Doctor Who, The X-Files, Stargate and Star Trek all owe a debt to Nigel Kneale, architect of the Quatermass stories, The Year of the Sex Olympics, The Stone Tape and more. Paul Simpson celebrates the lasting influence of the writer, who died last year.

“I wish Bernard was here!”

“British Rocket Group has got its own problems…”

This exchange of dialogue from a 1988 Doctor Who story is probably the show’s most blatant attempt to acknowledge its debt to Nigel Kneale (although the British Rocket Group is also responsible for the Mars probe in the 2005 Doctor Who Christmas special).

‘Bernard’ is unmistakably Professor Bernard Quatermass, the much put upon and beleaguered scientist who, by 1963 (when the Who story was set), had dealt with no fewer than three alien problems, and was, presumably, still fighting for control of his British Rocket Group.

But Thomas Nigel Kneale didn’t just lay the groundwork for Doctor Who. With his four Quatermass stories and groundbreaking TV plays The Year of the Sex Olympics and The Stone Tape, he influenced everything from Sapphire and Steel to The X-Files.

Pulp fiction

Before the first Quatermass story was broadcast in 1953, science fiction was commonly regarded as something for children and adolescents. Pulp sci fi flooded the UK via branches of FW Woolworth (which used magazines such as Amazing Stories as ballast when shipping other goods from the US to Britain), and, in the cinema, kids thrilled to the incredible adventures of Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers and Superman.

So, when Nigel Kneale was commissioned to write a thriller for a broad audience, there was a good chance that the resulting six-part serial, The Quatermass Experiment, would not be taken seriously.

In the story, an experimental rocket returns to Earth, missing two of its three crew. Much of the story is told through the eyes of the ordinary people who witness the vessel’s return, and who are affected by the devastating consequences. These include the wife of one of the missing astronauts, and a police inspector who quickly realises that he is out of his depth.

In the centre of it all is the head of the British Rocket Group, Professor Quatermass himself, who is also out of his depth, but who feels a responsibility to solve the problem.

Yetis on the loo

The show was a big success, achieving an estimated five million viewers for its final episode (more than twice the average audience for television at the time). Kneale had succeeded in combining the extraordinary and the ordinary, and in bringing science fiction into people’s homes in more ways than one.

Jon Pertwee is often quoted as saying, “There’s nothing more frightening than finding a Yeti sitting on your loo in Tooting Bec,” and that’s exactly the effect that Kneale achieved in The Quatermass Experiment and his subsequent work. Doctor Who imitated the formula during Pertwee’s tenure, when the Doctor was exiled on Earth, and continues to do so in the new series, with its emphasis on the domestic.

It is perhaps no coincidence, either, that John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos followed in Quatermass’s wake.

After the first Quatermass serial, Kneale succeeded in scaring the population again with his adaptation of George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, starring Peter Cushing as Winston Smith. Like Quatermass, it emphasised how easily the people in the story could be you or me, and achieved an audience of several million.

Body Snatchers

In Quatermass II, broadcast in 1955, Kneale described an invasion that had already happened. With its strange meteor showers and alien conspiracy at the highest levels of government, it presaged Invasion of the Body Snatchers and served as a template for numerous conspiracy thrillers that followed.

Doctor Who plundered the ideas for the 1968 tale The Invasion, and again for Spearhead from Space two years later. The central themes aren’t a million miles away from The X-Files, either – particularly the 1998 movie. Kneale was actually approached to write an episode of The X-Files, but declined.

The final BBC Quatermass serial, Quatermass and the Pit, was shown in 1958-59. A rocket is found buried during some construction work, and Quatermass is called in to investigate. It becomes apparent that the artefact is millions of years old, and the professor theorises that its occupants changed the path of human evolution. Furthermore, though the occupants are long dead, he realises that the alien technology could still unleash something terrible.

Again, Doctor Who had no hesitation in returning to Kneale’s work, with The Daemons treading much of the same path in 1971, and the notion that mankind was influenced by other races appearing in the Tom Baker serials Image of the Fendahl and City of Death. The idea is also at the heart of the Stargate franchise, and is alluded to in some episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Sex Olympics

In 1968, Kneale posited a future in which the masses were controlled by television. The one-off play The Year of the Sex Olympics was controversial, but in many ways prescient.

“It was a comment on television and the idea of the passive audience,” Kneale said of the play, in which pornography is used as a substitute for sex, to keep the population under control. The Year of the Sex Olympics also included depictions of what would become known as ‘reality television’, 30 years before Big Brother hit our screens. Ironic, considering that Kneale brought Orwell’s original Big Brother to television in 1954.

Once again, Doctor Who took the idea and ran with it. The controversial 1984 serial Vengeance on Varos features two characters who watch events unfold on screen, and risk severe punishment if they stop paying attention. The 1998 film The Truman Show also warned of the logical extremes of the reality genre.

Kneale would return to the ideas behind The Sex Olympics in 1979, for the final Quatermass serial (known simply as Quatermass on its original broadcast, but renamed The Quatermass Conclusion for the feature-length version). Set in an anarchic future Britain, the only thing that attracts a TV audience is pornography featuring giant sex toys.

The serial, originally intended for broadcast in 1973, revisits several other Kneale themes, and its use of nursery rhymes foreshadows Sapphire and Steel, numerous horror films and the Doctor Who story Remembrance of the Daleks (also the source of the quotes at the top of this page).

Classic chills

Sapphire and Steel also has parallels with The Stone Tape, Kneale’s chiller from 1972. Up there with classic ghost stories such as Dickens’ The Signalman, it succeeds in creating an atmosphere of dread and foreboding with its tale of a house that records dreadful events in its very fabric.

If that sounds familiar to horror fans, it should. There are marked similarities between The Stone Tape and John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness, which references a Kneale University and is supposedly written by one Martin Quatermass…

Today, the impact of The Quatermass Conclusion and The Year of the Sex Olympics is not as visions of the future, but as scarily prophetic depictions of our own present.

Kneale depicted a Britain where sex and reality shows dominate the airwaves; where taxi drivers have wire mesh in their cabs to protect them from their fares; where shops are boarded up, or have only a small hatch open to serve; where guns are in the hands of teens; and where Wembley Stadium is the scene of gladiatorial games.

Well, maybe that last one hasn’t happened yet. But it’s due to open in March…