiment. I said I’d like to try to do an update of that.” The Warners-Hammer deal, which was said to have cost a six-figure sum, covered the remake rights for the entire Hammer back catalogue, with O’Bannon’s take on The Quatermass Experiment lined up as the first on the starting blocks.
Alas, the script never went into production. “Nothing came of it,” O’Bannon admits. “About the time I was finishing writing the script, somehow or other the whole deal collapsed. I don’t know what went wrong, but I did manage to finish the screenplay. As a reference I worked from a videotape of The Creeping Unknown and from a copy of the teleplay, as a matter of fact I used that same Penguin edition I’d bought as a child. I worked to incorporate what I thought were the best moments of both.” O’Bannon even had a suggestion to make about casting. “I was going to recommend that they get Sean Connery to play Quatermass. I had him in mind as I was writing it.”
O’Bannon’s take on the story concerns one Dr Geoffrey Quatermass, a middle-aged aerospace tycoon — according to the stage directions, ‘a cross between Howard Hughes and George Patton’. With experimental rocket groups a thing of the past, the enterprises of the 1993 Quatermass are driven by commercial concerns, as well as a fierce, questing curiosity. The script is a faithful modernisation of the television original, stylish and fast-paced, with an American setting. The familiar characters from the forty-year-old serial — Victor Carroon, Judith Carroon, Gordon Briscoe and Colin Marsh — are present and correct, with names intact. Even the new Quatermass character is, we learn, the ‘son of British rocket pioneer Bernard Quatermass’. “I had a little fun with that, a few in-jokes,” O’Bannon admits. “Of course, if you think about it logically, it’s impossibly bizarre that his son happens to have exactly the same experience that his father’s had forty years before. I just didn’t touch on that!”
The script opens with Quatermass team nervously awaiting news from their lost rocket — again, a direct nod to Kneale’s serial, rather than the Hammer remake. “I went back into the teleplay and I found things that had been omitted from the movie that I thought were worthwhile, and I put them back in,” O’Bannon explains. “The movie opens with something that was a real cliché scene in the 1950s in a horror movie. A teenage couple is necking in their convertible when the rocket crashes. Real cliché. And in so doing they omitted a really lengthy scene from the teleplay, which took place in Quatemass’ mission control in which they’re all walking around very worriedly waiting for this rocket to return. I went back to that. With technology the way it is now, they’re able to track this thing coming in over one continent and then the next.”
For O’Bannon, the relocation of the story to America was a mixed blessing. “There are certain things that are lost”, he argues. “One of the very good things about the film version is the way it makes use of that postwar situation in Britain. You can still feel the rubble almost of the war. There’s a grim quality, of cratered buildings and tight circumstances, that infuses that film. I think that’s one of its virtues, and all of that had to go.”
Instead, O’Bannon sets the crashing of Quatermass’ rocket in Atlanta, Georgia, the home of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC. The decision was driven by a desire to update the original scene where the mutating Carroon breaks into a chemist’s shop and frenziedly consumes every chemical it contains. “I transformed that scene,” O’Bannon says. “Instead of keeping it a pharmacy or chemists, I had him break into the CDC’s biosafety 4 lab — the highest level of contamination — and eat all of the specimens. Since I was doing that, by simple logic I had the thing crash in Atlanta.”
After the initial crash, Geoffrey Quatermass speeds to the scene. “Quatermass comes whipping across the ocean in his own private jet,” O’Bannon explains, “because he’s the head of Quatermass Aerospace who have manufactured a line of various high performance aeroplanes, and the jet is, of course, of their own manufacture.” O’Bannon’s script even opts for Kneale’s original climax, with the massive Carroon creature — having taken up residence in a nuclear dismantling building before it spores — responding to Quatermass’ pleas to the lingering shred of humanity within it.
