Art & Creativity Quote by Nigel Kneale

Attention is the scarcest resource Kneale is staking a claim on, and he’s doing it with the slightly combative confidence of a writer who thinks viewers are too easily let off the hook. “Demanded” is the operative word: not invited, not courted, not gently earned. It implies a kind of narrative authority that refuses to become background noise, a story engineered to interrupt your evening and stay with you after the credits.

That insistence makes perfect sense coming from Nigel Kneale, whose best work (especially Quatermass and The Stone Tape) treated television not as a cosy hearth but as a delivery system for unease. Mid-century British TV could be sleepy and polite; Kneale used genre as a crowbar. His science fiction and horror are rarely escapist. They’re arguments with the audience about complacency, about how modernity manufactures new kinds of fear, and about how rational institutions fail when confronted with the irrational. To “demand attention” is to reject the passive spectator and force a moral posture: you can’t half-watch this; you have to take a position.

The subtext is also a quiet indictment of the medium itself. Television tends toward distraction, toward the domestic rhythms that dilute intensity. Kneale’s line reads like an anti-television manifesto written from inside the machine: if the box is going to beam images into your home, then the writer has a responsibility to make those images matter. His attention-demanding story isn’t just thrilling; it’s a refusal to let the viewer remain unexamined.