Quatermass and the Pit

Kim Newman

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781844577910
• eBook ISBN:
  9781838717674
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

While digging an extension to the London Underground Railway, workmen discover an object which might be an ancient Martian spaceship – and Professor Quatermass of the British Rocket Group investigates a mystery which prompts frightening revelations about the origins of humanity itself. Before 2001: A Space Odyssey and Doctor Who, Quatermass and the Pit was the paramount British science fiction saga in film and television. Kim Newman's fascinating study focuses on Roy Ward Baker's 1967 film, written by Quatermass creator Nigel Kneale for Hammer Films, but also looks at the origins of the Quatermass franchise in 1950s BBC serials and earlier films. Exploring the production and reception of the film and series, Newman assesses the lasting importance of this landmark franchise.

1 Contact Has Been Established

At 8.15 pm on Saturday, 18 July 1953, BBC-TV – the only channel available to members of the British public who owned what were still known as receiving sets – broadcast the first instalment of a new drama serial. Accompanied by the ominous opening of Holst’s ‘Mars, the Bringer of War’, seemingly handwritten titles emerged from chemical fog,⁷ letters oozing unpleasantly. The Quatermass Experiment… ‘a thriller for television in six parts by Nigel Kneale’ … Episode One ‘Contact Has Been Established’.

‘One morning, two hours after dawn, the first manned rocket in the history of the world takes off from the Tarooma range in Australia’, intones a narrator (Stewart Mortimer), as a missile rises vertically. This is stock footage of a captured German V-2 rocket launched from White Sands, New Mexico, in 1946; it returned the first film of the Earth from space.⁸ The episode was seen by 3.4 million viewers. Over the run, the audience increased. On 22 August, 5 million watched the finale, ‘State of Emergency’, holding their breaths during a tense four-and-a-half minute transmission break caused by a technical fault at the story’s moment of direst peril. By then, Quatermass had become a national institution.

Nigel Kneale was considerably more involved in the production than most TV writers then or now – to the extent of making and manipulating the tendril-covered garden glove that represents the monster in the climax. Rudolph Cartier recalled Kneale approached him with three Quatermass ideas. They settled on the back-from-space story as being most achievable within the limitations of live broadcast and a BBC budget.⁹ The teaming of a mystically inclined Briton with literary instincts and a cultivated Austro-Hungarian refugee was not without precedent. A certain Michael Powell-and-Emeric Pressburger vibe resonates throughout the Quatermass saga. The portrayal of problem-solving science yoked to political bureaucracy and military impatience in The Small Back Room (1949) is a precedent for the Professor’s official status. The feud between haunted, alcoholic bomb-disposal expert Sammy Rice (David Farrar) and a particularly tricky Nazi infernal device seems a specific influence on the V-weapon subplot (‘it could be a “Satan”’) of Quatermass and the Pit .¹⁰

The Quatermass Experiment was a quickly written fill-in for an unpromising summer slot; when the first episode aired, Kneale hadn’t yet finished writing the serial. In interviews, Kneale liked to portray the endeavour as more casual than it must have been. The easy option would have been to adapt someone else’s novel. Instead, he took the opportunity to write his first original teleplay.¹¹ He initially knew little, if anything, about rocketry, but must have at least talked with experts to authenticate the jargon. Occasional infodumps, reflecting the BBC’s Reithian educational remit, go into how pressure suits are put together or what ‘stage separation’ means. Some of this was done between writing and broadcast; the scripted flight is supposed to be ‘fifteen thousand miles’ into space, modified to a more credible ‘fifteen hundred’ on screen. Hammer’s Quatermass 2 has a credit thanking the British Interplanetary Society, whose sometime chairman was Arthur C. Clarke. It’s possible technical advice for the serials came from the BIS, which had been advocating space exploration since the 1930s; indeed, Quatermass’s Rocket Group could well be the British Interplanetary Society given resources to put theory into practice.

The serial, whether original or adapted, was a British television staple from the start of the medium, carried over from radio. Advertising-financed US television favoured theoretically unending series over finite serials, so the format didn’t really exist in America until the ‘miniseries’ was invented in the 1970s. In pre-production, Kneale’s space story was called The Unbegotten, suggesting gothic horror; Bring Something Back, his preferred title, was abandoned as too flippant. Settling on The Quatermass Experiment fixed the serial’s genre as science fiction, though billing it as ‘a thriller’ was calculated so as not to put off viewers accustomed to usual Saturday evening fare.¹² Conjoining an odd, distinctive name with ‘experiment’ evokes mad scientists from Frankenstein to Dr Moreau¹³ – foreshadowing, of course, that the outcome of Quatermass’s dispassionate scientific enquiry will be the creation of monsters. When Bram Stoker crossed out ‘Count Wampyr’, the provisional name of his villain, and wrote in ‘Dracula’, he elevated his novel to pop-culture immortality. Similarly, when Kneale found a name in the thin Q section of the London phone book, his fill-in serial became destined to lodge in the collective memory. ‘Quatermass’ is perfect: as strange as Frankenstein, yet as English as Middlemarch. Real-life rocketry pioneers, being Russians like Konstantin Tsiolkovsky or Germans like Wernher von Braun, had sinister, melodramatic foreign names. Von Braun, name-checked in the serials, was among the German scientists who created V-weapons for the Nazis then worked for the American or Russian space (and ballistic missile) programmes. One of the missing astronauts in The Quatermass Experiment is German-accented, bearded Dr Ludwig Reichenheim (Christopher Rhodes). Quatermass’s first name, Bernard, comes from Bernard Lovell, director of Jodrell Bank Observatory.

