59 Facts About Nigel Kneale

Thomas Nigel Kneale was a Manx screenwriter who wrote professionally for more than 50 years, was a winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, and was twice nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best British Screenplay.

Nigel Kneale was most active in television, joining BBC Television in 1951; his final script was transmitted on ITV in 1997.

Nigel Kneale has been described as "one of the most influential writers of the 20th century", and as "having invented popular TV".

Nigel Kneale's family came from the Isle of Man, and returned to live there in 1928, when he was six years old.

Nigel Kneale was raised in the island's capital, Douglas, where his father was the owner and editor of the local newspaper, The Herald.

Nigel Kneale was educated at St Ninian's High School, Douglas and trained to become an advocate at the Manx Bar.

Nigel Kneale worked in a lawyer's office, but became bored with his legal training and abandoned the profession.

At the beginning of the Second World War Nigel Kneale attempted to enlist in the British Army, but was deemed medically unfit for service owing to photophobia, from which he had suffered since childhood.

On 25 March 1946 Nigel Kneale made his first broadcast on BBC Radio, performing a live reading of his own short story "Tomato Cain" in a strand entitled Stories by Northern Authors on the BBC's North of England Home Service region.

Nigel Kneale made further radio broadcasts in the 1940s, including a reading of his story Zachary Crebbin's Angel on the BBC Light Programme, broadcast nationally on 19 May 1948.

Nigel Kneale had short stories published in magazines such as Argosy and The Strand.

Nigel Kneale began using the name "Nigel Kneale" for these professional credits, but was known as "Tom" to his family and friends up until his death.

Nigel Kneale continued to write in his spare time and in 1949 a collection of his work, Tomato Cain and Other Stories, was published.

Nigel Kneale did take small voice-over roles in some of his 1950s television productions, such as the voice heard on the factory loudspeaker system in Quatermass II, for which he narrated most of the recaps shown at the beginning of each episode.

Nigel Kneale's publisher was keen for him to write a novel, but Nigel Kneale himself was more interested in writing for television.

In 1951 he was recruited as one of the first staff writers to be employed by BBC Television; before he started working for the station, Nigel Kneale had never seen any television.

Nigel Kneale was initially a general-purpose writer, working on adaptations of books and stage plays and even writing material for light entertainment and children's programmes.

Nigel Kneale's first credited role in adult television drama was providing "additional dialogue" for the play Arrow to the Heart, broadcast on 20 July 1952.

Nigel Kneale wrote The Quatermass Experiment, which was broadcast in six half-hour episodes in July and August 1953.

Nigel Kneale was not pleased with the film, and particularly disliked the casting of Brian Donlevy as Quatermass, as he explained in a 1986 interview.

Nigel Kneale took very little interest in the making of the films or in playing the part.

Nigel Kneale was inspired in writing the serial by contemporary fears over secret UK Ministry of Defence research establishments such as Porton Down, as well the fact that as a BBC staff writer he had been required to sign the Official Secrets Act.

Nigel Kneale left the corporation when his contract expired at the end of 1956; "Five years in that hut was as much as any sane person could stand," he later told an interviewer.

Hinds and Guest had overseen the first Quatermass film, upon which Nigel Kneale had been unable to work due to his BBC staff contract.

Nigel Kneale was disappointed that Brian Donlevy returned in the role of Quatermass.

In May 1957, Nigel Kneale was contracted by the BBC to write a third Quatermass serial, and this was eventually transmitted as Quatermass and the Pit across six weeks in December 1958 and January 1959.

On this occasion Nigel Kneale was inspired by the racial tensions that had recently been seen in the United Kingdom, and which came to a head while the serial was in pre-production when the Notting Hill race riots occurred in August and September 1958.

Nigel Kneale knew Richardson through having previously adapted a Chekhov short story for the BBC, which Richardson had directed.

Nigel Kneale was nominated for the British Film Award for Best Screenplay for both films.

Nigel Kneale completed screenplays for adaptations of the novels Lord of the Flies by William Golding and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.

In 1966 Nigel Kneale worked again for Hammer Film Productions when he adapted Norah Lofts's 1960 novel The Devil's Own into the horror film The Witches.

