Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Quatermass Experiment by Nigel Kneale The Quatermass Experiment by Nigel Kneale. He died in a London hospital after a period of ill health, his agent said. Kneale's The Quatermass Experiment in 1953 was the UK's first sci-fi serial and created its first TV hero, the alien-battling Bernard Quatermass. The writer, from the Isle of Man, has been cited as an influence by Stephen King and film-maker John Carpenter. The Quatermass Experiment told the story of an alien monster brought back to Earth by a British space rocket. Robert Simpson, on Hammer Films' official website, said it was "event television, emptying the streets and pubs for the six weeks of its duration". Last year BBC Four broadcast a live remake starring David Tennant and Jason Flemyng. Channel controller Janice Hadlow described the original as "one of the first 'must watch' TV experiences that inspired the water cooler chat of its day". It was followed by two further serials in the 1950s, Quatermass II and Quatermass and the Pit, with all three dramas later turned into films. A fourth serial, Quatermass, was made in 1979. Kneale also scripted TV dramas including 1984, The Year of the Sex Olympics and The Stone Tape, which are regarded as modern classics. His 1954 adaptation of George Orwell's 1984 was so shocking that questions were asked in the House of Commons about the suitability of such material for television. Kneale earned two Bafta best screenplay nominations for his film adaptations of John Osborne's plays Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer. He continued working until the late 1990s, writing Sharpe's Gold and episodes of Kavanagh QC. His wife Judith Kerr is the creator of the Mog children's books. The couple had two children: Matthew Kneale, who won the Whitbread Book of the Year award for his novel English Passengers, and Tacy Kneale, a special effects designer who has worked on the Harry Potter films. Thank you for your memories of the work of Nigel Kneale and your reactions to his death, many of which are published below: I wonder if he would get a chance to produce such superb work these days? Current TV sci-fi/fantasy has a dreary preoccupation with the back story and emotional life of characters. Yet in works like Quatermass and the Pit and The Stone Tape, Kneale concentrated on the science or the horror and still managed to say a lot more about raw human emotion and the state of society than today's rubbish. Jon Sutcliffe, Enfield, UK. Nigel Kneale was one of the great TV writers. If he had been working in any other genre, this would have been recognised much more readily. However, the quality of his work shines out whenever it is seen again. Long may we be given that opportunity. A worthy tribute might be a restaging of his brilliant The Road, which the BBC so carelessly mislaid decades ago. Inga, Letchworth Garden City, Hertfordshire. One of this country's finest writers. ever. He helped to define what was possible with the new medium of television. Extraordinary stories, and their impact on ordinary lives. Quatermass and the Pit has got to be one of the most perfectly crafted stories ever written. The world is richer place for what he has left, and a poorer place for his passing. Mark Slater, Stockport. Kneale was certainly innovative and way ahead of his time. But he was also compassionate, moral and concerned about humanity, shown most effectively in Quatermass and the Pit, where Bernard Quatermass strenuously defends his view that militarism should not be taken into space. Brian Anderson, Bedford, Beds. Kneale was a great talent and seemed to have an intuitive understanding of the potential and power of television as a medium for popular and intelligent drama. A creator of iconic television drama matched only in his visceral use of the medium by Dennis Potter. David Ballantyne, Liverpool UK. Up there with Wyndham, Wells and Orwell - the fathers of intelligent, plausible science-fiction. Nigel Kneale was a true genius whose influence on the genre is undoubted and undiminished. David Moody, Halesowen, UK. Nigel Kneale was the founding father of quality sci-fi TV. The fact that 50 years on Quatermass is still reverently spoken of says it all. He will be sorely missed, yet leaves behind a wonderful legacy. My thoughts are with his family and friends. Mark Jobson, Edinburgh, Scotland. The Quatermass films terrified me as a child and entertained me as an adult. Superb imagination and way ahead of his time. Dave, Kidderminster, England. Kneale was a true pioneer and visionary. His body of work was staggering, with Quatermass, The Stone Tape, The Year of the Sex Olympics still holding up today as prime examples of great television. He had a unique understanding of the human character and exploited it to shocking effect in his work. British television owes Kneale a tremendous debt. Andy, London, UK. One of my earliest memories as a child was my dad telling me about Quatermass, and how the whole country seemed to stop for it. Only last week me and some friends held a Quatermass night; the plots, if not the special effects, still hold up remarkably. Even though he hated science fiction per se, I'll never forget how he summed up the first three serials. 