This is taken from The Times, November 02, 2006:

Nigel Kneale
April 28, 1922 - October 29, 2006
Creator of The Quatermass Experiment whose tales of the paranormal pushed the boundaries of television drama

In 1953 the BBC television drama department was faced with an unexpected gap in the schedule and at short notice commissioned Nigel Kneale, a young staff writer, to fill the gap. He came up with The Quatermass Experiment, a science-fiction thriller of power and originality that kept a large proportion of the viewing population gripped for six weeks.

Kneale had been with the BBC for a year or so, mainly working on adaptations of plays and novels. But The Quatermass Experiment was his own creation, and television had not shown anything like it before. In contrast to American science fiction, which then rarely rose above the level of children’s comics, Kneale was writing for an adult audience.

As in much of his subsequent work in science fiction and the supernatural, Kneale drew on contemporary anxieties to fashion bold, compelling and often prescient stories.

Underlying The Quatermass Experiment were fears about the nuclear bomb and the Soviet-American space race, as the rocket scientist Professor Bernard Quatermass, confronts the survivor of an aborted space mission who returns to Earth and changes into a vegetable monster.

Kneale found a sympathetic collaborator in the director, Rudolph Cartier, the German émigré who had joined the BBC at the same time. Both men were dismayed by the lack of ambition in television drama, which in form had hardly progressed beyond providing pictures to radio plays and in content was stuck in classic serials and West End stage hits.

Cartier’s visual flair, which had been forged in prewar German cinema, matched the ambition of Kneale’s scripts and the two forged a powerful partnership. From The Quatermass Experiment they moved to another nightmare vision of the future, which drew on contemporary angst about totalitarianism, George Orwell’s 1984. Sombre and chilling, most memorably in the sequence where Peter Cushing as the hero, Winston Smith, is terrorised by rats, it was the BBC’s most controversial drama production to that date.

The corporation received thousands of complaints about bad taste, one woman saying she thanked God for Wilfred Pickles and The Grove Family. There were also questions in Parliament. At that time plays went out live and were usually repeated a few days later. The BBC hesitated over whether to transmit 1984 again, but the press was generally supportive — and it emerged that the production also had a champion in the Queen.

Kneale and Cartier worked on two more Quatermass serials. Prefaced by a warning that it was “not for children or those of a nervous disposition”, Quatermass II (1955) again reflected Cold War paranoia, as a secret government chemical research station turns out to be an acclimatisation centre for an alien race that is trying to infiltrate the minds of the population. The challenge for Quatermass is to destroy the asteroid where the aliens are based.

In Quatermass and the Pit (1959) Kneale married science fiction with the supernatural. An ancient alien spaceship discovered beneath the streets of London is followed by Quatermass’s discovery that ghosts, demons and other phenomena can be traced back to a Martian invasion of Earth millions of years before. There were echoes, too, of the race riots that had erupted in the London district of Notting Hill.

It was probably the most satisfying of the Quatermass stories. Kneale’s script suggested that behind the apparently irrational there were real dangers, and the technology, too, had become more polished. In The Quatermass Experiment the monster had defeated the BBC’s design department and Kneale had been forced into making it himself. Now there were no such obstacles and, moreover, the BBC had taken over the former Ealing film studios with its superior facilities.

The first two Quatermass serials were adapted by Kneale for the cinema, as was a television play directed by Cartier that reached the screen as The Abominable Snowman. A film of Quatermass and the Pit was made in 1967. Kneale also scripted the cinema versions of the John Osborne plays Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer, as well as the naval adventure HMS Defiant. He also worked on a screenplay for a film, which was never made, of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. But his main outlet was television, which he continued to serve with intelligence and imagination.

Thomas Nigel Kneale was born in Barrow-in-Furness but brought up on the Isle of Man and considered himself a Manxman. He worked in a lawyer’s office and, after studying at RADA, acted in Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon. His first success as writer came when Tomato Cain and Other Stories, a collection published in 1949, won the Somerset Maugham Prize. The stories were inspired by his childhood in the Isle of Man and anticipated his later concerns. He was encouraged by his publisher to write a novel but decided to try his hand at television, convinced that a still infant medium had yet to realise its potential.

By the end of the 1950s he, as much as any writer, had demonstrated the creative possibilities of television drama and he continued to produce challenging work, much of which, thanks to BBC regulations of the time to wipe and reuse tapes, has not survived. One of the lost plays was The Road (1963), which began as a ghost story set in an 18th-century village but ended in the future with people taking flight from a nuclear war.

