Category: jotter

When I took over the running of a small bookshop in the late 1980s, I wrote to Savoy Books in Manchester, publisher of all kinds of weird and poisonous stuff, to ask them how to order for retail from them.  Because I was 20 and didn’t know anything about anything.  A lovely guy called Martin Flitcroft wrote me back a long and wonderful letter, which was stuffed into one of two giant boxes containing a wide selection of Savoy productions.  This included their reprint of Harlan Ellison’s GLASS TEAT, which became a favourite and influential book for me.  I was lucky to have had the kind of life where, twenty years later, I could meet Harlan – I stood up from the table when he arrived and he said, “Jesus, you’re huge!” – and thank him directly for that book.

THE GLASS TEAT is largely about love for what television could be and hate for what it was.  It was written from 1968 to 1970.  A lot of it probably seems quaint now.

Harlan also wrote a story called “Demon With A Glass Hand,” which could also stand in for television, and for QUATERMASS AND THE PIT.

Kneale was not a satirist. He was not a funny writer, as his misbegotten late-period “comedy” show KINVIG showed all too dismally. His family have said he was the source of a great deal of laughter in the home, but it didn’t really make it to the page.

He had a lot in common with George Orwell, whose 1984 he adapted for tv in the 1950s, starring Peter Cushing, Donald Pleasance and Andre Morell, who later played Quatermass in QUATERMASS AND THE PIT. That 1954 broadcast was famous for its horrific overtones, supposedly responsible for one viewer dying of a heart attack, which led to five MPs writing a motion to denounce it for “the tendency, evident in recent British Broadcasting Corporation television programmes, notably on Sunday evenings, to pander to sexual and sadistic tastes.” One imagines Kneale had that in mind when he wrote SEX OLYMPICS.

As a writer, he was furious about everything. I like to imagine him meeting Harlan Ellison, author, among many other things, of THE GLASS TEAT. He would have hated Harlan on sight, but if they’d gotten to talk I think the two television writers would have quickly found common ground in anger. Anger at the corrosive effects of television, for one.

THE YEAR OF THE SEX OLYMPICS was a television film – we tended to call them television plays until relatively recently – about several concerns of Kneale’s, built around the proposal that a group of people be abandoned on an island, left to fend for themselves, and filmed doing it. This is, of course, what we know today as SURVIVOR. THE YEAR OF THE SEX OLYMPICS was broadcast in July 1968.

More broadly, it’s about the pacification of the populace with pornography and constant streams of shitty video. About the passive audience and the post-literate audience, attenuated vocabulary and a jaded “youth.” It’s about what television does to people. A demon buried in a glowing glass container.

Kneale’s other issue was that the BBC owned THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT, and so didn’t have to pay him a penny for the film versions. And therefore didn’t. He was furious about this, by all accounts.

The BBC eventually, in 1967, paid him £3000 (three grand in 1957 being the equivalent of nearly a hundred grand in 2025). But not actually for that slight. They called it an “ex gratia” payment in recognition of the success of the Quatermass series, not an admission of guilt or misdemeanor. This practice continues today all over the world. I got one of those – a lot closer to three grand than a hundred – in 2013.

This was how he returned to the BBC to write SEX OLYMPICS.

The QUATERMASS scriptbooks are notable for Kneale’s forewords, in which he does a little score-settling, particularly over the film adaptations of EXPERIMENT and II. There were two issues. Firstly, Hammer Films, who made them, cast the American actor Brian Donlevy as Professor Bernard Quatermass. Kneale’s troubled, emotional English scientist became a squat, high-volume bawling New Yorker.

I don’t have the book immediately to hand, but I recall the kindest thing Kneale said about Donlevy was that he was “once an excellent comic heavy, now quite gone to pieces.” He fingered Donlevy (real first name Waldo) as a drunk who has no idea what he was doing.

Brian Donlevy was an Oscar-nominated actor who did a lot of films noir, a lot of radio and early television, and was the lead in the Fritz Lang film HANGMEN ALSO DIE! that was co-written by Bertolt Brecht. After the first two QUATERMASS films, Donlevy went back to the States, did the American localisation shoots for GAMERA THE INVINCIBLE, and married Bela Lugosi’s fourth wife, Lillian. He died in 1972 at the age of 71.

Nigel Kneale hated the 1960s. “I didn’t like the Sixties at all because of the whole thing of ‘let it all hang out’ and let’s stop thinking […] which was the all too frequent theme of the Sixties which I hated”. This became his primary preoccupation in the latter part of his career. He writes angry.

In 1969 a psychedelic prog rock band formed and named themselves Quatermass. Pink Floyd were fans of Nigel Kneale, as were Ringo Starr and Michael Palin.

Wikipedia on THE YEAR OF THE SEX OLYMPICS: “Influenced by concerns about overpopulation, the counterculture of the 1960s, and the societal effects of television, the play depicts a world of the future where a small elite controls the mass media, keeping the lower classes docile by serving them an endless diet of lowest common denominator programmes and pornography. The play concentrates on an idea the programme controllers have for a new programme that will follow the trials and tribulations of a group of people left to fend for themselves on a remote island. In this respect, the play is often cited as having anticipated the craze for reality television.”