1. We go to them. 2. They come to us. 3. They have always been here. Martin Winchester, Liverpool. Another one of my personal heroes gone. I don't think that his influence on TV drama in the UK has yet been fully realised, but I don't think it's overstating the case to say that Nigel Kneale pretty much invented popular drama on British television. These pioneering television writers truly are a dying breed and, maybe we don't all realise it yet, but we will miss them. Good on you, and thanks for the memories. Martin, High Peak, UK. The world is poorer for the passing of Nigel Kneale. He was a pioneer, a modern day prophet and hugely influential. The Year of the Sex Olympics was originally a prediction of what might happen in the future. Today it is a chilling parody of reality television. The collapse of society so clearly detailed in the final Quatermass story is a warning to us all. Jamie Dowling, Birmingham, England. I remember watching the film versions of the Quatermass stories as a teenager, after the 1979 story was aired, and being mortally terrified by Quatermass and the Pit. Since then I've been enthralled repeatedly by these classics. They don't date. Nigel was a genius in every sense of the word and I for one am sorry he has gone. I'll watch my DVD of the original series again tonight as a memorial. Thanks Nigel. Paul Jones, Grays, UK. Landmark TV - never to be forgotten series. John Rowney, Chesterfield. This is extremely sad news. His seminal Quatermass science fiction serials, particular the BBC trilogy, are still unsurpassed in the history of British broadcasting. Seeing them again on the recently issued DVD set is a reminder of a remarkable creative talent. Other works such as his adaptation of 1984, The Year of the Sex Olympics and the remarkable The Stone Tape are enduring testaments to a pioneer of television drama. His admirers will cherish his memory and watch again the works he wrote at the height of his imaginative powers. James Conway, London, UK. I remember my Dad telling me how he went to the doctor suffering from palpitations and lack of sleep during the Quatermass series. Turned out he was suffering from stress due to the scary nature of the programme! Now that's quality writing. Essex Havard, Cardiff, Wales. A true genius of TV, I only met him once at a screening of Quatermass and the Pit and he seemed a humble man that was just doing a job, but I believe TV as we know it would not be the same without him. DOMINIC FARNWORTH, UNITED KINGDOM. Directly responsible for some of the greatest television ever, indirectly responsible for most of the rest. he will be missed but never forgotten. James Hadwen, Nr Norwich. Always highly attuned to the anxieties of the nuclear age, he produced outstandingly original science fiction drama. In an era of primitive special effects, his ability to compel lay in his focus on the human reaction to whatever plot was unfolding, which is why his classic works are still so worth watching today. Mike Webb, San Diego, United States. Anyone who believes this man was just a writer of great television should unearth his novelization of the 1979 version of Quatermass - Kneale had an incredible command of language, wrapped around an insightful understanding of dynamics and reactions of society, even in a sci-fi setting. Simply put, Kneale shaped and influenced the tone and intelligence of science fiction in this country, from the 70s' Doctor Who through 80s' The Day of the Triffids to 90s' Ultraviolet. RIP Nigel, you'll be missed. Leonard Sultana, Cleckheaton, West Yorkshire. I remember seeing The Stone Tape at the National Film Theatre, introduced by the author. Magic! I don't think he'll be fully appreciated until now - the mark of most geniuses. Perhaps a tribute season will be arranged, showing just how many 'firsts' he was actually responsible for. John Wall, Hampshire, UK. The Year of the Sex Olympics is scarily accurate about the whole reality TV craze - predicting where Big Brother and the like will eventually end up. At the time (1970?) it must have seemed totally outlandish - now it looks prescient. Also don't forget Beasts - another example of just how well he could write for TV. Mark Phillips, London, United Kingdom. He also wrote the interesting series of plays, Beasts, and the offbeat SF sitcom Kinvig, both now happily on DVD. To compare his stuff to Doctor Who is a bit misleading: his work was more serious in intent and