Kneale began writing the scripts, working to a delivery deadline of February 1973. Much of the setting for the story was influenced by contemporary political events such as strikes, power cuts, the oil crisis and developments in the space race, especially the planned Apollo-Soyuz missions and Skylab. Writing in the listings magazine "TV Times" to promote the serial, Kneale said, ""Quatermass" is a story of the future – but perhaps only a few years from now. There are some clues already in the most obvious places: the streets. Pavements littered with rubbish. Walls painted with angry graffiti. Belfast black with smoke and rage. Worst of all, the mindless violence". Concerns about the state of society, especially the "dropout" culture of the youth movement, had been a theme of Kneale's writing for some time. This was seen in such works as "The Big, Big Giggle", an unmade play about a teenage suicide cult; "The Year of the Sex Olympics", about the consequences of a world with no censorship or inhibitions; and "Bam! Pow! Zap!" (1969), about teenage delinquents, all of which fed into the world depicted in the new "Quatermass" serial. Kneale said, "I looked at the alarming aspects of contemporary trends. Since then, we'd seen 'flower power' and hippies, so all I did was bring them into the story. It was written in 1972 and it was about the sixties really". Another theme that had crept into Kneale's writing at this time—as seen in "Wine of India", about compulsory euthanasia for the elderly, and later the "Beasts" episode "During Barty's Party", about an elderly couple terrorised by rats—was the consequences of growing old. Kneale later recalled, "The theme I was trying to get to was the old redressing the balance with the young, saving the young, which I thought a nice, paradoxical, ironic idea after the youth-oriented 60s".