His next important work was The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968), transmitted in the BBC’s Wednesday Play strand, which again combined contemporary concerns with a nightmare vision of the future by imagining a world in which appetites for sex and food are dulled by television. The screen experience becomes a substitute for the real thing.

Saturated by pornography, people lose their urge to procreate and the population declines. The world food shortage is solved by showing non-stop images of gluttony which dull the appetite. The play contained scenes of violence and love-making which were explicit for the time and sparked a deluge of complaints.

Kneale reworked the ghost story in The Stone Tape (1972), in which scientists are trying to invent a new recording medium while working in a haunted Victorian building. In a frightening climax the heroine, played by Jane Asher, is menaced by ghostly lights. At this time Kneale began work on a fourth Quatermass story, but the project ran into technical problems and the Department of the Environment refused permission to shoot a key scene at Stonehenge. Blaming rising costs, the BBC eventually dropped the project.

This was one of the reasons why, in 1975, Kneale decided to move to ITV. There he wrote Beasts, a series of six dramas with the common theme of a fear of animals, and had a play about the slave trade dropped, before reviving the aborted Quatermass. With John Mills as the now elderly scientist, and the Stonehenge ban overcome with a stone circle built in polystyrene, Kneale portrayed a dystopian future where society had broken down, urban guerrillas were on the rampage and crowds of hippies, called Planet People, were being harvested by an alien force.

Costing more than £1 million, making it one of the most expensive television dramas, Quatermass demonstrated that Kneale’s invention and prescience had not declined, though the various plot elements gelled less satisfactorily than before and the four-part serial had less impact than its 1950s predecessors.

In 1981 Kneale combined science fiction with situation comedy in Kinvig, in which an electrical repairman is transported to the planet Mercury. He later adapted Susan Hill’s ghost story A Woman in Black and, in a return to the BBC, Kingsley Amis’s comic novel Stanley and the Women in which John Thaw departed from type to play the eponymous hero. During the 1990s, by now well into his seventies, Kneale contributed episodes to Sharpe, the adventures of an English soldier fighting Napoleon, and Thaw’s legal series, Kavanagh QC.

Kneale was much admired by American practitioners of horror and the supernatural, including Stephen King and the film director John Carpenter and he was commissioned to write a screenplay for the third in the Halloween series. But it was an unhappy experience and he had his name removed from the credits.

He was asked, but declined, to write for the American television series The X-Files, which addressed themes of paranoia similar to those which he had explored 40 years earlier.

He married Judith Kerr, a script editor and writer of children’s stories, in 1954. They had a daughter, Tacy Kneale, an actress, and a son, Matthew Kneale, a novelist.

Nigel Kneale, television dramatist, was born on April 28, 1922. He died on October 29, 2006, aged 84.

This is taken from The Daily Telegraph:

Nigel Kneale
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 03/11/2006

Nigel Kneale, who died on Sunday aged 84, was responsible for one of BBC Television's earliest audience successes, the Quatermass series, and became one of the most influential television and film writers to emerge in the 1950s.

Directed by Rudolph Cartier and broadcast live in three series of six half-hour episodes, each story in the Quatermass trilogy — The Quatermass Experiment (1953), Quatermass II (1955) and Quatermass and the Pit (1959) — used a plot of invasion from outer space as a framework for contemporary social comment. The series influenced films from Stanley Kubrick's 2001 to Ridley Scott's Alien.

The Quatermass Experiment was inspired by the Frankenstein myth, and concerned the sole survivor of a rocket crew who returns to an earth infected by an alien life form that exists by feeding on human blood. The man is gradually and painfully transformed into a giant fungoid mutant, stalking London and committing horrifying murders as his human side fights an ultimately hopeless battle against the evil force within him. The scientist who tracks him down is the rocket group chief, Professor Quatermass (Reginald Tate), who eventually corners the monster at his lair in Westminster Abbey.

The series was laughably crude by the standards of modern sci-fi epics. As there was no special effects department, Kneale had to do them himself. "The appearance of the monster in Westminster Abbey was my two hands, stuck through a blow-up still of the interior of the Abbey with my hands suitably dressed with gloves which I'd covered with a bit of vegetation and leather," he recalled. Yet, in the fearful atmosphere of the early 1950s, the shock of seeing space creatures in post-war London made Quatermass the first television drama to become a national event. It won huge audiences, despite the relative rarity of television sets at that time. Pubs reported a sharp drop in trade because of customers staying at home to watch the latest episode.

