Nigel Kneale

Nigel Kneale, the creator of the brilliant 'Quatermass' television shows has died aged 84. BBC News.

Hailed as the founding father of television sci-fi, Kneale pretty much invented the 'must-see' TV event, emptying the streets and pubs when the BBC aired 'The Quatermass Experiment' live in the 1953. The shows lead character, the alien-battling Professor Bernard Quatermass, was televisions first TV serial hero and went on to star in three more adventures.

In 'The Quatermass Experiment' the first manned space mission, sent into space by the British Experimental Rocket Group, crash lands back on Earth with two out of the three crew dead from mysterious circumstances. Once back on Earth the surviving astronaut slowly transforms into an amalgam of man and plant. 'Quatermass 2' followed in 1955 and featured an alien infection infiltrating Earth and turning people into zombies.
The third was perhaps the most successful of the series and in 'Quatermass and the Pit', Professor Quatermass finds himself involved in the discovery of a bizarre object at an archeological dig in Knightsbridge, London. As the serial progresses, Quatermass and his allies find that the contents of the object have a horrific influence over those who come into contact with it, and darker implications for the entire nature of mankind. The British Film Institute described the show as: "Completely gripping, under the guise of genre it tackled serious themes of man's hostile nature and the military's perversion of science for its own ends." Despite it's success, 'Quatermass and the Pit' was to be the last outing for the professor for twenty years.

Kneale also pre-empted the current fashion for reality TV shows with the creation of 'The Year of the Sex Olympics' in 1968. Here, society in the future is divided into two classes, the hi-drives and the low-drives. The low-drives are controlled by a constant broadcast of pornography that the hi-drives are convinced will pacify them.
In 1979 the BBC broadcast Kneale's modern horror story 'The Stone Tape', a terrifying tale concerning a group of electronic engineers who become fascinated by the supposed haunting of the historic house where they have set up their new research laboratory.

He returned to his most famous creation in 1979 and wrote 'Quatermass' for ITV. The serial starred Sir John Mills as the titular character and this time, after the destruction of a new space station, young people find themselves mysteriously drawn to an ancient stone circle in England where they believe they’ll be taken to a better place by a higher power. Quatermass discovers that they are actually being harvested by an alien race and must find a way to stop them.

In his illustrious career Kneale earned two BAFTA best screenplay nominations for his film adaptations of John Osborne's plays 'Look Back in Anger' and 'The Entertainer'. He worked on literary adaptations of 'Wuthering Heights' and most famously George Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four', starring Peter Cushing. The latter case creating a television production which became almost as famous as the book itself, being labelled both horrific and subversive, provoking death threats and raising questions in Parliament.

He continued working until the late 1990s, writing 'Sharpe's Gold' and episodes of 'Kavanagh QC' and his legacy can be felt throughout the sci-fi horror genre.