Day's Night (1964). The 74-year-old actress Katie Johnson played a supporting part; she later became well known and won a British Film Award for her role as the landlady Mrs. Louisa Wilberforce in the film The Ladykillers (1955). Episodes Production The serial was written by BBC television drama writer Nigel Kneale, who had been an actor and an award-winning fiction writer before joining the BBC. The BBC's Head of Television Drama, Michael Barry, had committed most of his original script budget for the year to employing Kneale. An interest in science, particularly the idea of 'science going bad', led Kneale to write The Quatermass Experiment. The project originated when a gap formed in the BBC's schedules for a six-week serial to run on Saturday nights during the summer of 1953, and Kneale's idea was to fill it with "a mystifying, rather than horrific" storyline. Rudolph Cartier, one of the BBC's best-regarded directors, directed the serial. He and Kneale had collaborated on the play Arrow to the Heart, and worked closely on the initial storyline to make it suit the television production methods of the time.> Kneale claimed to have picked his leading character's unusual last name at random from a London telephone directory. He chose the character's first name, Bernard, in honour of astronomer Bernard Lovell. The working titles for the production were The Unbegotten and Bring Something Back...!, the latter a line of dialogue spoken in the second episode. Kneale had not finished scripting the serial's final two episodes before the first episode was broadcast. The production had an overall budget of just under £4000. The theme music used was "Mars, Bringer of War" from Gustav Holst's The Planets. Each episode was rehearsed from Monday to Friday at the Student Movement House on Gower Street in London, with camera rehearsals taking place all day on Saturday before transmission. The episodes were then transmitted live—with a few pre-filmed 35mm film inserts shot before and during the rehearsal period—from Studio A of the BBC's original television studios at Alexandra Palace in London. It was one of the last major dramas to be broadcast from the Palace, as the majority of television production was soon to transfer to Lime Grove Studios, and it was made using the BBC's oldest television cameras, the Emitrons, installed with the opening of the Alexandra Palace studios in 1936. These cameras gave a (by modern standards) poor-quality