A 2003 Manx stamp celebrating the work of Nigel Kneale

You realise what you’re implying? That we owe our human condition here to the intervention of insects?

So wrote Nigel Kneale, premier British screenwriter, in what is probably his most famous work: “Quatermass and the Pit”. As both BBC drama (1958) and Hammer-produced feature film (1967), the SF-horror epic made an indelible impression on its generation, and has continued to captivate audiences to the present day. It set new standards for television drama at the time — but has also managed to stimulate the imaginations and scare the willies out of audiences across the world ever since.

In a writing career that produced more than his fair share of genre classics, Kneale made a habit of articulating strange and dangerous human (and inhuman) possibilities, bringing a superb sense of drama, powerful dialogue and a dark imagination to British television. Science fiction and horror were his forte. He had a curiously rational way of dealing with the irrational, treating it as an extension of natural possibility. Whereas in other writers such an approach too often results in irritating rationalization that undermines the numinous nature of the supernatural and renders it mundane, in Kneale’s work the opposite occurs. His famous ghost story, “The Stone Tape” (1972), is a case in point. Here SF and supernatural horror are artfully blended; the infamously frightening TV movie not only treats its ghosts seriously, but connects their manifestation to a startlingly prescient phenomenon by which traumatic human history is “recorded” onto stone, much like a film onto DVD, and replayed when “switched on” by living human presence. Its protagonists are scientists researching the next generation of recording devices — in fact, digital recording onto silicone crystal.

“The Stone Tape” — first broadcast in 1972 and repeated only once in 1973 — was for a long time something of a holy grail to genre film enthusiasts. So potent was its scare-quotient that memories of it lingered in the public consciousness over several decades, until DVD technology brought it back for us all to experience. Even when viewed in 2001, it didn’t disappoint.

Thomas Nigel Kneale was born in 1922 and grew up on the Isle of Man. Through a circuitous route, via law studies, acting, short stories on the side (his collection Tomato Cain and Other Stories won the W. Somerset Maugham Award for Literature in 1949), he ended up working as a staff writer for the BBC in 1951. By 1952 he was a script adapter, mainly helping other writers who were having trouble adapting radio script conventions to the new medium of television drama. Then in 1953, he was given carte blanche to create a thriller for live broadcast (the standard method for TV drama then) – and as a result he created what was to be his signature character: the driven, intellectually uncompromising rocket scientist, Bernard Quatermass.

The first Quatermass broadcast was “The Quatermass Experiment” about an astronaut who returns to Earth carrying an alien passenger. It made television history despite less-than-stellar production values and was subsequently remade as a feature film, The Quatermass Xperiment (1955, known under the more generic title of The Creeping Unknown in the US). The latter film was so successful that it might be credited with creating Hammer Film Productions, or at least cementing its future path.

The first Quatermass was followed in 1953 by “Quatermass II” (later to become the feature film Quatermass 2, known as The Enemy from Space in the US). Its paranoid vision of government duplicity and alien corporate invasion is still as powerful as it was then. But it was “Quatermass and the Pit” (1958) that sealed Kneale’s reputation. Once again broadcast live, it nevertheless had considerably higher production values and achieved record audience numbers in Britain, especially for its final chapter. Its blend of SF and horror is quintessential Kneale, with an apocalyptic vision of demons, ancient Martians and the hive mentality that translated perfectly into Hammer’s cinematic remake in 1967.

Kneale’s writing career spanned several genres, but it is his SF/horror that has become part of the cultural consciousness. Apart from the Quatermass stories and “The Stone Tape”, he wrote the intelligent and poignant script of Hammer’s The Abominable Snowman (1957), a remarkable (and perhaps lost) apocalyptic ghost story “The Road” (1963), an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ novel, The First Men in the Moon (1964), “The Year of the Sex Olympics” (TV, 1968), an excellent six-part TV anthology series “Beasts” (1976), “The Woman In Black” (TV, 1989) and much else besides, including the script of the non-sequential horror sequel Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982). Kneale’s final foray into the world of his most famous character came in 1979 with “Quatermass”, a four-episode mini-series edited down to film length under the title The Quatermass Conclusion.

Playing out against a background of urban decay and the collapse of civilisation, the consistently underrated “Quatermass” is intelligent, well-written science fiction, the sort of thing one expects from Kneale. Apart from anything else, it was the swansong of his scientific-rationalist character Professor Bernard Quatermass, here depicted by John Mills as a disillusioned and inward-focused old man, whose past glories seem irrelevant in the face of near-universal social disaffection. This is humanity on its last legs — and now even the “hope of the future”, the young, have become the mindless advocates of either self-interested violence or a pseudo-mystical philosophy that must inevitably result in their own annihilation. Knowledge is scorned and the scientists that were its champions are little more than eccentric outcasts or the pawns of political opportunism. The series has an air of resignation about it, as though Kneale had been watching the vigorous future become the empty present for too long and could now only see the continued and escalating abandonment of Quatermass’ rationalism as it reached new and more astounding heights (or depths) as a retreat from everything he had valued in his writings.

Is this relevant to 2006? In a new millennium that has already witnessed a resurgence in crackpot religious fundamentalism, political hypocrisy of unprecedented sophistication and rationalised warmongering, how can it be otherwise? Sure, the Planet People of “Quatermass” are based on post-hippy culture, but what they represent is still as relevant as ever. The self-destructive pursuit of hedonistic indifference or fundamentalist fantasies is as much a symptom of social breakdown as the sort of New-Age acquiescence that causes the Planet People to gather expecting transcendental teleportation to a new world of happiness. That they are harvested for their energies and turned into piles of grey ash is Kneale’s ultimate comment on the future. Or it might have been if not for the sacrificial intervention of Kneale’s ultimate scientific rationalist, Bernard Quatermass himself.

Best seen in its full TV version (even if it is arguably too long), “Quatermass” relied not on slick production values (which it mostly struggled to achieve), but the typical intelligence of the script and the non-mainstream edginess of its concepts. Images such as the decaying streets of London, the hippyish Planet People following ley lines en masse toward their own destruction, scenes of alien harvest as a pillar of light from the sky engulfs the crowds gathered in ancient stone circles, and the grey ash of its aftermath linger in the mind long after the show is finished – as does so much of Kneale’s output over the years.

Nigel Kneale died on 29 October 2006, at age 84, after a lingering illness and having suffered a series of small strokes. He will be missed, though hopefully his legacy of creative originality, incisive social comment and rationalist intelligence will live on.