Head of Television Drama is an amateur." Gielgud himself felt that television drama was too influenced by the cinema and ought to be closer to its radio equivalent, with television plays being more like illustrated radio broadcasts than independent entities in and of themselves. Gielgud eventually returned to radio, being replaced as Head of Drama by his assistant, the experienced producer Michael Barry, in 1952. One important move that had occurred under Gielgud was the establishment in 1950 of the Script Department, and the hiring of the television service's first in-house staff drama writers, Nigel Kneale and Philip Mackie. Gielgud began to commission new drama, such as Jack Hulbert's The Golden Year in 1951, a contribution to the Festival of Britain and something of a throw-back to a previous age, as it was the first ever musical comedy made for television. Barry later expanded the Script Department and installed the experienced film producer Donald Wilson as its head in 1955. Television was now developing beyond simply adapting stories from other media into creating its own originally written productions. It was also becoming a high-profile medium, with national coverage and viewing figures now running into the millions, helped by the explosion of interest due to the live televising of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in the summer of 1953. That same year, Barry invested the majority of his original scripting budget into a six-part science-fiction serial written by Kneale and directed by Rudolph Cartier, an Austrian-born director who was establishing a reputation as the television service's most inventive practitioner. Entitled The Quatermass Experiment, the serial (miniseries in American terminology) was a huge success and went a long way towards popularising the form, where one story is told over a short number of episodes, on British television: it is still one of the most popular drama formats in the medium to this day. Kneale and Cartier went on to be responsible for two sequel serials and many other highly successful and popular productions over the course of the decade, drawing many viewers to their programmes with their characteristic blend of horror and allegorical science fiction. It was they who were responsible for the 1954 adaptation of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the second performance of which drew the largest television audience since the coronation, some seven million viewers, and is one of the earliest surviving dramas in the archive. The telerecording process