Nigel Kneale had worked on the screenplay for the adaptation in 1961, the same year in which he had begun to adapt Quatermass and the Pit for Hammer.

Nigel Kneale returned to writing for television with the BBC when his play The Road was broadcast in September 1963.

Nigel Kneale did his first work for the ITV network during this time, writing a one-off play called The Crunch for the ATV company in 1964.

In 1965 Nigel Kneale had been approached by the producer of the BBC2 science-fiction anthology series Out of the Unknown to write a new one-off 75-minute Quatermass story for the programme.

The play, a horror piece based around witchcraft, led the following year to a series called Beasts, a six-part anthology where Nigel Kneale created six different character-based tales of horror and the macabre.

Nigel Kneale was unable to find backing to produce the play for the stage, but sold the script to ATV who put it into pre-production for television.

Shortly before filming it was cancelled by ATV's managing director, Lew Grade, and Nigel Kneale was never told why.

The series was not a commercial success, although Nigel Kneale later remained personally pleased with it.

In 1982, Nigel Kneale made another one-off diversion from his usual work when he wrote his only produced Hollywood movie script, Halloween III: Season of the Witch.

The Black Lagoon script never went into production, but while in America Nigel Kneale met the director Joe Dante, who invited him to script the third film in the Halloween series, on which Dante was working; Nigel Kneale agreed, on the proviso that it would be a totally new concept unrelated to the first two films, which he had not seen and he did not like what he had heard about them.

Nigel Kneale had a positive relationship with the director assigned to the film, Tommy Lee Wallace, but when one of the film's backers, Dino De Laurentiis, insisted upon the inclusion of more graphic violence and a rewrite of the script from Wallace, Nigel Kneale became displeased with the results and had his name removed from the film.

Nigel Kneale returned to writing scripts for British television, including Gentry with Roger Daltrey for ITV in 1987, and the 1989 adaptation of Susan Hill's novel The Woman in Black for transmission on ITV on Christmas Eve.

Susan Hill did not like some of the changes that Nigel Kneale had made to The Woman in Black.

Nigel Kneale adapted Sharpe's Gold for ITV in 1995, as part of their series of adaptations of Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe novels.

Partly composed of Nigel Kneale looking back at the events that led to the writing of the original three Quatermass serials and using some archive material, there was a dramatised strand to the series, set just before the ITV Quatermass serial and featuring Andrew Keir, star of the Hammer version of Quatermass and the Pit, as the Professor.

Nigel Kneale was invited to write for the successful American science-fiction series The X-Files, but declined the offer.

Nigel Kneale's final professional work was an episode of the ITV legal drama Kavanagh QC, starring John Thaw.

Nigel Kneale has appeared as an interview subject in various television documentaries, and recorded further audio commentaries for the release of some of his productions on DVD.

Nigel Kneale lived in Barnes, London, until his death on 29 October 2006 at the age of 84, following a series of small strokes.

When he joined BBC, Nigel Kneale was impressed with the state in which they found BBC television drama.

The writer and actor Mark Gatiss indicated that Nigel Kneale was among the first rank of British television writers, but that this had been overlooked.

Nigel Kneale never saw himself as a science-fiction writer, and was often critical of the genre.

Nigel Kneale particularly disliked the BBC series Doctor Who, for which he had once turned down an offer to write.

Nigel Kneale criticised Doomwatch and Blake's 7, with the latter described as the lowest point of British television science-fiction.

Nigel Kneale painted the covers for the Quatermass script books released by Penguin Books in 1959 and 1960.

Nigel Kneale was responsible for a painting of a lobster from which special effects designers Bernard Wilkie and Jack Kine drew their inspiration for the Martian creatures they constructed for the original television version of Quatermass and the Pit.

Nigel Kneale worked with Kerr on an adaptation of When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit in the 1970s, but the eventual makers of the film version disregarded their script.

Similarly, in 1995 Nigel Kneale scripted a four-part adaptation of one of Kerr's sequels to the book, A Small Person Far Away, but this went unproduced.