execution, strong science fiction rather than family adventure. Jason Mills, Accrington, UK. What better way to celebrate the remarkable work and life of Nigel Kneale by finally releasing the restored version of his 1954 screenplay of Orwell's 1984. Together with Rudolph Cartier he created the genre of Telefantasy and two of the still most talked about BBC dramas from the 1950s. Clive Shaw, Stockholm, Sweden. Kneale was a true literary genius, a godfather of television science fiction with an eerie ability to portend future developments with his provoking, brilliant and challenging plays. His influence was felt across everything from Doctor Who to The X Files, and without Quatermass we probably wouldn't have had Hammer Horror either. Television is suddenly so less satisfying without him. Robert J.E. Simpson, Belfast, Northern Ireland. Although he loathed Doctor Who, I think Kneale was quietly proud that his work had inspired other creations. Without a doubt a pioneer of TV writing and broadcasting, he should be up there with Dennis Potter. David Foxen, Emsworth, UK. When Quatermass appeared for the first time on BBC, I hid behind the couch because I was only eight. During the repeat a few months ago, I still hid behind the couch at the age of 64 . ina Gilchrist, Wetzlar, Germany. Nigel Kneale was, in my opinion, Britain's greatest and most original screenwriter and as I had the privilege of meeting him once I'll add that he was a thoroughly pleasant and charming bloke too. Bill, London, UK. I remember him appearing at a special screening of Quatermass at the BFI in London in the late 80s and he received a warm greeting from fans, but I feel he never really received the recognition he truly deserved from the industry he gave so much to or for the way he managed to predict what television would become. What a great creative imagination has been lost with his passing. Jackie, Nottingham UK. Much of Quatermass appeared before I was born and yet it became as big a part of my cultural landscape as Doctor Who. I remember being scared witless when I saw Quatermass and the Pit on the BBC some time in the early 70s and I absolutely loved the John Mills series on ITV in 1979 (I think). Nigel Kneale was a terrific and original writer. His passing is a great loss to TV drama. Jim, London. Probably the most important and innovative writer of his generation, the Quatermass serials and his adaptation of 1984 rank among the greatest achievements of live television and The Year of the Sex Olympics has proved itself sadly prophetic. David Forbes, Widnes. The consistently high quality Nigel Kneale maintained over his lengthy career in TV and film can be attributed to his refusal to compromise his work to the demands of the "creatures" (as he termed them) in the film and TV industry. Although he is best known as a writer of science fiction and horror, he refused to work to existing generic formats, instead basing his frightening and thought-provoking dramas on contemporary social fears. I once wrote to him enquiring about an out-of-print book of his and he took the trouble to look up my phone number and invite me round to his house, where he gave me a signed copy. A nice bloke as well as a TV pioneer. Alex Briggs, London, UK. A truly original creator, who proved that popular drama could be intelligent and intelligent drama popular. Another work of his that deserves a mention is his adaptation of Susan Hill's The Woman in Black, which managed to be truly terrifying by intelligent use of mood, suspense and character without ever resorting to cheap shocks or gore. Colin Stuart, Worcester, UK. The father of modern television drama has died. What can anyone say to convey the true impact of this? I always somehow thought that people like Nigel Kneale would go on for ever, and I don't know how I will ever come to terms with the fact that they never can. A loss beyond description. Charles Norton, Leicester, UK. The breadth of Kneale's imagination, coupled with his understanding of how to write for the medium of television, defined templates for telling science fiction stories on the small screen that are still in use today. His legacy will always be those masterclasses that have inspired so many pupils. Jeremy Bentham, Boreham Wood, UK. Nigel Kneale's Quatermass series is timeless. He was a television pioneer who harnessed complex ideas in scripts that brilliantly combined intelligence and popular appeal. As with many pioneering originals he never really received the wide recognition that he deserved in his lifetime. It says something about how much what Kneale represented in particular, and television culture in general, has been degraded, that one of the categories in last night's National Television Awards was for Most Popular TV Contender - an award for a so-called "star" of a reality television series! It's enough to