KNEALE, (Thomas) Nigel

(1922-)

   UK author and screenwriter, married to Judith Kerr (1923-), a well known children's author. After attending the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and working as an actor, NK began writing short stories, 26of which - some horror or fantasy - appear in Tomato Cain and Other Stories (coll 1949). Since then most of his writing work has been forTELEVISION and film, often using sf themes, most commonly consisting of scientific rationalizations of ancient motifs from HORROR fiction and MYTHOLOGY. His first major tv success was in 1953 with a serial, TheQUATERMASS EXPERIMENT . In 1954 he successfully adapted George ORWELL's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1949) for BBC TV; it caused much controversy. Two more Quatermass serials for BBC TV were QUATERMASS II (1955) and QUATERMASS AND THE PIT (1958-9). All three were adapted into feature filmsby Hammer Films, as The QUATERMASS XPERIMENT (1955; vt The Creeping Unknown), QUATERMASS II (1957; vt Enemy from Space) and QUATERMASS AND THEPIT (1968; vt Five Million Years to Earth). NK coscripted the second of these films, and scripted the third. The tv scripts were published as The Quatermass Experiment: A Play for Television in Six Parts * (1953 BBC TV;rev 1959), Quatermass II: A Play for Television in Six Parts * (1955 BBC TV; rev 1960) and Quatermass and the Pit: A Play for Television in SixParts * (1958-9 BBC TV; rev 1960). NK also scripted FIRST MEN IN THE MOON (1964) and the horror film The Witches (1966), adapted from novels by H.G. WELLS and Peter Curtis respectively.Three further tv plays, "The Road" (1963), "The Year of the Sex Olympics" (1969) and "The Stone Tape" (1972) have been collected in The Year of the Sex Olympics and Other TV Plays (coll 1976). The first is an 18th-century ghost story in which the ghostsare apparitions of 20th-century TECHNOLOGY; the second deals satirically with a future tv-watching population and improved methods of apathy control; the third again combines Gothic horror with messages across time. In 1971 "The Chopper", about a biker's ghost, was televised as part of theOUT OF THE UNKNOWN series. The 1975 ATV tv series Beasts was scripted by NK, the beasts in question ranging from psychological to supernatural.In 1979 Quatermass returned, this time to ITV, in a new tv serial (4 parts) entitled QUATERMASS. An edited-down version, retitled The Quatermass Conclusion, was intended for cinema release, but in the UK was releasedonly on videotape. It had in fact been written a decade earlier for BBC TV, and its plot (featuring mystically inclined flower children about tobe harvested by ALIENS via messages beamed through stone circles) seemed curiously old-fashioned. The book version by NK, Quatermass (1979), which appeared concurrently, is not a novelization, and diverges in detail from the tv series. A more sinister version of the same theme appears in NK's script for the film HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH (1983), in which microchips made out of a Stonhenge monolith are used to booby-trap children's Halloween masks with a hideous destruction device, this being the plot of a madman who wishes (as perhaps NK does) that the true meaning of Halloween had not been vulgarized.It had now become clear from NK's sf/horror work that he had little interest in, or even knowledge of, sf proper, a genre about which he has consistently expressed contempt (sf being "very disappointing and horribly overwritten" and sf fans, he said in a 1979 interview, being either fat with wispy wives or wispy with fat ones); it is interesting, for example, that the two films he repudiated as having vulgarized his scripts, Quatermass II - which he has kept from circulation for years - and Halloween III, are among the better ones. With hindsight, there is a clear pattern in NK's work of ordinary people being seen as stupid and ignorant, and ready prey for the supernatural or sciencefictional forces that will almost inevitably attempt to control them. There is a seigneurial, Edwardian element in this, a recoiling from the vulgar. It is worth labouring the point, because he is certainly a much better than average scriptwriter - the Quatermass series especially is exemplary - and his scripts have been, paradoxically, very influential on sf, at least at the GOTHIC and irrational margin of the genre where sf meets fantasy and horror (and particularly among film and tv producers, who never expect sf to make sense anyway).NK's revulsion against what he saw sf as standing for came into gloomy focus with the 1981 tv series KINVIG, which attempts to call forth derisory laughter at the granting(through the introduction of a very beautiful ALIEN) of two sf fans' romantic longings for mysteries in a mundane world; it is a sitcom notable for its contemptuous treatment of the leading characters.

   PN

   See also: MUSIC; PSEUDO-SCIENCE; SUPERNATURAL CREATURES.