QUATERMASS
It's the last stand for the iconic Professor Quatermass - and there's anarchy in the UK. Robert fairclough Investigates
Remembering the time dear, dear Johnny Mills saved the planet from alien nasties. Deserved a second knighthood, frankly.
Thomas Nigel KNeale’s three 1950s BBC tV serials about rocket scientist Professor Bernard Quatermass were among the first examples of televised science fiction in Britain. over 60 years later, they remain some of the finest.
Between 1953 and 1958, audiences in the United Kingdom tuned in in their millions. in atmospheric black and white, viewers witnessed the dogged scientist confront a mutant parasite, alien infiltrators of the British establishment and, the trilogy’s finest moment, the paranormal legacy of martian experiments on humanity’s ancestors. testifying to the impact of Kneale’s professor, all three serials were made into successful movies by hammer Films.
Five years after the professor’s sole outing in colour in hammer’s Quatermass And The Pit and on the eve of the 15th anniversary of the first series, The Quatermass Experiment, in November 1972 there was an unexpected but welcome announcement in the Daily Mirror: “With the anniversary feeling around, i thought the BBC might be interested [in a new script],” Kneale was quoted as saying. “Quatermass will be a retired gentleman now, in his seventies. But not a dodderer. he’ll come back on a tV panel commenting on the first russian-american space spectacular. then things will start to happen…”
Despite this encouraging news, by summer 1973 the BBC had decided to drop Quatermass IV due to the prohibitive production costs involved in filming at stonehenge. Kneale also wryly observed that the story, featuring a world in the grip of social and political crisis, together with a wild youth cult called the Planet People, was “too gloomy” for the BBC.
the BBC retained the rights to Kneale’s scripts until 1975. By this time, a new style of television had emerged on the BBC’s rival channel, itV. euston Films, a subsidiary of thames television, had made it possible to make drama entirely on 16mm film – the cheaper cousin of 35mm, used mainly in the cinema – and the potential for filming entirely on location increased accordingly. itV’s big hit of 1975 was The Sweeney, which saw the london-based Flying squad pursuing criminals across real locations in Britain’s capital city. By 1978, euston’s ambitions and resources had expanded to the point where they were able to support a feature film-style production that would do justice to Kneale’s Quatermass IV scripts, an option they eagerly picked up after the writer’s BBC contract expired.
simply titled Quatermass, the itV series was made into four hour-long instalments and shot on 35mm so it could also be released as a cut-down feature film version – The Quatermass Conclusion. reflecting the global market, international names of the time such as John mills – as Quatermass – simon macCorkindale (astronomer Joe Kapp) and Barbara Kellerman (his archaeologist wife) headed up the cast.
“i didn’t have much of a track record with movies,” director Piers haggard tells SFX. “at that point, i’d only done Wedding Night and The Blood On Satan’s Claw; now people really love that, but at that point it hadn’t attracted a lot of attention. i was really asked to do Quatermass because of my work on Dennis Potter’s Pennies From Heaven [BBC, 1978]. i wasn’t one of the euston Films school of directors, and Pennies From Heaven was a big epic with a lot of different resonances and layers. maybe euston thought an approach like that was appropriate for a big project like Quatermass.
“the script had been around for quite a while: by the time we did it, the wandering hippy thing was getting a little bit dated. looking at it now, you could see the Planet People as punk rockers, but that’s because we now have some hindsight.”
Quatermass was one of the first programmes to be transmitted after a strike by technicians suspended itV transmissions between august and october 1979. the industrial unrest of the