Nigel Kneale - ITV and Hollywood

ITV and Hollywood

Kneale's remaining television work was written for ITV. His first script for ITV was the one-off play Murrain, made by the network's Midlands franchise holders Associated TeleVision (ATV) in 1975. The play, a horror piece based around witchcraft, led the following year to a series called Beasts, a six-part anthology where Kneale created six different character-based tales of horror and the macabre. It featured some well-known actors such as Martin Shaw, Pauline Quirke and Bernard Horsfall, but did not gain a full network run on ITV; different regions transmitted the episodes in different timeslots and some in different sequences.

In the mid-1970s, Kneale made his only attempt at writing a stage play. Called Crow, it was based upon the memoirs of real-life Manx slaver Captain Hugh Crow. Kneale was unable to find backing to produce the play for the stage, but sold the script to ATV who put it into pre-production for television. However, shortly before filming it was cancelled by order of ATV's managing director, Lew Grade—Kneale was never told why.

Following the cancellation of Crow, Kneale moved to work for another of the ITV companies, Thames Television, who in 1977 commissioned the production of the scripts of Kneale's previously abandoned fourth Quatermass serial, to be produced by their Euston Films subsidiary film company. The production was structured to work both as a four-episode serial for transmission in the UK, and a 100-minute film version for cinema release overseas—something Kneale later regretted agreeing to. Starring John Mills as Quatermass and with a budget of over £1 million—more than fifty times the budget of Quatermass and the Pit in 1958—the serial was not as critically successful as its predecessors. "Thematically no less awesome than Mr Kneale's earlier science-fiction essays for BBC Television, his ITV debut has proved only a so-so affair," was the verdict of The Times when previewing the final episode. Tying in with the series, Kneale returned to prose fiction when he wrote his only full-length novel, Quatermass, a novelisation of the serial.

Kneale's next television series was a departure from his usual style—Kinvig, his sole attempt at writing a sitcom, produced by London Weekend Television and broadcast on ITV in the autumn of 1981. Although his first out-and-out comedy, Kneale was keen to stress that there had always been elements of humour present throughout his scripts, and some of the press reaction to Kinvig was positive. "If you like the idea of the Hitch-Hiker's Guide but found its realization tiresomely hysterical you may well prefer Kneale's relaxed wit. Cast splendid, direction deft," was The Times's preview of the first episode. However, the series was not a success, although Kneale later remained personally pleased with it.

In 1982, Kneale made another one-off diversion from his usual work when he wrote his only produced Hollywood movie script, Halloween III: Season of the Witch. Kneale had initially been approached by the director John Landis to work on the screenplay for a remake of Creature from the Black Lagoon, and he and his wife spent some time living at the Sheraton Hotel in Hollywood while Kneale worked on the project. The Black Lagoon script never went into production, but while in America Kneale met the director Joe Dante, who invited him to script the third film in the Halloween series, on which Dante was working. Kneale agreed, on the proviso that it would be a totally new concept unrelated to the first two films, which he had not seen and did not like what he had heard of.

Kneale's treatment for the film met with the approval of John Carpenter, the producer of the Halloween series, although Kneale was required to write the script in only six weeks. Kneale got on well with the director assigned to the film, Tommy Lee Wallace, but when one of the film's backers, Dino De Laurentiis, insisted upon the inclusion of more graphic violence and a rewrite of the script from Wallace, Kneale became displeased with the results and had his name removed from the film.

He returned to writing scripts for British television, including Gentry with Roger Daltrey for ITV in 1987, and the 1989 adaptation of Susan Hill's novel The Woman in Black for transmission on ITV on Christmas Eve. Lynne Truss, reviewing a repeat broadcast of the production on Channel 4 for The Times in 1994, wrote that: "Clip-clop is not usually a noise to get upset about. But it will be an interesting test, today, to go up behind people and whisper 'clip-clop', to find out whether they saw The Woman in Black last night. People who made the bold decision to watch this excellent drama will respond to any 'clip-clop' by gratifyingly leaping in the air and grabbing the backs of their necks." The adaptation nearly went unmade; Kneale had written the script in ten days but been advised by his agent to wait before submitting it to the producers Central Independent Television so that they would not think he had rushed it. When he did submit the script three weeks later, he discovered that Central had been about to cancel the production as they had assumed that Kneale, then 67, had not been able to complete the work due to his age.

Susan Hill herself did not like some of the changes that Kneale had made to The Woman in Black. It has been observed that Kneale on some occasions operated a double-standard with adaptations; being unhappy when others made changes to his stories, but willing to make changes to stories he was adapting into script form. Referring to The Woman in Black adaptation, the writer and critic Kim Newman noted that: "He was very offended at the notion of Susan Hill using the name of Kipps from HG Wells as the hero of The Woman in Black, and so he decided not to use it and to change the hero's name to Kidd. I'm sure if somebody thought that Quatermass was a silly name and changed it, he'd be furious!" However, an adaptation he wrote in 1991, a four-part version of Kingsley Amis's novel Stanley and the Women, met with approval from the original author, with Amis regarding it as the most successful adaptation of any of his work.

Kneale also adapted Sharpe's Gold for ITV in 1995, as part of their series of adaptations of Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe novels. This was an assignment that surprised his agent; "We didn't think he'd want to bother with them but he did. That was probably because he liked the producer." He returned to writing for radio for the first time since the 1950s in 1996, when he wrote the drama-documentary The Quatermass Memoirs for BBC Radio 3. Partly composed of Kneale looking back at the events that led to the writing of the original three Quatermass serials and using some archive material, there was also a dramatised strand to the series, set just before the ITV Quatermass serial and featuring Andrew Keir, star of the Hammer version of Quatermass and the Pit, as the Professor.

While recording an audio commentary for that film in 1997, Kneale speculated about a possible Quatermass prequel set in 1930s Germany. According to The Independent, Kneale conceived a storyline involving the young Quatermass becoming involved in German rocketry experiments in the 1930s, and helping a young Jewish woman to escape the country during the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

Kneale was invited to write for the successful American science-fiction series The X-Files (1993–2002), but declined the offer. His final professional work was an episode of the ITV legal drama Kavanagh QC, starring John Thaw. Kneale's episode, "Ancient History", was about a Jewish woman who during the Second World War had been subjected to horrific experiments in a concentration camp. Transmitted on 17 January 1997 and cited as one of the programme's finest episodes, it brought Kneale's writing career to a close after more than fifty years.

He continued to appear as an interview subject in various television documentaries, and also recorded further audio commentaries for the release of some of his productions on DVD. In 2005, he acted as a consultant when the digital television channel BBC Four produced a live remake of The Quatermass Experiment. He lived in Barnes, London, until his death on 29 October 2006 at the age of 84, following a series of small strokes.