The way that Nigel Kneale chooses to do so makes for a surprising end to the series. In the 1950s, Quatermass was a bold adventurer – at the end of The Quatermass Experiment/Xperiment, Quatermass’s rocket launch had ended in disaster yet he was undaunted and making plans to launch another; here he is almost 180 degrees removed from that same character, a frightened old man who instead of seeking new bold horizons to conquer, sits cynically decrying a space link-up for its symbolic wedlock of two corrupt political dynasties. This Quatermass is even a different person in the casting of John Mills, a diminutive man who is almost the complete antithesis of brutish Brian Donlevy from the first two Quatermass films or the more authoritative Andrew Keir in Quatermass and the Pit. The exercise almost seems to represent a wearying of life on the part of Nigel Kneale – it seems a story written by someone who sees the world as having gone down the drain and doesn’t appear to care about it any longer. It also seems to have been written by someone who can no longer understand what the generation gap is about to the extent that they literally view adults and youth as different species.

Despite the prevailing mood of cynicism, Quatermass/The Quatermass Conclusion has the familiar conceptual wildness one has come to associate with Nigel Kneale. The melange of ideas and images is striking – the Planet People who follow lei-lines using plumb bobs, being drawn to ancient megalithic sites, which were erected as warning markers by the ancients over giant alien microwaves. Kneale even offers the amusingly wild idea that Wembley Stadium is one of these ancient sites and offers such as explanation for football hooliganism. However, the Planet People as leftover hippies is an idea that seems well and truly dated by 1979. (The result of the script having been written in the early 1970s, originally for Hammer as an original film. Kneale also originally used Stonehenge as the megalithic circle but the series was refused permission to shoot on a national monument). Perhaps a better idea at the time would have been to have replaced them by punks. The actual appearances of the alien force in mid-air and the crisped ash remains left on the sites have an eerie power. The images of a socially decayed London – of pay-cops, of books used for burning, of vehicles and bodies lying in the streets and cats being sold for their fur – are also well achieved.

This was not the end of the Quatermass saga. 25 years later, the BBC revived the character in a remake, the live-broadcast The Quatermass Experiment (2005) starring Jason Flemyng as Quatermass.

Nigel Kneale’s other tv works are:– 1984 (1954), a live adaptation of the George Orwell novel; The Creature (1955) about the search for The Yeti; The Road (1963) about a haunting that may be an example of time travel; The Year of the Sex Olympics (1970) about a future dulled into compliance by televised sexual competitions; Wine of India (1970) about future euthanasia; The Stone Tape (1972), a scientific explanation of hauntings; the six-episode tv anthology series Beasts (1976), which all featured unseen monsters; the seven-episode comedy series Kinvig (1981) about two science-fiction fans who are transported into encounters with UFOs; and the ghost story tv movie The Woman in Black (1989). Kneale’s film scripts were The Abominable Snowman (1957) adapted from The Creature; the adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon (1964); the occult film The Witches/The Devil’s Own (1966); and uncredited work on Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982).

Director Piers Haggard is the great-grandson of the adventure writer H. Rider Haggard, author of books like King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and She (1887). Piers Haggard has made a number of genre entries such as the occult film Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), the Dennis Potter mini-series Pennies from Heaven (1978), The Fiendish Plot of Dr Fu Manchu (1980), Venom (1982) and The Breakthrough/The Lifeforce Experiment (1994).