Kneale wrote original scripts and successfully adapted works by writers such as George Orwell, John Osborne, H. G. Wells and Susan Hill.

[7] At the beginning of the Second World War Kneale attempted to enlist in the British Army, but was deemed medically unfit for service[10] owing to photophobia, from which he had suffered since childhood.

[16] After graduating from RADA, Kneale worked for a short time as a professional actor performing in small roles at the Stratford Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon.

[9] He did take small voice-over roles in some of his 1950s television productions, such as the voice heard on the factory loudspeaker system in Quatermass II (1955), for which he also narrated most of the recaps shown at the beginning of each episode.

[18] His first professional script writing credit came when he wrote the radio drama The Long Stairs, broadcast by the BBC on 1 March 1950 and based on an historical mining disaster on the Isle of Man.

[20] Kneale was initially a general-purpose writer, working on adaptations of books and stage plays and even writing material for light entertainment and children's programmes.

[14] Kneale's first credited role in adult television drama was providing "additional dialogue" for the play Arrow to the Heart, broadcast on 20 July 1952.

Controller of Programmes Cecil McGivern wrote in a memo that: "Had competitive television been in existence then, we would have killed it every Saturday night while [The Quatermass Experiment] lasted.

[32] There was also prominent support for the play; the Duke of Edinburgh made it known that he and the Queen had watched and enjoyed the programme,[33] and the second live performance on 16 December gained the largest television audience since her coronation the previous year.

[35] Specifically designed by the BBC to combat the threat of the new ITV network,[25][31] which launched just a month before Quatermass II was shown,[36] the serial was even more successful than the first, drawing audiences of up to nine million viewers.

[42] On this occasion Kneale was inspired by the racial tensions that had recently been seen in the United Kingdom, and which came to a head while the serial was in pre-production when the Notting Hill race riots occurred in August and September 1958.

"In a story which mined mythology and folklore ... under the guise of genre it tackled serious themes of man's hostile nature and the military's perversion of science for its own ends.

[45] In 1958, Kneale's play Mrs Wickens in the Fall, transmitted by the BBC the previous year, was remade by the CBS network in the United States, retitled The Littlest Enemy.

Broadcast on 18 June as part of The United States Steel Hour anthology series, the script was severely cut back in length.

[55] Critic Nancy Banks-Smith wrote in 2003 that: "In The Year of the Sex Olympics [Kneale] foretold the reality show and, in the scramble for greater sensation, its logical outcome ...

In 1972 he was commissioned by the BBC to write a new four-part Quatermass serial, based in a dystopian near future world overrun with crime, apathy, martial law and youth cults.

[51] The serial was announced as a forthcoming production by the BBC in November,[57] and some model filming was even begun in June 1973,[51] but eventually budgetary problems and the unavailability of Stonehenge—a central location in the scripts—led to the project's cancellation.

[61] 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.

[51] The production, Quatermass, 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.

"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.

[30] 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.

[30] 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.

"[70] 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.

[71] 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.

But his place is secure, alongside Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, John Wyndham and Brian Aldiss, as one of the best, most exciting and most compassionate English science fiction writers of his century.

[83] Other entertainment industry figures that publicly expressed admiration for Kneale's work include The Beatles' drummer Ringo Starr, members of the rock group Pink Floyd and Monty Python's Flying Circus writer/performer Michael Palin.

[92] He was also responsible for a painting of a lobster from which special effects designers Bernard Wilkie and Jack Kine drew their inspiration for the Martian creatures they constructed for the original television version of Quatermass and the Pit.

[16] They married on 8 May 1954[94] and had two children; Matthew, who later became a successful novelist,[32] and Tacy, an actress and later a special effects designer who worked on the Harry Potter film series.

[7] Kerr became a successful children's writer, with the Mog series of books[32] and When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, which was based on her own experiences of fleeing Nazi Germany in her youth.

[11] Kneale worked with Kerr on an adaptation of When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit in the 1970s, but the eventual makers of the film version disregarded their script.