Tales From Development Hell: The Big, Big Giggle
- Jun 19
- 10 min read
Updated: Jun 20
By Ryan Fleming.
There are plenty of ideas for films that never see the light of day due to their subject matter being too provocative. There are even plenty made whose subject matter makes them the source of great controversy. One of the former that it is easy to imagine becoming the latter is The Big, Big Giggle from Manx playwright Nigel Kneale.
What was that subject matter? A television signal that caused a wave of teen suicides.
Originally commissioned as a six-part serial by the BBC, for whom Kneale had turned in many memorable serials during the 1950s, it was then mooted as a motion picture after the Corporation got cold feet over its subject matter. The BBFC were of a similar mindset, and after long negotiations the project fell through. Kneale’s work had touched upon controversial subject matters before, even in his most acclaimed television work, but this particular idea was a step too far even for a commissioning culture that sometimes could prove to be too accommodating to its screenwriters.
Kneale had begun his career in the entertainment industry as an actor rather than a writer, studying acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. His first writing was in prose rather than for screen, and it was the successful reception of his short stories published in magazines that made him decide to give up acting for writing. A collection of his stories won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1950, and the publisher of that collection wished for him to write a novel, but Kneale preferred to focus on television screenwriting. After a well-received radio play based on a real-life mining disaster on his native Isle of Man, Kneale was employed by the BBC as one of their first staff writers in 1951, despite him never having watched television prior to his employment.
In his early tenure with the Corporation, he adapted literary and theatrical works, as well as contributing additional material for other programmes including children’s programming, light entertainment, and drama. His first forays into drama brought him into collaboration with Austrian director and producer Rudolph Cartier, which would mark the beginnings of a working relationship that would produce some of the most famous, and infamous, works from the BBC during the 1950s. The BBC showed a surprising amount of faith in Kneale’s potential, even committing most of their annual budget for original material to Kneale’s salary bringing him in as a full-time writer for the drama department.
Kneale’s first science fiction drama was also the first science fiction drama on UK television aimed at an adult audience. The Quatermass Experiment was broadcast over six weeks during the summer of 1953. Cartier directed all six episodes, which starred Reginald Tate as the title character, a rocket scientist who has to contend with the sole survivor of the first manned space launch bringing something back with him. The name, despite having its origins in Kneale’s own Manx homeland, had been plucked from the phonebook for its unique sound. The serial had been called one of the UK’s first examples of event television, emptying the pubs on a Saturday night for each week it was on the air. Its success was also recognised by the Corporation in light of the looming launch of their sole competitor, ITV. As such, follow up serials were commissioned starting with Quatermass II (1955) and subsequently Quatermass and the Pit (1958). Both serials necessitated a recasting of the title character, as Tate died less than a month before Quatermass II was due to begin filming and his successor, John Robinson, was in turn unavailable for the third serial, which led to André Morell being cast in the role. Ironically, Morell had declined the title role back in 1953, being Cartier’s original choice before offering it to Tate.
Morell had earlier appeared as O’Brien in the Kneale adapted, Cartier directed adaptation of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954), which starred Peter Cushing as Winston Smith. That adaptation, a single broadcast, was subject of much controversy in its original airing with questions being asked in Parliament about its suitability for television broadcast. That was in a direct adaptation of the source material, but Kneale’s original works would also touch upon raw subject matter like Quatermass and the Pit having plot points inspired by the then recent Notting Hill race riots.
Television was not the sole medium where the success of Kneale’s works was recognised. After an omnibus re-staging of The Quatermass Experiment that was precluded by Tate’s death, producer Anthony Hinds secured the film rights for Hammer Film Productions. Whilst most companies were reticent to secure a film that would likely secure an ‘X’ rating from the BBFC, then the most restrictive classification possible, Hammer had no such qualms and even branded their eventual adaptation The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) so that they might put the ‘X’ front and centre on the poster.
