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.