O’Bannon decided to run his handiwork by the original writer himself. “I communicated with Mr Kneale,” he explains. “I wrote him a letter, and I sent him a copy of the screenplay to get his comments on it. He sent a reply and he was very friendly and courteous.” Kneale, in turn, was very taken with the deft, thoughtful new script. “Dan sent me a copy, which was fine. He’d Americanised it, of course, but there was nothing wrong with that. I’d seen things he’d done, Alien and so on, and I thought he was pretty good. I found he’d used my original ending, which I was very pleased with.” O’Bannon was delighted to receive such positive feedback. “I’m very flattered that Kneale feels that way,” he says. “Maybe he was simply pleased that I took the effort to work from his original, rather than simply tossing it to the winds and ignoring it, which is what is done so often with adaptations.”
Sadly, the project capsized before it got past the stage of the first-draft script. “It was fun,” O’Bannon says, “but then the Warners deal collapsed for reasons that were never explained to me.”
By contrast, Kneale was not remotely enamoured by a radical remake of Quatermass and the Pit that was mooted at the tail end of the nineties. It was lined up by director Alex Proyas, then best known for his atmospheric comic book adaptation The Crow. Proyas enlisted the assistance of scriptwriter David S Goyer, with whom he’d collaborated on the paranoid fantasy Dark City. Goyer scripted the new adaptation, which he called simply Legacy. This time, the story would be set in modern day America, and there would not even be room for Professor Quatermass himself. Goyer’s script centres on the remarkable concepts of the source material, and the suggestion that man has been influenced by Martian visitors, which becomes clear when a mysterious object is unearthed. The materialisation of the demonic ‘Hob’ figure, which happens at the climax of Kneale’s serial, was shifted to earlier in Goyer’s version, with much of the narrative that followed devoted to its consequences. The tone is relentlessly dark and foreboding — not to mention rather unsubtle.
Plans were drawn up for Proyas to direct from Goyer’s script, and shoot in Australian studio space, then a vogueishly affordable option. But Kneale was extremely dismayed when he read Legacy, and endeavoured to have the production stopped. “It was atrocious,” he asserts. “They’d turned it into a bogey picture.” But it never actually came to pass: citing problems with rights issues, in the event the film was quietly cancelled. Goyer has become a prime mover behind the wave of big-budget adaptations of DC Comics characters, as a key contributing writer to the recent Batman and Superman movies.
Film remakes of existing Kneale scripts are regularly said to be in the pipeline, but as yet none has yet come to fruition. The BBC even briefly considered the possibility of adapting the Quatermass serials for radio in 2002. Mark Gatiss approached the Corporation with a view to making a fresh television production of The Road at around the same time, but sadly these plans came to nothing.
Nor was this the first time a remake of The Road was mooted. According to Julian Petley, similar efforts had been made in the early nineties. “When Mark Shivas was producing drama at the BBC, I said to him, ‘You really ought to think about trying to remake some of the stuff that the BBC has destroyed, and in particular Nigel Kneale’s The Road’’,” Petley says. “I sent him a copy of the script, and he showed it to one of his script editors without telling her who it was by. He just said, ‘What do you think of this?’ Apparently, she said, ‘This is the greatest thing I’ve ever read!’ And yet, still no one has remade it, which I think is extraordinary!”
The spring of 2005 saw a fresh flurry of Kneale-related activity. In April, BBC Worldwide released a ‘Quatermass collection’ DVD box-set, comprising the original TV versions of Quatermass 2, Quatermass and the Pit, and the two extant episodes of The Quatermass Experiment. The archive material was remastered by the BBC’s semi-official ‘Restoration Team’, achieving very impressive results on a very tight budget. The package also came with an extensive booklet detailing the production of the serials, written by archive TV expert Andrew Pixley.
Simultaneous with the appearance of the box-set, BBC4 staged a season around the theme of television nostalgia. The strand, ‘TV on Trial’, was an assessment of television quality down the decades, screening archive programmes and allowing viewers to decide which era was the best. (In the final vote, the 1970s won out.) Needing a climactic centrepiece for the project, it was decided to restage The Quatermass Experiment as a live TV drama — the BBC’s first such undertaking in twenty years. This juxtaposing of fifties TV drama with the twenty-first century was, it was felt, an appropriate way to draw proceedings together.