Kneale was dismissive of their adaptation, especially of their casting of American actor Brian Donlevy, whom Kneale referred to as ‘a former Hollywood heavy gone to seed’. As a result of his dissatisfaction with their first adaptation, and Hammer’s attempt to do a very Quatermass-like tale with an original character in X the Unknown (1956). That film also cemented Hammer’s turn from a company producing generic B-features to one specialising in science fiction or horror pictures. Kneale would adapt his own work in Quatermass 2 (1957), the same year saw him also adapt The Creature (1956), a single play directed by Cartier, into The Abominable Snowman for Hammer. As much as Kneale might have felt the adaptations were lesser works, The Quatermass Xperiment and The Abominable Snowman are the only extant versions of his works after the BBC wiped the tapes of their television originals as per their policy at the time.
Despite never, then or later, considering himself a science fiction author, Nigel Kneale ended the 1950s as perhaps Britain’s most notable one. He would pen further television and film works – original, adapting his own works, and adapting others – throughout the 1960s. Author and critic Kim Newman would later describe Kneale’s experiences writing for the BBC and Hammer, respectively, as “the writer turned in the script, the producer said it was brilliant and filmed it” and “the writer turned in the script, and they were simply too lazy to change it.” The Big, Big Giggle and its wave of teenage suicides would rouse both the BBC from their adoration and Hammer from their lethargy.
Some reports have indicated that The Big, Big Giggle would have been set in the near future and involved lot of special effects, with the teenagers in question the disaffected future youth akin to the protagonist and his acolytes in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962). Other plot and character details of the project remain scant half a century later. There were those in the Corporation, despite their reputation at the time as a company that respected the visions of its writers, provided they had the accolades and profile of a Kneale or a Dennis Potter, that immediately had reservations. They feared imitators or, more probably, that any teenager that committed suicide during the six weeks it was on the air would immediately be linked to the production by certain tabloids, regardless of any actual evidence that this was the case.
In later interviews, Kneale would express a feeling that perhaps the Corporation had been right to pass on the project. The project did not end there, and instead a film version was mooted to be distributed by 20th Century Fox. Likely it was to be produced by Hammer, as Fox was one of several Hollywood studios acting as their distributors during the mid-60s. The film version would suffer the same issues in being made as the television one, though here it was not the prospective producers who objected, but the British Board of Film Censors themselves.
Kneale recalled long, excruciating talks on behalf of the project with John Trevelyan of the BBFC. Despite being more liberal than his predecessors in the role of chief censor, Trevelyan was never afraid of insisting upon cuts to films he felt would be detrimental to the public. He would employ a seeming double standard, as frequent Hammer director Roy Ward Baker would suggest, where anything he felt to be ‘art cinema’ was given more leeway than those films he considered ‘commercial cinema’. Despite Kneale’s recurring accolades from critics, his efforts in science fiction and horror had him pigeon-holed as a writer of ‘commercial’ rather than ‘art’ cinema. Trevelyan would spell the end for The Big, Big Giggle.
Kneale would instead adapt Norah Lofts’s 1960 novel The Devil’s Own for Hammer as The Witches (1965) and subsequently adapt his own Quatermass and the Pit into a film of the same name in 1967. (That film finally saw Hammer cast a different actor in the title role, with Scottish actor Andrew Keir succeeding Donlevy.) His mid-60s efforts for Hammer would be his last credited work on theatrically released feature films. He would remain more prolific on television, with his plays The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968), The Stone Tape (1972), both for the BBC, and the anthology series Beasts (1976) for ATV being amongst his more notable works during this period.
A fourth Quatermass serial would follow before the end of the 1970s, produced simultaneously as a four-part serial for Thames Television (under the name Quatermass) and a 100-minute film from Euston (as The Quatermass Conclusion). John Mills became the sixth actor in seven productions to play the title role. The themes of disaffected youth and a plot point of a signal that causes mass death would seem to be inspired by The Big, Big Giggle.
It would not be the only work from Kneale to touch upon ideas originally planned for Giggle. Kneale would make a brief foray into Hollywood in the early 1980s, primarily to script a remake of The Creature from the Black Lagoon for John Landis that never came to pass but also scripted the second sequel to John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), intended to turn that series into an anthology of different horror tales set on Halloween. Although Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) did not feature Kneale’s name as screenwriter, removed at his own request, it features in its plot a television signal intended to cause the death of children. Carpenter, producer of the sequel to his breakthrough success, would use Kneale as an inspiration in later films despite their falling out, most notably in Prince of Darkness (1987), which combined elements of Quatermass and the Pit with The Stone Tape.