have Quatermass spinning in his pit! Deborah, London, UK. Nigel Kneale's brilliant concoction of ghost stories, scientific romance and kitchen sink drama is still cutting edge today, with shows like Torchwood carrying the flame. He wrote about the society he lived in but also predicted aspects of the future we are now living in. Paul Phillips, Manchester, UK. I recently got hold of the original Quatermass serials on DVD, and was amazed at how well they stood up to today's productions - especially in terms of atmosphere. Nigel Kneale wrote the serials at a time when sci-fi was regarded by many as kids' stuff, but the on-screen warnings put an end to all that! Writers of modern science fiction/fantasy owe a huge debt to Nigel Kneale. A genius and legend indeed. Rob, Winsford, Cheshire. Very sad news, but he leaves behind an immense legacy. His adaptation of 1984 pretty much launched the career of Peter Cushing and his Quatermass serials set the bar for TV science fiction - a bar never really surpassed. With wit and imagination, he took the viewer to places that were unusual and frightening but always with a deep and thoughtful intelligence. The Year of the Sex Olympics is stunning in its foresight. If you made it today, it would be hailed as a savage piece of social commentary. He will continue to inspire those dark corners of the imagination. Julian Thorley, Staffordshire, UK. One of the defining moments of my childhood was watching Nigel Kneale's series Beasts on ITV in 1976. The episode Baby is one of the greatest portrayals of the supernatural on either television or cinema, where Kneale builds up the tension to an almost unbearable level. A great talent, may he rest in peace. Paul Adams, Luton, UK. The man who saw tomorrow. When Big Brother began on Channel 4 in 2000, I took a principled stand against it. "Don't they know what they're doing?" I screamed at the TV. "It's The Year of the Sex Olympics! Nigel Kneale was right!" In 1968's The Year of the Sex Olympics, Kneale, a pioneering writer of TV drama who died this week, ingeniously predicted the future of lowest- common-denominator TV. The programme kept a slavering audience pacified with such blackly funny concepts as The Hungry/Angry Show (in which senile old men throw food at one another), the titular Olympics, and the ultimate programme, in which a family are marooned on an island and then watched on camera, 24 hours a day. Yesterday's satire is today's reality. Or today's reality TV. A few years ago I tried to persuade The South Bank Show to devote an edition to Kneale, only to be told he wasn't a "big enough figure". This was doubly dispiriting, not only because, to anyone interested in TV drama, Kneale is a colossus, but because it seemed to confirm all the writer's gloomy predictions regarding the future of broadcasting. Couldn't the medium celebrate one of its giants? When I was cast in last year's live BBC4 remake of Kneale's The Quatermass Experiment, I was over the moon. It was a thrilling experience, partly because it was live, but mostly because it was Kneale. Propelled by adrenaline and sheer terror, the cast managed to get by, fluffs, scenery crashes, monstrous astronaut and all. Kneale, who had acted as consultant, wasn't too impressed. I had to suppress a smile, remembering my own, abortive attempt to get one of his plays remade. Though he continued writing well into his 70s (producing such gems as an adaptation of The Woman in Black, one of the scariest things ever made for TV), Kneale was a contradictory figure. He hated the cult of the personality yet was clearly bitter about his cavalier treatment by various institutions (particularly the BBC and Hammer films). His predominant theme was the collision between science and superstition. This found its most eloquent expression, firstly, in The Stone Tape, in which a group of engineers think they have discovered a new recording medium, ghostly echoes in stone, only to discover that something infinitely more sinister lies beneath; and also in The Road, a ghost story with an ingenious twist - the haunting of an 18th-century wood has been caused by a nuclear explosion. It was this play that, a few years ago, I persuaded the BBC to remake. I met Kneale in his lovely house in Barnes and, determined not to gush, managed to ask most of the burning questions I'd been pondering for years. He spoke eloquently about the nuclear terror that had inspired The Road and how, having regarded the play as dated, he now saw it as "horribly relevant". I left, glowing with happiness, clutching Kneale's own DVD of The Stone Tape ("I can always get another") and convinced that a collaboration with the master was on the cards. It didn't work out, alas, and I discovered that this was a pattern many had experienced over the years. Kneale had exacting standards and, though he loved some things (The