The project was the brainchild of Richard Fell, then head of the BBC’s Fictionlab unit, which was formed to develop drama projects for the Corporation’s newly-launched digital channels. As Fell explains, “It was my idea, having been a long-time fan of Nigel’s work. Quatermass, The Year of the Sex Olympics and my own particular favourite, The Road, are all classics of television drama — some sadly no longer with us. But it’s now becoming an accepted idea that classic television, like theatre of film, can be revived and adapted for a contemporary audience.” Indeed, according to Fell, the seeds of such a venture had been sown some time earlier. “I made a BBC film called Surrealissimo with Mark Gatiss a number of years ago, and during the making of that we discovered we were both fans. We discussed the idea of reviving a Kneale piece then. When BBC4 announced they were doing a ‘TV on Trial’ season, I thought it was a great opportunity to resurrect the idea. There was no intention, or pre-knowledge, about the DVD box-set — just happy accident.”
An impressive team was assembled to realise the idea. Fell adapted Kneale’s original six-part drama into one two-hour piece, as well as acting as executive producer. The appointed director was Sam Miller, an alumnus of the likes of BBC2’s popular drama This Life, with some feature film experience under his belt, too. Many were surprised at the casting of a ‘young’ Quatermass, namely established film actor Jason Flemyng, but his restrained, authoritative performance was agreeable and satisfying. Andrew Tiernan essayed a troubled, edgy Victor Carroon, and prominent Kneale fan Mark Gatiss bagged the role of Quatermass’ anxious assistant, Paterson. (As Gatiss himself wryly claims, “I made it clear that if I wasn’t involved in this production, it wasn’t going to happen — let’s put it that way!”). Appearing as Gordon Briscoe was rising TV star David Tennant, in the same week that he was first named as the next Doctor Who.
Extensive rehearsals were held for the piece in a London church hall, but the live performance itself was staged at a disused Ministry of Defence base in Surrey, with different areas of the base dressed as the various sets. Between scenes, the actors were ferried from set to set on golf buggies, and pre-recorded links were inserted to bridge the gaps.
Kneale himself signed on as consultant to the project, and, after initial meetings, received weekly phone calls from the production team to keep him updated. “Nigel gave us notes on the script,” Fell says, “and we had long discussions about the characters and their motivations — some of which we used and some of which we didn’t. He was incredibly helpful in discussing the meaning of the film — why and how he had written it and the pitfalls he had encountered. His co-operation was incredibly useful.”
Broadcast live on Saturday April 2, 2005, the end result was, arguably, more ‘interesting’ than entirely successful. The claustrophobic atmosphere of the early scenes set around the mission control centre dissipates rather as Carroon escapes to roam London. Unexpectedly, the tone is of ‘timelessness’ rather than an outright update. There are few obvious trappings of 2005, whereas the costumes and design often seem to suggest the 1950s. “The timeless approach was our intention from the beginning,” Fell admits. “Indeed, one of the things that attract me to Nigel’s work is its timeless quality and relevance. We did not want to make a period piece, or reconstruct the originals. We wanted to make it as impactful to a contemporary audience as we could. By the same token, we didn’t want to do something obviously set in the present day, as that would date as well. We wanted to stay true to the story and the characters, just lift them from their fifties locale. We wanted the viewers to have some sense of its origins — both linguistically and technologically — but not to allow that to confine or hinder the viewers’ enjoyment of the story. We also wanted to convey the prescience of the original work.”
Images from the 2005 live TV remake of The Quatermass Experiment, starring Jason Flemyng.
The final confrontation was relocated from Westminster Abbey to the Tate Modern gallery (an accidental nod, perhaps, to inaugural Quatermass star Reginald Tate), but hedges its bets by showing no monster whatsoever. Instead, Quatermass simply addresses the darkness around him. After two hour’s tension and build-up, though, the climax is weakened as a result. Nevertheless, the compelling quality of Kneale’s original scripts still shone through, and the production marked the first BBC TV production of his work for thirty-one years, albeit not of new material. (Perhaps surprisingly, there were few slip-ups during the live broadcast — just one fluffed line, and one near-fall.)