What if the ideas of The Big, Big Giggle had already been filmed back in the 1960s? How would Kneale’s career have been impacted by the unavoidably controversial subject matter?
That might depend on whether it was as a television serial or film that the work was produced. As enticing as the six-part serial might be, the film version seems somewhat easier to create a scenario in which it makes it to production. The Corporation passed on the serial without outside influence, whilst the film version only broke down after protracted negotiations with the censor. Maybe all that would be needed would be Trevelyan to see Kneale as more of an artistic writer than a commercial one. Kneale had also scripted unmade adaptations of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World during the 1960s, so maybe the BBC producing one or both of them might have tilted his profile into the artistic column for Trevelyan. The Big, Big Giggle then winds up produced as a theatrical film, likely by Hammer, for distribution by 20th Century Fox.
As Kneale himself, a famous curmudgeon who could cross over into arrogance at the drop of a hat, would suggest in later interviews, the concerns of the Corporation and others about how it might be received, especially by the tabloid press, would not have been unfounded. Controversy would have been unavoidable.
Without even speculating on less scrupulous journalists attempting to link real-life tragedy of teenage suicides to the motion picture, the subject matter alone might have garnered much press for Mary Whitehouse’s then new National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association. Although that organisation had most infamously been concerned with threats to what they considered public decency from television, they would not shy away from protesting theatrical films that did not meet their standards. An earlier version of the infamous ‘video nasties’ debacle of the 1980s focused on theatrical films would be a stretch, but it might do some damage to the reputation of Hammer films. Enough that they might not win the Queen’s Award to Industry that they won in 1968 for their contributions to the UK economy.
On the other hand, such a notable, even controversial, film set in the modern era or near-future might allow them to diversify their output from the Gothic horrors that had become their main output following The Curse of Frankenstein (1957). When they did finally try their hand at modern-set horror films in the early 1970s, it was a case of too little, too late. The controversy could in fact be better for Hammer in the long-term than their survival was without it. Aside from Quatermass and the Pit, they had also largely moved away from science fiction too preferring instead to focus on films starring Christopher Lee as Count Dracula or Peter Cushing as Doctor Frankenstein.
As for Kneale, if he did have the artistic pigeon-holing in this universe to see The Big, Big Giggle produced, he likely would have lost it following the reaction to the film. He would not even be a ‘commercial’ writer anymore but rather a ‘controversial’ one. The reaction also might pigeon-hole him even further as a science fiction or horror writer, notions that he always eschewed, actually disdaining the former genre multiple times in interviews. Television and film work in the United Kingdom would not vanish completely, but Kneale might be forced to return to his literary roots or even the theatre if he was not receiving as much as he did historically due to the controversy over The Big, Big Giggle.
Would he even consider plying his trade across the Atlantic, where the controversy would be lesser known? Could a 1960s/70s foray into Hollywood have gone better than when he eventually tried to work in that climate during the 1980s? The easy answer is probably not. Kneale’s experience on UK television and in UK film would be markedly different from both US film and television, where the screenplay was always provisional and subject to change throughout production. Kneale was also a man who turned down multiple opportunities to write for famous franchises and series like James Bond, Doctor Who, and The X-Files because he disliked the product. However, an earlier opportunity between he and Carpenter might prove more fruitful.
What is likely is that the likes of The Stone Tape, Quatermass, and Halloween III, or their equivalents, might have different stories if there is a desire to avoid similarities with the controversial Big, Big Giggle. A fourth Quatermass serial in particular might never be made as a result of a decline in Kneale’s profile in the UK.
The Big, Big Giggle is an attention-grabbing idea form a prolific writer of television fiction that never made it past the initial discussions on both that medium and in film. Amongst fans of the genre or of Kneale it could acquire an almost legendary reputation if the controversy kept it from being re-released, broadcast on television, or released to home video. Some of those fans of Kneale who would also go into film-making might even consider it ripe for a new version. Perhaps John Carpenter produces a remake of the controversial film at some point? Would that remake fare better?
If you think the controversy over The Big, Big Giggle might have been profound in the United Kingdom during the 1960s, imagine how it might have been received in the United States at any point since the 1980s.
Ryan Fleming is the author of SLP's Reid in Braid and various short stories for the anthologies, as well as editing The Scottish Anthology.
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