Last night the Talking Pictures tv channel showed the 1955 movie The Quatermass Experiment. This tried to emulate the iconic BBC serials that started with the the same name in 1953. Adam Scovell's article on 28th April 2022 whose headline I pinched above describes "the first original sci fi drama that the BBC had produced for television". He was marking one hundred years since the birth of it's creator Nigel Kneale. The serials, directed by "the legendary" Rudolf Cartier centred on Professor Bernard Quatermass played by Reginald Tate investigating extra-terrestrial happenings. The first series, with six episodes broadcast live in the summer of 1953, "gripped the nation with the tale of an astronaut bringing something aggressively alien back to earth".
It was followed by Quatermass 11 in 1955 and Quatermass and the Pit in 1958. Only two episodes of the original series survive but all the others do. They are all on YouTube. These series by the BBC are not to be confused with the movies that cashed in on their popularity. That 1955 movie launched Hammer Studios into the bigtime with their first "horror" film that became their extremely successful trademark. The Quatermass Xperiment is directed by Val Guest with a change of title to confirm the film's "X" certificate. What I found hugely disappointing with the casting of American Brian Donlevy as Professor Quatermass. That was when I turned it off. Movies from Hammer followed the titles of the BBC serials in 1957 and 1967.
There is one vivid memory of the time when the BBC serials were broadcast. It was probably the second series when I was twelve, creeping downstairs complaining I could not sleep and hoping to catch a glimpse of the television. Disappointingly, I was sent back to bed. I'm sure classmates at school had seen it. Maybe that fired my ongoing love of sci-fi movies and my regret of not seeing these ground breaking programmes at the time. I could not resist including the extract from the article below.
In spite of the television serials' popularity, the Quatermass Hammer films had an even more impactful influence on culture, especially abroad and in the US. "The likes of Stephen King, Joe Dante, John Landis and Dan O'Bannon grew up watching them and adored them," Murray suggests. "There's what looks suspiciously like a nod to the Quatermass and the Pit film at the climax of Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). In Mexico, Guillermo del Toro was first exposed to Nigel Kneale though the Quatermass films too."
The cornerstone of Quatermass's unique sci-fi vision was its quintessential Englishness. It depicted a simultaneously recognisable and surreally menacing version of the country in the post-war period, complete with copious "Keep Out" signs, villages that weren't really villages, and Tube stations haunted by devilish Martian insects. "He took that feeling of an England that had become strange to itself and managed to turn it into a kind of mode, so people could name the unease that they felt in the 1950s," says writer and broadcaster Matthew Sweet, an ardent fan of Kneale's work. "And that name was Quatermass."
This sense of a society askew was felt strongly in the second instalment, Quatermass II. It follows the professor (now played by John Robinson) investigating an alien presence in the town of Winnerden Flats. Meteorites are falling, and the local research laboratory has grown to such a suspiciously large size that the original town has been flattened for the prefabs for its many zombie-like workers. People are also showing unusual marks on their hands and are behaving increasingly oddly. Just what is growing in the great vats of the research laboratories?
"Quatermass lifts the stone and shows what's crawling underneath the culture we occupy," suggests Sweet. "It makes England a fit place for aliens to visit. I think Kneale, as well as John Wyndham, made England a suitable environment for them to transform." Indeed, Kneale's aliens often seem strangely at home in their new surroundings, ready to transform shabby 1950s England for their own unspeakable purposes.
The third serial, Quatermass and the Pit, provided an even more off-kilter perspective on everyday life in 1950s Britain. The aliens in this series have found their way to England again, but this time there's a unique twist: the Martians, it transpires, might have been on Earth before us and, perhaps, it is we who are the aliens. Broadcast in 1958, the influence of Kneale's third instalment can be seen in a great deal of television to come, in particular upon Doctor Who's 1970s series starring Jon Pertwee, which were earthbound and dealt with similar narratives of para-military organisations protecting Britain from alien foes.
The excavation of a Martian craft from under a Tube station by Quatermass (now played by André Morell) and his team is one thing. But the way Kneale frames the implications of this is where his skill and influence as a writer really come to the fore. In his hands, the perception of our place in the world is knocked out of joint as fantastical futurisms become haunted folklore.
Indeed, throughout Kneale's work, there's a general sense of the folkloric. His galactic evils may occasionally foreshadow fears over the coming Space Age, but they often simultaneously seem ancient and haunting. They may be ostensibly associated with other planets, but they are also found to be already embedded within our physical, and psychic, landscapes.
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