Kneale himself was decidedly underwhelmed by the project. “It was a stunt, wasn’t it?” he opines. “And not a good stunt. They found themselves doing what somebody had thought a live show was like — and it wasn’t like that!” In particular, Kneale was unimpressed by what became of his original screenplay. “They were just slashing their way through, taking my script and chopping great lumps out of it, cutting it to size. I could barely tolerate watching it. And that’s not the fault of the actors, who were decent people and had obviously done a lot of work. They were making it as real as possible. Mark Gatiss’ performance was totally believable. The others were limited by the fact that there was no script left. Strangely, my accountant liked it. It must have cheered him up.”
Images from the 2005 live TV remake of The Quatermass Experiment, starring Jason Flemyng.
On the other hand, the BBC itself was well pleased with the piece, as Richard Fell asserts: “I think it was successful. I think it carried off the tension and adrenaline and suspense of the story. The direction was taut, the acting superb and the design gave it a real ‘ghost story’ feel. The feedback from the audience was unprecedented for a BBC4 programme.” Indeed, it drew an impressive audience of around half-a-million viewers, considerable ratings for a non-terrestrial channel and BBC4’s highest for a year. (Soberingly, exactly three weeks after the broadcast, one-time Quatermass Sir John Mills died at the age of ninety-seven — leaving Jason Flemyng as the sole surviving actor to have played the role.)
THE KNEALE FAMILY WEATHERED MANY UPS AND DOWNS AROUND THE turn of the millennium. Sadly, Judith’s brother Michael, who had forged career as a hugely well regarded QC, died in 2002.*
On a happier note, Judith’s father, Alfred Kerr, had once again become a celebrated writer in his homeland. The Nazis had systematically destroyed much of Kerr’s writing, but in recent times dedicated parties had been unearthing such work. One figure was Günther Rühle, himself an esteemed German theatre critic, and near-contemporary of Judith Kerr and Kneale. He had great success in 1995 when searching for Alfred Kerr’s work in the University of Wroclaw, formerly Breslau. “In the archive, he found all the newspaper articles that had been written over five years,” Kneale says. “It’s the most astonishing thing. He took them back to Berlin, and said, ‘Would anybody be interested in this?’ and one man was. He was an entrepreneurial publisher, and he said, ‘Let me have them.’ Within three months they had sold 70,000 copies in hardback! If only the man who wrote it all had been alive… They’re now published in superb editions, and secondary subpublications and in different languages — not English, because they’re untranslatable, but to local German, Polish and so on. Marvellous things, but all I can do with them is admire them on the mantelpiece.”
The resulting royalties which flowed towards Kneale and family were substantial. It was Kneale himself who suggested a fitting use for the money, namely to create and fund the Alfred-Kerr-Darstellerpreis, an annual prize of 5,000 Euros given to outstanding young German actors, presented in Berlin at the end of every May.
Indeed, the success of Kneale’s family is quite astonishing. His wife Judith continues to write and illustrate best-selling children’s books. After sixteen volumes, she killed off her most famous creation (rather like her husband had done with Professor Quatermass), with the 2002 title Goodbye Mog, in which the Thomas family have to learn to cope with the loss of their beloved pet. Between them, the Mog books and her fictionalised childhood autobiographies have been published all over the world, and translated into many languages. Total sales now number over nine million worldwide. Their daughter Tacy left acting to move into the field of special effects puppeteering, a lifelong fascination (and a curious echo of long ago, when her father decorated a pair of leather gloves with foliage to pass as an alien creature in Westminster Abbey). Her credits include work on the blockbusting Harry Potter film series.
Their son Matthew, meanwhile, has himself become an author of great repute. His fourth novel, English Passengers — a historical, seafaring tale, touching, like his father’s unmade play Crow before it, on old Manx smuggling and the slave trade — was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 2000, and won the prestigious Whitbread Prize the same year. While working on new fiction, Matthew relocated to Italy, and became a father to two young children, Kneale’s first grandchildren.
