QUATERMASS
70 YEARS AGO A TV CLASSIC CHILLED THE NATION – AND THAT WAS JUST THE BEGINNING. PREPARE TO FACE THE QUATERMASS PHENOMENON…
1953 THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT(TV)
The name was everything. Commissioned to write a new Saturday night serial, Nigel Kneale nearly christened his hero Professor Charlton – but that was too mundane for the unsettling tale he had in mind. Scouring the London telephone directory the BBC staff writer pounced on Quatermass.
The surname belonged to an East End fruit seller, but it held a distinct magic: three syllables that suggested units of scientific measurement (quarter, mass) but in combination had a queasy, unknowable power, hinting at unearthly biologies. Fitting for a rational hero confronting alien forces – and perfect for a TV drama set to bring a shudder of the uncanny to post-war Britain. With one curious, inexplicable word, Quatermass defined itself.
The world was still four years away from the launch of Sputnik, the triumph of the Soviet space program, but Kneale’s story was already electrified by the paranoia around mankind’s next frontier. “It was… something that was just beginning to be talked about in sensible, serious newspapers,” he recalled. In fact The Quatermass Experiment would be the first original science fiction production expressly written for an adult audience in Britain.
The six-part serial sees Professor Bernard Quatermass investigate the fate of the first manned rocket into space. The craft crashes back to London, its sole survivor mutating into a monstrous extraterrestrial lifeform. Reginald Tate was cast as the pioneering boffin, head of the British Experimental Rocket Group, and defined the character as a principled moral force. “He was troubled and bothered and anxious and very energetic at the same time,” Kneale remembered. “Absolutely super.”
Director Rudolph Cartier, a visionary Austrian émigré, also proved a perfect match for such ambitious storytelling. “I realised he was a man who never took no for an answer,” said Kneale. Transmitted live from Alexandra Palace, hobbled by cameras that were temperamental relics of the 1930s, the production demanded all of Cartier’s steel. As Kneale recalled, “It was horrendous. If any special effects were required you had to take a chance that they would work on the screen. There was little room for error.” Kneale himself manipulated the creature at the story’s climax, his hands thrust into vegetation-smothered rubber gloves that squirmed and writhed inside a miniature Westminster Abbey.
Broadcast the month after the Queen’s Coronation – another primal TV event climaxing at the Abbey – The Quatermass Experiment is now remembered as a cultural phenomenon that emptied the streets of Britain. In 1979, however, Kneale pointed to some less-than-stellar conte
