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.