A memory of TV's golden era.

I imagine most people will know the name Quatermass, but there will be few of us who remember the original "Quatermass Experiment". Groundbreaking television which quite literally brought the nation to a near standstill, as everybody tuned in to watch it. I was 15 and it made a big impression on me, both as a sci-fi/horror story and as a morality play (in the end, it is Quatermass's appeal to the monster's essential humanity which saves mankind). It was written by Nigel Kneale, whose death over a year ago has, I'm ashamed to say, only just come to my notice. A writer way, way ahead of his time, he not only wrote three Quatermass serials (of which in my book "Quatermass and the Pit" is, by a small margin, the best), and another brilliant horror story for TV called "The Stone Tape", but also did a memorable and powerful TV adaptation of George Orwell's "1984". But for sheer prescience, his play "The Year of the Sex Olympics" takes the biscuit, portraying as it does a (then) future world where television has become lowest-common-denominator pap and someone has the idea of marooning a group of people on a deserted island, and then broadcasting their daily interactions and efforts to survive. Ring any bells?