In Quatermass II a shower of meteorites brings an alien force to earth which succeeds in enslaving the highest in the land. It turns them into willing instruments for world domination, until Professor Quatermass (John Robinson) leads a workers' uprising to destroy it.

Kneale reached his apogee in Quatermass and the Pit, a powerful meditation on the destructive urge within mankind.

The series begins with the discovery of a long-buried spaceship containing the bodies of horned, locust-like Martians. Quatermass (André Morell) deduces that five million years ago, when Mars was dying, Martians removed apes from the earth, altered them surgically and returned them, imbued with new faculties, in an attempt to perpetuate their race.

The hypothesis explains everything that is unexplained — ghosts, poltergeists, second sight and telekinesis. All the elements come into play in a chilling finale in which, as the emanations from the rediscovered spaceship become stronger, Martian memories are awakened in anyone who has the Martian gene, and they start to massacre those who do not.

All three BBC television series were later memorably filmed by Hammer, establishing the company as an entire industry churning out horror films.

Thomas Nigel Kneale was born at Barrow-in-Furness on April 18 1922. His family came from the Isle of Man, where his father owned and ran the Herald newspaper; soon after Nigel's birth, the family returned to the island. Manx folklore would influence his development as a writer, and Manx names such as Kinvig, Quaggan and Cain were prominent in his work. Even the name Quatermass was inspired by the number of Manx names beginning "Qu".

After leaving St Ninian's High School, Douglas, Kneale chose acting as a career and got small parts at the Stratford Memorial Theatre, writing short stories and plays in his spare time.

His first major success came in 1948, when his play Zachary Crebbin's Angel was broadcast on BBC radio. When his first book of short stories, Tomato Cain and Other Stories, won the 1950 Somerset Maugham award he decided to give up acting and become a writer.

In the early 1950s Kneale was taken on by the BBC's fledgling drama department as one of two scriptwriters. His long working partnership with Rudolph Cartier began with Arrow to the Heart (1952), and his other early work included The Cathedral, Mystery Story, Golden Rain, Affair At Assino and Number Three.

The then Head of BBC Drama, Michael Barry, was so impressed by the quality of Kneale's work that he decided to spend his entire script budget on him. The Quatermass Experiment was conceived as a six-part serial to fill the summer schedule in 1953. Also that year, he worked with Tony Richardson on Curtain Down.

After collaborating with Cartier on an adaptation of Wuthering Heights, Kneale began on a memorable adaptation of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954). It contained a particularly chilling performance from Peter Cushing as Winston Smith, and the rat scene in "Room 101" brought calls for the government to step in and prevent the play's planned second showing.

In The Road (BBC, 1963), ghosts from a future nuclear holocaust haunt an 18th-century village; in Year of the Sex Olympics (BBC, 1968) a population desensitised by television is steadily reduced by being exposed to non-stop pornography, which discourages them from sex. In Wine of India (BBC2, 1970) Kneale envisaged a future in which medical advances keep people young and fit for up to a century, so that, in order to die, they have to agree to euthanasia.

Kneale was invited to write for Doctor Who at its inception, but refused, bcause his children were growing up and he did not want them exposed to anything so nasty. In 1975 he moved to ATV, for which he made a six-part serial called Beasts, with the underlying theme of animals as attackers.

In the most striking and disturbing of these, During Barty's Party, a couple living in a country house find they are being invaded by what they gradually realise is a rat swarm, assembling underneath the floorboards. They call a commercial radio phone-in progamme and, until the rats cut the line, maintain a tenuous link with the outside world.

Kneale returned to Quatermass in a four-episode serial shown on Thames Television in 1979. Called simply Quatermass and set in the near future, Professor Quatermass, now retired and living in Scotland, comes south to take part in a television programme and becomes involved in trying to defeat an alien force which is seeking to harvest the young of the earth by sweeping them up in great force fields at ancient ritual sites.

Kneale's other film credits included an adaptation of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1959); The Entertainer (1960); HMS Defiant (1962); First Men in the Moon (1964); The Witches (1966) and Halloween III (1983). He continued to write for television into the 1990s.

Nigel Kneale was married to the children's writer Judith Kerr, whom he had met in the early 1950s when they were both working for the BBC. She was the author of When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, based on her experiences as a Jewish refugee. "That," Kneale once said of the book, "is what Quatermass and the Pit is all about."

Nigel Kneale and Judith Kerr had a daughter and a son, the writer Matthew Kneale, whose novel, English Passengers, won the Whitbread Prize in 2001.