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What's on the Telly?

I was never one of those precocious literary children who always had their nose in a book and was reading Jane Austen at the age of seven. I did read a lot, but a lot of the time it was just Dr Who books or Asterix. I also spent a lot of time watching telly, which was probably just as responsible as books for my interest in stories and storytelling. In those days there were only three channels and we had to watch whatever the dear old BBC and ITV chose to beam at us. Nowadays, hoorah, there are DVDs and the internet and a billion satellite channels and we can all browse happily among the telly of days-gone-by. But what shall we watch? Here are a few of my favourites.

Nigel Kneale and Quatermass

When Nigel Kneale died in 2008 you might have expected the BBC to mark his passing with some kind of tribute. He was one of the most consistently good writers ever to work on British television. He was at least as important to the development of TV drama as Dennis Potter, and with The Quatermass Experiment and its sequels he almost single-handedly invented sci-fi TV. But if there were any tributes, they were so brief I never noticed them, except on BBC4, which repeated its recent live re-make of The Quatermass Experiment, a production so poor that it probably did more harm than good to the late Mr Kneale's reputation.

So, if you're under thirty, there's a good chance that you have never even heard of Nigel Kneale. But if you enjoy science fiction or fantasy, and especially science fiction and fantasy on telly, you have almost certainly soaked up his influence at second hand. It's unavoidable. Quatermass is what Dr Who has always wanted to be when it grows up. The writers of Torchwood echo Nigel Kneale's themes and techniques with the mindless persistence of urban starlings mimicking a car alarm. And even certain minor children's authors are not above sprinkling their books with Quatermass references...

I'm quite a lot older than thirty, but most of the Quatermass programmes were broadcast before even my time. I still remember my dad telling me, when I was about ten, the story of the first one, The Quatermass Experiment, which he must have seen when it was first broadcast in 1953. In those early days of television, drama had to be filmed live, like a stage-play recorded in a series of studio sets by the heavy, virtually immobile cameras of the time. Filmed inserts could be used for exterior scenes, but budgetary restrictions kept these to a minimum. The few fragments of the first Quatermass which have survived look almost unbelievably primitive to anybody used to the slickness of modern TV. Let's face it, most of you could shoot better quality pictures on your mobile phones. But there is a lot of inventiveness and imagination (in the way that the stock newsreel footage is edited for the rocket launch at the start of episode one, for instance) and the sheer quality of the storytelling keeps you watching. In 1953 it gripped viewers in a way that few TV broadcasts had before.

That first story introduces Professor Bernard Quatermass, the mastermind behind the British Rocket Group, which has just launched the UK's first manned space-probe. Nigel Kneale is one of those rare science fiction writers who actually understands science and how scientists work, and Quatermass and his team are expertly drawn characters, whose believability makes the unfolding story even more gripping. For when the rocket returns to earth two of its three-man crew have vanished, and the third astronaut is behaving strangely. He has, it turns out, been infected by some sort of alien life form which, over the course of the following episodes, slowly takes over his body. Gradually he mutates into a predatory blob which absorbs every living thing that it encounters, but which still retains faint traces of his personality...

The Secret Show

This idea of people being taken over and manipulated by malevolent forces becomes a recurring theme in the later, increasingly ambitious Quatermass stories. In the chillingly paranoid Quatermass 2 (broadcast in 1955) most of the British establishment fall under the influence of would-be alien invaders, while in Quatermass and the Pit (1959) workers digging a new underground station unearth a Martian spacecraft which has lain buried under London since before the dawn of recorded history, and which triggers violent instincts in the population.

So what makes these programmes special? If you haven't seen them they must sound pretty much like a hundred other sci-fi stories. What was it about Quatermass that made my dad remember them so clearly twenty years after they were shown?

I think the answer lies in Nigel Kneale's scripts. He is a real writer, and there is a quality in his work which raises it high above the level of the average Dr Who story. There is often a dark humour to his ideas, but he's actually deeply serious, and deeply concerned with the problems of the real world. The menaces which Prof. Quatermass encounters mirror actual menaces of the '50s and '60s; Atomic weapons, state secrecy, race riots. But Mr Kneale also has a profound understanding of the way that real people think and speak. They react to the horrors that beset them as you feel real people would react, and this makes the horrors themselves feel more real, and therefore more scary.

In 1979, when I was thirteen, a fourth story was broadcast. Called simply, Quatermass, it was not made by the BBC this time but by Euston Films for ITV, and it's often dismissed as a flawed piece of work (not least by Nigel Kneale himself). But it was my first encounter with Prof. Q. and despite its obvious problems (like a strange, dragging pace and lots of shouty acting) I found it riveting. Unlike the earlier serials it set its tale of alien control not in the present day but in the near future, in a third-world Britain riven by gang warfare and economic collapse. It's hard to express how real that world seemed at the time. With its mercenary policemen and abandoned motorways, its rubble-strewn urban war zones, it's radio presenters casually announcing "tomorrow's power-cuts", this was the Britain which we would have inherited if the Labour government had survived the 1979 election, and it was almost more terrifying than Quatermass's discovery that the human race is really just finger-food for some off-screen alien gourmets. (Though that's terrifying too. You'll never quite trust a hippy or a stone circle once you've seen Quatermass...)

In real life, of course, the grim future predicted by Quatermass never arrived. The 1979 election was won by union-stomping glam-rock harpy Margaret Thatcher and now we all live in Blade Runner instead. This is good, if only because it means that we've got home entertainment and the internet and can hunt down the original versions of all the Quatermass serials on DVD or YouTube.

It's also well worth seeking out some of Nigel Kneale's other work. The Stone Tape is a fabulous science-fiction take on the traditional haunted house story which made me have to sleep the light on when I watched it alone a few years ago. And The Year of the Sex Olympics (which was made in 1973 and is Not As Rude As It Sounds) is a brilliant, prophetic play about a future society ruled by an elite caste of TV executives who turn out endless hours of lowest-common-denominator programming as a way of controlling the masses. It starts out very funny and ends up very bleak, and along the way it neatly predicts the whole Reality TV phenomenon and the dumbing down of British television. In fact, it makes me wonder if I was wrong to say that the BBC didn't do enough to mark Nigel Kneale's passing. It's possible that their entire current output is really just a clever tribute to The Year of the Sex Olympics.

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