the first of many collaborations between the pair, who enjoyed during the next few years a highly productive working relationship, despite profound creative disagreements on occasion. Cartier and Kneale were an important presence in the British television drama of the era and were, according to television historian Lez Cooke, "responsible for introducing a completely new dimension to television drama in the early to mid-1950s". Collaborations with Nigel Kneale Cartier and Kneale's first major production was the six-part serial The Quatermass Experiment, broadcast in the summer of 1953. A science-fiction story, it relates the sending of the first humans into space by Professor Bernard Quatermass and the consequences when an alien presence invades the crew's rocket during its flight and returns to Earth in the body of the one remaining crewmember, having absorbed the consciousnesses and shredded the bodies of the other two. A critical and popular success, The Quatermass Experiment has been described by the British Film Institute's Screenonline website as "one of the most influential series of the 1950s". Cartier's contribution to the serial's success was highlighted in his 1994 obituary in The Times newspaper, which also called the serial "a landmark in British television drama as much for its visual imagination as for its ability to shock and disturb". The success of The Quatermass Experiment led to two sequels, Quatermass II (1955) and Quatermass and the Pit (1958–59), both produced and directed by Cartier and written by Kneale. Both were successful and critically acclaimed, and Cartier's production work on them became increasingly ambitious. For Quatermass II, he pre-filmed a significant amount of material on location, using 35 mm film, opening the drama out from a confined studio setting with the most ambitious location shooting yet attempted in British television. Cartier, with his previous experience as a film director, particularly enjoyed working on these cinema-style filmed scenes. The appeal of the Quatermass serials has been attributed by the Museum of Broadcast Communications to the depiction of "A new range of gendered fears about Britain's postwar and post-colonial security. As a result, or perhaps simply because of Kneale and Cartier's effective combination of science fiction and poignant melodrama, audiences were captivated." The Screenonline website suggests that the visual impact of Cartier's interpretation of Kneale's scripts was a major factor in their success, which it attributes to their "originality, mass appeal and dynamism... The Quatermass Experiment became a landmark of science