Royle Family was particularly praised), he could afford to smile wryly as the schedules descended ever closer to his dystopian nightmares. Hating the tag "science-fiction writer", he preferred to think he used the genre to explore his personal concerns. It's ironic that, although he can lay claim to having invented popular TV, the fact that he wasn't known as a "straight" writer has forever kept him in the "cult" bracket, legendary to some but never considered alongside Dennis Potter, David Mercer and Alan Plater. Born in Lancashire but raised on the Isle of Man, he brought a strange, outsider's perspective to his work. Originally an actor, Kneale began writing short stories, including Jeremy in the Wind and The Photograph. The acclaim Kneale received brought him to the attention of pioneering BBC producer Rudolph Cartier, and Kneale became a staff writer. The two men struck up an immediate rapport and collaborated on The Quatermass Experiment in 1953. Kneale wrote that it was "an over-confident year" and he piloted his hugely influential tale like a rocket into the drab schedules of Austerity Britain. Over the decade, Kneale and Cartier produced two more Quatermass serials that emptied pubs, were spoofed by the Goons and Hancock, and cemented themselves in the psyche of a generation. What sci-fi piece of the past 50 years doesn't owe Kneale a huge debt? The "man into monster" theme of Experiment and the paranoid conspiracy of Quatermass II and, particularly, the "ancient invasion" of Quatermass and the Pit cast a huge shadow. The latter - with its brilliant blending of superstition, witchcraft and ghosts into the story of a five-million-year-old Martian invasion - is copper-bottomed genius. A true pioneer has passed - and the light of Mars will shine a little brighter tonight. Signing out of a broken Britain: The final Quatermass serial. Ley-ing it on thick with alien beams and hippie dreams. Quatermass at 60 Nigel Kneale was one of the best British writers of the past 50 years, but thanks to enduring British snobbishness about both TV and stories of the imagination, the name is met with blank looks today. Luvvies and critics have never taken to Kneale's Professor Quatermass character - and perhaps more people will recognise the name Rod Serling than Kneale even though Quatermass preceded Serling’s Twilight Zone by several years. The original Quatermass TV series turns 60 this year and we’ve already given it some a loving reconsideration at El Reg . Last year, Verity Stob gave a bird’s eye view. But there’s a part missing: Kneale’s final Quatermass instalment, which ended the saga and killed off the eponymous hero. The Thames TV four-parter from 1979 is today described as regularly a “cult classic” – an ambiguous term often used to damn material that only fanboys or stoned students can guffaw to. So is the final Quatermass up to much? Is it worthy of the ‘brand’, which by the 1960s meant subtle, grown-up entertainment? Let’s have a look. John Mills as Professor Bernard Quatermass. The Quatermass Experiment was broadcast while rationing-era Brits bought their first TV sets: 60 guineas for a 14-inch GEC in 1952. Kneale wrote entertainment for adults - “we didn’t get the kids,” he cheerfully admitted - that captivated a mass audience. Kneale combined horror and science fiction to give invasion literature a new twist. His predecessors, such as HG Wells’ War of the Worlds , were really updates of the Western genre, only where the good guys wear white, and the bad guys wear green slime. It was pretty clear who was the enemy. And it was equally clear what needed to be done with them. The Quatermass Experiment pulled the rug out from under this approach with a typically English bit of improvisation. The aliens had been here, on our world, before, and implanted memories into early humans. As a result, we were no longer certain quite what was a genuine human thought or instinct, and what might be a response to alien conditioning. So, we couldn’t trust each other and the heroic individual had ceased to exist – he couldn’t be relied upon to save the day. Instead of John Wayne riding in on a horse, there was a more recognisably British figure, Professor Bernard Quatermass, who reasoned with and outwitted the aliens. In telling this original story, the technical limitations of the time - The Quatermass Experiment was filmed live, so the fly trapped inside the camera is still trapped in the prints today - and the meagre BBC budgets were turned into an advantage. The horror was off-screen and so implied, giving the films an atmospheric quality that was deeply unsettling. Alongside Kneale’s crisp and witty writing, it made for great grown-up TV. And it emptied the streets. Many horror and sci-fi serials were inspired by The Quatermass Experiment – but without much of the dread and menace evoked by Kneale’s