Quatermass is Director of the British Experimental Rocket Group (BERG). Against expectations, he is not an eccentric like Mr Cavor, creator of the anti-gravity spaceship in Wells’s The First Men in the Moon (1901), or Sidney Stratton (Alec Guinness), whose dirt-and-wear-resistant fibre has unintended consequences in The Man in the White Suit (1951). Quatermass’s sole affectation is a peculiarly natty spotted scarf worn with a regulation white laboratory coat. The era of lone researchers like Frankenstein (who creates a monster in his student digs) or Cavor (who builds a spaceship in his suburban workshop) is over; BERG is state-funded and committee-overseen. Reginald Tate, the first actor to take the part, sets the tone for subsequent portrayals: brusquely dedicated to his mission, yet mindful of the human costs. He stands and issues curt orders to seated subordinates as the rocket is brought down to Earth, conveniently near Wimbledon Common. He is wearily patient with Blaker (W. Thorp Devereaux), a civil servant to whom technical details have to be explained for the benefit of the audience. Kneale insists ‘my man was a creature with a conscience’¹⁴ and Tate’s Quatermass shows it early as he expresses self-doubt (‘Am I a charlatan?’). He considers the feelings of his assistant Judith (Isabel Dean), wife of astronaut Victor Carroon (Duncan Lamont), seemingly the sole survivor of the three-man crew. He is even sensitive enough to notice the Carroon marriage isn’t happy and understand the bind this puts her in when her husband becomes simultaneously a national hero, a murder suspect and a world-threatening alien menace.

The Quatermass Experiment (1953): Reginald Tate as Quatermass; The Quatermass Xperiment (1955): Brian Donlevy as Quatermass

Tate – who had a great many officers, editors and police inspectors on his CV – was cast in Quatermass II, but died suddenly while the second serial was in pre-production. His replacement was the glummer, pudding-faced John Robinson, who was reportedly unhappy with learning technical dialogue and stepping into someone else’s signature role. Robinson wasn’t available for the third serial.¹⁵ His replacement was Andre Morell, who had been shortlisted for the original serial and played the suave torturer O’Brien in Kneale and Cartier’s adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four (BBC, 1954). A subtler actor than Tate or Robinson, Morell plays Quatermass with a bow-tie and occasional flashes of humanising warmth and wit. The Quatermass Experiment went out when the BBC had a UK television monopoly; Quatermass II aired when the first few ITV companies were up and running, but before there was another network. By 1958, the BBC had to think about competition and Morell was a stronger draw. With Quatermass (The Quatermass Conclusion) – written for the BBC in 1973, produced by Euston Films for ITV in 1979 – an ‘international name’ was required for the Professor’s last hurrah. Sir John Mills’s Quatermass is shabbier, initially retired to the sidelines and embittered about the perceived failure of his life’s work. A footnote Quatermass is Jason Flemyng in The Quatermass Experiment (BBC4, 2005), directed by Sam Miller and adapted from Kneale’s script by producer Richard Fell; besides redoing a six-part serial for a two-hour slot (which it underran), this took on the unnecessary added complication of being broadcast live.

The widowed Quatermass is a father figure to his colleagues at the BERG, which gets renamed the British Rocket Group after the events of Experiment. In Quatermass II, one of his assistants is his daughter, Paula (Monica Grey); his prime motivation in Quatermass is to reunite with his granddaughter Hettie (Rebecca Saire).¹⁶ A problem with the 2005 remake is that a too-young Flemyng scarcely seems senior to his assistants (Mark Gatiss, David Tennant, Indira Varma) or lead astronaut (Andy Tiernan). Quatermass always has a touchy relationship with politicians, civil servants, military men and the media – though he gets on well with policemen. He needs others to facilitate his research, just as a television writer needs collaborators to turn a script into a programme, but worries about misappropriation and misrepresentation of his work. In Experiment, he has trouble within his team: second-in-command Paterson (Hugh Kelly) resents being passed over for the mission crew and takes his complaints to the press. It almost needn’t be said that Kneale and Cartier identified with Quatermass because, like everyone creative in the film and television industry, they had career-long woes with BBC (and ITV) bureaucrats, interfering politicians (questions were asked in the House about the horrors of Nineteen Eighty-Four), studio executives in the UK and Hollywood, budget-limiting accountants, actors who weren’t their first (or fiftieth) choices, and technical facilities unable to realise their ambitious visions.

Quatermass is a recognisable British type – the boffin. Christopher Frayling notes

the word ‘boffin’ caught on during the war of 1939–45, making scientists seem both friendly and effective, and it seems to have originated as a title conferred by RAF officers on a few radar scientists with wh...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Contact Has Been Established
• 2. ‘Hob’
• 3. Ringstone Round
• Notes
• Credits
• eCopyright