Born 100 years ago this April, Thomas Nigel Kneale (1922-2006; obituary FT218:28-29) was one of Britain’s most signifi-cant screenwriters. Kneale was described by Mark Gatiss as the inventor of modern television,1 and his works encompassed the technologically wondrous and the profoundly dystopian, the unknowable ancient past and grim visions of the future. While his choice of speculative topics would lead to his being labelled a writer of ‘science fiction’ and ‘folk horror’ – terms that appalled him – Kneale’s focus was always relevant to the here and now, dealing with topics like racism and intergenerational conflict – and, as we shall see, perhaps something rather more personal.
We tend to think of Kneale as a post War writer – Quatermass is a creation of the early Cold War; The Road was written in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis – but he was a child of the 1920s, born in the same year as actor Christopher Lee – who would later be made famous by the Hammer Films that Kneale helped to reinvent – novelist Kingsley Amis – whose novel Stanley and the Woman would be the last series Kneale would adapt for television – and computer scientist Geoffrey Tootill – creator of the world’s first electronic stored-program computer, and later Control Centre Director of the European Space Research Organisation (now the European Space Agency) – essentially a real-life Bernard Quatermass. The Twenties saw the first regular radio broadcasts and the creation of the BBC, as well as John Logie Baird’s first experiments with turning electronic signals into images. Radio and TV were born alongside Kneale.
THE ISLAND
Although he was born in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, Kneale’s parents came from the Isle of Man and in 1928 they returned there. William Kneale had been Deputy Chief Reporter on the , and had hopes for the , but a combination of a homesick wife, economic depression and a sickly child persuaded him to return to Douglas, the island’s capital, and take up the position of assistant editor on the . Young Nigel was strongly photosensitive and this inability to tolerate sunlight would plague him all his life. Daughter Tacy remembers holidays from her childhood: “It was always a kind of known horror. Mostly we’d go on ‘cool’ holidays but when we went to Venice, we’d have one day on the beach and Dad came with us, and sat in this hut or little building, fully kitted out in a hat and gloves and a jacket and some sort of scarf or polo neck. And Mum and I would be in bikinis, Matt (Matthew Kneale) in swimming shorts, and we’d be leaping around in the sea. And I remember a bat fell out of a tree. Nobody wanted
