Thanks to his legendary work on the Quatermass serials, we tend to think of Nigel Kneale as a science fiction writer.
But this isn’t really true.
Or perhaps we should say that’s what he said.
After all, he was never happy that he had been labeled a science fiction writer. A closer look at his long career reveals that he wrote a wide range of very different stories, most of them dramas, like his scripts for Damn the Defiant! and Olivier’s The Entertainer, not to mention cowriting Look Back in Anger and all those works by other authors he adapted for television and movies.
But he did keep coming back to Science Fiction even after the end of the original Quatermass serials, with such plays as The Creature (The Abominable Snowman), The Road, The Year of the Sex Olympics, The Stone Tape, and his highly regarded adaption of 1984, not to mention all the stories he wrote about ghosts and the supernatural.
And I suspect that this is why so many people misunderstand his comedy series, Kinvig.
Des Kinvig is not happy. He got stuck running his father-in-law’s repair shop (and blames him for dropping dead and leaving him the business) and can hardly be bothered to work on any of the things people drop off for him to repair. He’s unhappy with his wife (who is a very nice person but almost too earnest), his overgrown dog, Cuddly, and his marriage — and with nearly everything else in his life except for his fascination with flying saucers.
Instead of fixing things, he and his best friend, Jim, spend all their time reading the latest flying saucer magazines and talking about Jim’s latest theories about the alien incursions into our world, mostly derived from Sci Fi novels.
Perhaps Kinvig’s most difficult customer is Miss Griffin, an attractive young woman who gets so frustrated with his constant excuses that she decides to harass him with a constant series of demands.
But then, late one night, he hears a strange noise and discovers a flying saucer hidden in a building across the street. He enters it and discovers that it is crewed by three aliens from Mercury, and Miss Griffin, in a skimpy space girl costume.
You see, she is really a space agent, and needs Kinvig’s help to repair their ship.
And she has a series of missions she plans to send Kinvig on, to help defeat the sinister insect-like aliens known as the Xux…
With Jim’s help (he is the only one Des can trust with his secret), he takes on such challenges as a town councilman who is surely an alien duplicate, a startling display of telekinetic power in the form of countless bent spoons, a factory making humanoid duplicates, and a sinister stranger who may be trying to bring Des’ wife under his hypnotic control.
Most descriptions of the series will tell you it is never clear whether Kinvig’s adventures are real or not. In fact, I have yet to come across a review or product description which doesn’t.
This annoyed Nigel Kneale, not that anyone seems to have noticed.
After all, this simply isn’t true.
In fact, it should be obvious from Kinvig’s first encounter, when he enters the spaceship and finds…
It has giant vacuum tubes.
I mean, huge ones. Taller than a man.
Even Kinvig notices this, as he comments that he always knew transistors were just a fad.
In fact the entire bridge of the flying saucer is wreathed in dust and looks suspiciously like the old radio an elderly customer wants him to repair — and one of the aliens even echoes his line of dialogue about the radio, when he points to all the miles of wiring Kinvig has just pulled out and says all the extra parts just mean there is more that can break down.
I mean, if finding his most beautiful customer in the role of a super space bikini girl wasn’t enough of a giveaway.
It seems rather strange that no one has noticed this, particularly because most of the humor only works if we understand that Kinvig is getting more and more detached from reality.
The show ran for a mere seven episodes on London Weekend Television (part of the larger ITV network), which was hardly unusual for British television shows at the time. However, its ratings were terrible and the last two episodes were moved to a late-night spot and many who followed the series missed the final episode.
I have no idea whether there would have been any further adventures had the ratings been better. Kneale wrote every episode himself, which puts a huge burden on the creator (consider, for example, another classic ITV series from the same era, Sapphire and Steel, whose creators wrote most of the stories, but ended up taking a break and letting someone else write the second to last). This is actually longer than his other series — the Quatermass serials and the horror anthology, Beasts. The final episode’s ending has a touch of finality about it, with Des and the fantasy Miss Griffin walking into the sunset hand in hand (while Des is in a drunken stupor as a result of overindulging in the secret tonic which allows him to transport himself through space). There are signs that even Des may be questioning his own alternate reality in the second to last episode when he encounters an all too familiar mannequin.
And yes, you have to wonder how long he can survive in his current state of discontent.
Or is it clinical depression?
I will confess that I do like the attention that Kneale paid to the real Miss Griffin’s character, and her relationship to the real Kinvig. As angry as she gets at him, there are moments of kindness, and amused tolerance suggesting she actually likes him just a bit and is trying to wake him out of his stupor. Her speech in the final episode where she lets us see how she views her own life and where it is going helps explain why she treats him as she does.
Aside from a few of his plays and his screenplay for First Men in the Moon, Kneale wrote little actual comedy, although there are some fine comic bits in his more dramatic work. Some do not find Kinvig particularly funny, although I’m not entirely inclined to agree. Clearly he was trying to write something more character driven and not a wild, absurd Monty Python-esqe comedy. The first episode gets off to a slow start as it has to introduce us to the situation and doesn’t really pick up until Kinvig finally encounters the alien saucer at the halfway mark. But the series gets funnier as it goes along, as the situation gradually gets more complex and the odious Mr. Horsley is finally introduced.
It’s not one of his great works, but it is quite funny in its best moments, and has a lot of flair and imagination. Kinvig is just a little too miserable, perhaps, although that is more or less inevitable when you tell the tale of a man who escapes from the real world into dreams of a beautiful woman telling him how wonderful he is.
Although one of the best touches are the moments when the real Miss Griffin’s sharpness shows up in her space girl persona.
And it is a nice touch that the unspeakable Xux look more than a little like the Martians from Quatermass and the Pit.
For some reason or other, ITV released Kinvig onto DVD in the Nothings, at around the same time that the big Quatermass BBC box set, The Quatermass Experiment BBC 4 remake, and ITV’s ’78 Quatermass serial and their collection of Kneale’s anthology series Beasts all came out on DVD (and it’s fairly obvious from the cover that they thought Kneale was the main attraction!).
This means that the entire series is now readily available on YouTube and can be watched below (for some reason, whoever put this playlist together included a lengthy clip from part 3 and a duplicate episode, so skip the third and fourth videos and go straight to number five).
And watch carefully at the end of the credits for the various ways Les Chatfield’s credit disappears…
rivets on the poster 
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