In 1953, the BBC television drama department was faced with an unexpected gap in the schedule and commissioned Nigel Kneale, a young staff writer, to fill the gap. He came up with The Quatermass Experiment, a science fiction thriller in six half-hour episodes that gripped the nation. Kneale found a sympathetic collaborator in the director Rudolph Cartier, a German emigré who had cut his teeth on pre-war German cinema. Inspired by Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde, and echoing fears about the nuclear bomb and the space race, The Quatermass Experiment concerned the sole survivor of a rocket crew who returns to Earth infected by an alien life form that exists by feeding on human blood. The man is gradually transformed into a giant fungoid mutant, stalking London and committing horrifying murders as his human side fights an ultimately hopeless battle against the evil force within him. The scientist who tracks him down is the rocket group chief, Professor Bernard Quatermass, who eventually corners the monster in its lair in Westminster Abbey.

Two further Quatermass series followed, both directed by Cartier. Quatermass II (1955) again reflected Cold War paranoia, as a secret government chemical research station turns out to be an acclimatisation centre for an alien race that is trying to infiltrate the minds of the population. The challenge for Quatermass is to destroy the asteroid where the aliens are based, which he does by leading a workers’ uprising. Quatermass and the Pit (1959) begins with the discovery (deep under “Hobb’s Lane” in London) of a long-buried spaceship containing the bodies of horned, locust-like Martians. Quatermass deduces that five million years ago, when Mars was dying, Martians removed apes from the Earth, altered them surgically and returned them, imbued with new faculties, in an attempt to perpetuate their race. Ghosts, poltergeists, second sight and telekinesis all come into play in a chilling finale in which, as the emanations from the rediscovered spaceship become stronger, Martian memories are awakened in anyone who has the Martian gene, and they start to massacre those who do not. The programme contained echoes of the Notting Hill race riots that had recently occurred. All three series were later filmed by Hammer, helping establish the company as a specialist in the field of horror movies.

Kneale’s family came from the Isle of Man, where his father owned and ran the Herald newspaper. After leaving St Ninian’s High School, Douglas, Kneale chose acting as a career and he got small parts at the Stratford Memorial Theatre, writing short stories and plays in his spare time. When his first book of short stories, Tomato Cain and Other Stories, won the 1950 Somerset Maugham award, he gave up acting and became a writer. Soon afterwards, he became one of the two scriptwriters in the BBC’s fledgling television drama department. His chilling adaptation of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954) contained a brilliant performance from Peter Cushing as Winston Smith, and the rat scene in ‘Room 101’ brought ineffective calls for the government to step in and prevent the play’s planned second showing.

Kneale and Cartier followed it up with a very different play, The Creature (1955). Tales of the ‘abominable snowman’ had been fixtures in British newspapers since Hilary and Tenzing had reported seeing giant footprints during their ascent of Everest, and the previous year the Daily Mail had financed an expedition to track the creature down. Kneale clearly saw the potential for a fictional treatment of such an expedition; typically, he has more sympathy for the yeti than the squabbling explorers on its trail, played by Stanley Baker and Peter Cushing (who would reprise his role in Hammer’s 1957 film version, The Abominable Snowman).

Until the mid-Seventies, the BBC routinely wiped and reused tapes, so many programmes were lost, such as Kneale’s The Road (1963), in which ghosts from a future nuclear holocaust haunted an 18th-century village. Thankfully, some of Kneale’s most important plays do still exist. 1968’s The Year of the Sex Olympics was a Huxley-esque, and oddly prophetic, dystopian satire on the increasingly powerful television industry. Kneale’s script is startlingly prescient: a jaded population is kept quiescent with a constant diet of light entertainment, including live sex competitions. When TV executives decide that something new is called for the result is the ‘Live Life Show’, a ‘reality’ TV programme that uncannily predicts such contemporary phenomena as Big Brother or I’m A Celebrity… (although here with the addition of a murderer to do away with the contestants). The play was an early colour production – apparently making much use of bright costumes and gold make-up – but the original colour tapes were long since wiped. Fortunately, a 16mm black-and-white version has recently been found and released on DVD, giving us some idea of what was intended.

Another lucky survivor is The Stone Tape (1972), in which scientists are trying to invent a new recording medium while working in a haunted Victorian building. The ‘stone tape’ of the title is the building itself, replaying the terrible scenes its walls have ‘recorded’ in the past. Kneale’s staging of a confrontation between modern technology and the supernatural was a bold one, moving ghosts out of the realm of folklore and superstition and into the realm of scientific explanation – a move that made them no less frightening, as the play’s climax demonstrates.

Kneale had grown increasingly disenchanted with the BBC – which had shelved his new Quatermass series along with other projects – and in 1975 he defected to Independent Television, writing the play Murrain for ATV. A tale of modern-day rationality meeting rural superstition – a newly arrived country vet finds himself caught up in accusations of witchcraft among the locals – it led to the commissioning of a six-part series, Beasts, in which Kneale explored man’s relationship with other creatures – from telepathic dolphins and ‘super-rats’ to animalistic poltergeists – from a variety of angles. Relying more on suggestion and sound than explicit visuals, Beasts was nevertheless a disquieting – and in the case of ‘Baby’ terrifying – attempt at grown-up television horror.

Kneale dusted off his abandoned Quatermass script for a four-episode serial shown on Thames Television in 1979. Called simply Quatermass and set in the near future, the professor, now retired and living in Scotland, comes south to take part in a TV programme and becomes involved in trying to defeat an alien force that is seeking to harvest hippies by sweeping them up in great force fields at Stonehenge and other ancient ritual sites. Kneale’s dislike of what he saw as an increasingly alienated youth culture, (a theme he’d explored in the unmade BBC series The Big, Big Giggle and several one-off plays), his disgust at the parlous state of television (represented here by ‘The Tittupy Bumpity Show’), and his dystopian vision of a world in terminal decline have led many to feel that the final Quatermass is rather dated (it was conceived, after all, back in the early 1970s). But with a fine performance from John Mills as the ageing scientist, and a strangely prescient vision of the New Age Traveller movement, Quatermass stands as a worthy swansong for the character with which Kneale’s name would be forever linked. Until the end of his life, he toyed with the idea of a prequel to the Quatermass saga – it was to have concerned the young scientist’s adventures in Nazi Germany and to have been entitled Quatermass in the Third Reich.

Kneale’s film credits included Look Back in Anger (1959), The Entertainer (1960), HMS Defiant (1962), First Men in the Moon (1964) and The Witches (1966). He was much admired by Stephen King and John Carpenter and was commissioned to write a screenplay for the third in the Halloween series, but it was an unhappy experience and he had his name removed from the credits. He was asked, but declined, to write for The X-Files – as he had earlier for Dr Who, a programme that owed a great deal to Kneale’s own Quatermass but which he heartily disliked.

Thomas Nigel Kneale, television dramatist, born Barrow-in-Furness 28 April 1922; died London 29 Oct 2006, aged 84.