SPECIAL EFFECTS
In the final episode of Nigel Kneale’s groundbreaking serial The Quatermass Experiment (1953), a hideously mutated creature takes refuge in Westminster Abbey. With no means to depict anything more sophisticated, Kneale and his future wife decorated a pair of leather gloves and Kneale’s wriggling fingers did the rest.
The BBC established its Visual Effects Department the following year, carefully choosing a name that would draw a distinction between television trickery and sound effects. By all accounts the designers and assistants recruited by Jack Kine and Bernard Wilkie were a motley crew. Each one was highly talented. Some were deeply eccentric. None of them was frightened to fail.