series. These are genres are routinely written for kids. Even the revived Doctor Who , which has had moments of great writing and imagination, routinely falls back on get-out-of-jail-free plot devices - such as "Timey Wimey" things, in the jargon. The TARDIS-dwelling hero is suited and booted for export as a kind of camp Jesus Christ; the idiot Englishman; Jeeves with a Gadget Belt; or Dr Raj with a time machine. The Quatermass Experiment by contrast was using speculative fiction to tell a ripping yarn of paranoia and ageing, while questioning the foundations of authoritarianism, and it did so without the preachiness that suffocated British TV drama. Never trust hippies: Planet People and their emerging leader, Kickalong (Ralph Arliss) Outside the Quatermass serials, Kneale continued to produce challenging and original writing backed by a BBC willing to take risks. In his satirical 1968 drama The Year of the Sex Olympics , a United Nations plan to pacify the population by beaming a stupefying mix of live pornography and reality TV – until most are culled at the age of 28 – has been put into effect. Mary Whitehouse unsuccessfully lobbied to stop its transmission. The world of Big Brother game shows and the internet isn’t so far away. You can see a 20-minute clip here on filmmaker Adam Curtis’ blog. Kneale subsequently tackled ageing and the supernatural, again using his hallmark (as Verity Stob put it) “to pile up small individually plausible details to build an implausible whole”. So as he turned his hand to the final Quatermass serial, simply titled Quatermass , there was plenty to live up to. Updating the professor. “It was written in 1972 and it was about the 1960s really,” said Kneale of the final instalment. The BBC had commissioned and announced the series - as "Quatermass IV" - but Kneale and the corporation parted ways. Filming didn’t begin until 1978 after Thames’ drama subsidiary, Euston Films - run by Doctor Who ’s first producer Verity Lambert - took up the project, spun it into four one-hour episodes and a movie option, and assigned it a hefty - for its time - £1.25m budget. John Mills was a heavyweight choice as the professor. Joe Kapp (Simon MacCorkindale) struggles with faith in the face of grief. In Kneale’s final vision, a grey and violently dysfunctional urban Britain faces breakdown, with feral gangs, state-sponsored bloodletting, corporate contract police, and rolling power cuts. An eschatological youth cult called the Planet People roams the countryside, convinced that they’re about to be transported to another planet. While Prof Quatermass is looking for his missing granddaughter, the Planet People begin to disappear in large numbers, and we learn large youth gatherings all over the world are also disappearing. The Quatermass Experiment by Nigel Kneale. The story of the first manned flight into space, supervised by Professor Bernard Quatermass of the British Experimental Rocket Group. When the spaceship that carried the first successful crew returns to Earth, two of the three astronauts are missing, and the third is behaving strangely. It becomes apparent that an alien presence entered the ship during its flight, and Quatermass and his associates must prevent the alien from destroying the world. Script: Nigel Kneale Gatunek: Drama, Sci-Fi & Fantasy Countries: GB Released on: 18 Jul 1953. Nigel Kneale. Of all the writers of his time, Nigel Kneale, who has died aged 84, came closest to matching H G Wells in sensational public impact as well as the brilliance of his early years. His Quatermass trilogy of science fiction serials and his adaptation of George Orwell's 1984 - mostly performed live in the studio - were among the glories of British television drama throughout the 1950s, and are still seen as such. They were scripts of a vision and excitement that has hardly been equalled and never surpassed, despite all the technical slickery the medium has achieved since. The paradox was that Kneale never saw himself as a science fiction author. "I'm not really a science fiction fan. I hardly ever read it," he said towards the end of his life. Neither did he move a finger to exploit his triumphs or tout his reputation. He was the least self-promoting of artists, his name absent from Who's Who and all the usual reference books for the craft he adorned for 40 years . He continued to work, apparently contentedly, as a consistently distinguished jobbing scriptwriter, proud of his versatility, with TV and film work as various as John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1958), his first film script, and The Entertainer (1960), Hallowe'en III: Season of the Witch (1982), The Woman in Black by Susan Hill (1989) and Kingsley Amis's Stanley and the Women (1991). "He was an independent-minded man who refused to be typecast," his agent said. "He must have turned down scores