Kneale’s last return to the Isle of Man was a trip with Matthew during the nineties, but his links with the island were never entirely lost. On February 27, 2003, Manx Radio broadcast a brand-new production of Kneale’s first ever script, the disaster docu-drama The Long Stairs, with actors drawn from the Manx Amateur Drama Federation. The same year, Kneale received the rare distinction of featuring on a stamp, part of a series called ‘The Manx Bookshelf’ issued by the Isle of Man Post, among other literary names including Mona Douglas and Hall Caine. Kneale was chosen for the 27p stamp, which was illustrated with the line drawing from the cover of Penguin’s original Quatermass and the Pit script-book by his brother Bryan. Bryan himself, a member of the Royal Academy of Art since 1974, continues to be involved with art and culture on the island.
In recent times, the Isle of Man has developed a reputation as an ideal location for film-makers. Quite apart from its striking landscapes, the Manx government has also offered financial incentives to film production companies, and it’s becoming a go-to destination for such enterprises. For instance, the 1998 hit Waking Ned, set in Ireland, was made entirely in locations on the Isle of Man. Other notable productions to have been made on location there include The Libertine (2004), Miss Potter (2006) and Belle (2012). The spawning ground of a British cinema veteran is, therefore, drawing the British film industry back.
THE LANDSCAPE OF BROADCASTING HAS CHANGED ALMOST BEYOND RECOGNITION since Kneale began working in it in 1948. Today, there is a whole raft of channels on offer to viewers at all times. The BBC closed its inhouse Radiophonic Workshop division in 1999, and their visual effects department followed suit in 2003. Both facilities virtually debuted in the original BBC Quatermass serials, and are now gone forever. Meanwhile, Laura Mackie, the daughter of Kneale’s ex-Script Unit colleague, Philip Mackie, has become an influential senior drama executive for both the BBC and ITV. Arguably, Kneale’s style of writing, anchored in ideas rather than character, is out of favour in the current climate, where much TV drama is taken up with gritty character-driven star vehicles. Perhaps, too, the distance he kept from his writing — shying away from autobiographical fiction, and exercising, for instance, a fascination with the uncanny, in which he doesn’t believe — might leave modern viewers a little cold. But Kneale wrote for another time, and much of his work has a strength and power that today’s television schedules sorely miss. Perhaps the broadcasting environment will change again in due course.
But Kneale was quite content to put his career behind him. In fact, towards the end of his life the veteran writer was surprisingly optimistic about the future of broadcasting and storytelling. “It’s wonderful to find so many people now who know so much more about how to make a film, and the sort of film they’d like to make,” he remarked. “The technical and expert interest is quite wonderful, I find. And the whole business of storing old films and keeping them and showing respect to them — well, it’s a bit wobbly, because some areas are better than others, but the aim is good where it exists at all.”
For a writer who dealt so often with speculation, Kneale’s career is itself littered with ‘what if’s. What if he’d pursued a literary career after the success of his short stories? What if his working relationship with the BBC hadn’t deteriorated into frustration and ill-feeling? What if he’d fully established himself as a film screenwriter during the 1960s, or his original feature ideas had made it into production in the 1980s? And that’s not to mention the tantalising flotilla of unmade original scripts he wrote, from The Big, Big Giggle to Crow and Batavia.
And yet, speaking in 2002, Kneale himself doesn’t take the whole business too seriously. He certainly wouldn’t consider his greatest achievement in life to be writing Quatermass, The Road or The Stone Tape. Rather, it’s his long, happy marriage to a woman he loves, and being father to two children he adores. In that respect, it’s hard not to feel that he’s got his priorities exactly right. The writing was just something he did while he had to stay out of the sun. It so happened that what he wrote was remarkably skilled, imaginative and innovative.
“I always pushed my luck, I think,” Kneale says with a smile.
*He’d been knighted in 1972, and was yet another member of the Kerr family to have work published, namely two revised editions of the legal resource McNair’s Law of the Air; a short legal fable for the International Bar Association, The Macao Sardine Case, in 1989; and an autobiography, As Far As I Remember, which was published posthumously.