of commissions." In the mid-1990s, when he was 73, he agreed to the ultra-jobbing assignments, for a man with his record, of writing episodes for the series Sharpe's Rifles and Kavanagh QC (1997), his final script. "We didn't think he'd want to bother with them but he did," the agent said. "That was probably because he liked the producer." Last year's BBC4 remake of Quatermass proved that Kneale was honoured among his peers, even those not born when his early work was first shown. The critic Anne Billson called him a "master of the narrative twist which plunges you deeper into a swamp of fear". His best work, however, went much deeper than that. Nigel Kneale was born in Barrow-in-Furness, then in Lancashire, but grew up on the Isle of Man. "There's always been a traditional belief on the Isle of Man in things you can't quite see," he said. He studied for the Manx bar but grew bored. He then trained as an actor at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and briefly carried spears in Shakespeare plays at Stratford-upon-Avon. In 1950, when he was 27, his first collection of short stories, Tomato Cain, won the Somerset Maugham Award. In 1951 he joined the BBC as a scriptwriter. Only two years later came The Quatermass Experiment, directed by the innovative Rudolph Cartier. Kneale's fee for it was £250. Its plot (like those of HG Wells) was the sheerest hokum: an idealistic government rocket scientist battling the spread of a mind-bending alien vegetable brought home on a spaceship. But the narrative was stomach-clawing and the underlying metaphor - of individuals slowly falling victim to an unprepared-for invasion - engrossed an audience caught in real life between the second world war, the onset of the cold war, nuclear testing, an epidemic of flying saucer reports and the stirrings of the space race. "There was dread in the real world in the 1950s. The forces of annihilation were in the hands of fallible, panicking men, yet official propaganda was still jaunty," he said. "The BBC didn't have any special effects then. My stories had to be told through characters, and were better for it." In both this and his two equally popular sequels Quatermass II (1955) and Quatermass and The Pit (1959), Kneale, unusually for this time, emerged as an optimist as well as a humanist. In all three serials, the enemy was defeated not primarily by force but by the exercise of human free will. In the last, the foe turned out to be human mass destructiveness itself. This gave his work, at best, considerable grandeur. In 1954 he married his fellow BBC scriptwriter Judith Kerr. Of their two children, Matthew followed his father in winning a Somerset Maugham award. Matthew's novel English Passengers took the 2001 Whitbread book of the year award. Their daughter Tacy is an actor, and an art director on the Harry Potter films. Judith went on to publish the bestselling Mog children's books. Sandwiched into the triumphant 50s was Kneale's astonishingly mature version of 1984, an adapation that had his usual pace but encompassed the full dread and pity of the novel. The totalitarian ending, which could leave no margin for free will, appalled its audience, led to questions in Parliament, permanently revived Orwell's reputation and launched two of its players, Peter Cushing and Donald Pleasence, as specialists in the macabre. After that, his career was anti-climactic. Hammer Films commisioned scripts of all three Quatermass stories, which were box-office successes and are often reshown on TV. Cartier's vastly better television originals are rarely reshown. Kneale's name remained a byword for deft, exceptionally imaginative storytelling; but the medium in which he worked best, television, never again used him with any consistent flair. In 1968 he saw one of his ideas surface without acknowledgement in Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: a Space Odyssey. In 1972 the BBC produced his tale The Stone Tape, a technological ghost story still renowned among aficionados for the twist in its tail. In 1979, for Thames Television, he wrote a coda to his old saga. The serial, Quatermass: the Conclusion, was more complex than his previous work and rich in its sense of pity. In 1995 he went back to the subject for The Quatermass Memoirs on Radio 3, dedicated "to those who remember hiding behind the sofa when Quatermass came on. His adventures have gone down in cultural history," said the producer Paul Quinn. Kneale was by no means the only author to have been largely wasted by television, and to have seen his status overtaken by soap opera hacks. But his place is secure, alongside Wells, Arthur C Clarke, John Wyndham and Brian Aldiss, as one of the best, most exciting and most compassionate English science fiction writers of his century. · Thomas Nigel Kneale, writer, born April 18 1922; died October 29 2006.