Quatermass and the Pit is a British television science-fiction serial, the third of four in the famous Quatermass series by writer Nigel Kneale. It was originally broadcast by the BBC over the winter of 1958–59. Generally regarded by critics and fans as the most successful of the Quatermass serials, it was the last one to be produced by the BBC in the 1950s, and the last television outing of the character anywhere for twenty years. In a 2000 poll of industry professionals conducted by the British Film Institute, it was voted at number seventy-five in a list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes.
Background
After the success of the two previous Quatermass serials — The Quatermass Experiment (1953) and Quatermass II (1955) — the BBC were more than willing for Kneale, now a freelance writer and not on the BBC staff, to pen a third instalment in the series. Since Quatermass II Kneale had been working mostly in film, penning the screenplay adaptations of his own television serials The Creature (as The Abominable Snowman) and Quatermass II (as Quatermass 2), and John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger. For Quatermass and the Pit, he was reunited once again with director Rudolph Cartier, who had helmed the previous two Quatermass serials as well as many other Kneale scripts for the BBC. It was to be the final collaboration between the two, who had formed the most successful writer/director partnership in British television of the 1950s.
Quatermass and the Pit built on the already popular status of the Quatermass character and created a story that enthralled much of the television-watching public: for many years it was stated that the final episode famously "emptied the pubs" as enthusiastic viewers rushed home to watch. It helped to popularise the science-fiction genre on television in the UK, and make it a respectable and adult format. The serial is also notable for the distinctive electronic wailing noise that accompanies alien phenomena, which was created by the then newly-formed BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
As with the previous two serials and in common with most other television drama of the day, Quatermass and the Pit was transmitted live, from the BBC's Lime Grove Studios in London. However, it also had a large amount of pre-filming work carried out on external location and, for complex sequences not easily achievable in the confines of a live television studio, at Ealing Studios. For these filmed sequences, Cartier employed the services of the BBC's experienced film cameraman A. A. Englander, who was at the time one of the top film cameramen working in the UK. As usual, the pre-filmed sequences would be played into the live transmission as and where required.
The serial was broadcast over six Saturday evenings from December 22 1958 to January 26 1959. Although all six episodes — The Halfmen, The Ghosts, Imps and Demons, The Enchanted, The Wild Hunt and Hob — were written as half-hour instalments, each was given a thirty-five minute timeslot due to the overruns most of the episodes of the previous two Quatermass serials had gone into. All six episodes were scheduled in an 8.00–8.35pm timeslot.
As each episode was being transmitted it was telerecorded onto 35mm film, and these telerecordings proved to be of exceptionally good quality. Keen to take an example of what it felt to be an important piece of television, the British Film Institute took prints of these telerecordings, all of which survive in the BBC's archives. In 1960, an edited compilation version was prepared and screened by the BBC, broadcast in two instalments as Part One (January 2 1960, 8.40–10.10pm) and Part Two (January 9 1960, 8.45–10.15pm). This compilation version also survives in the BBC's archives, and is very important because the scenes originally shot on film were removed from it and replaced with the corresponding original film sequences, meaning that these pre-filmed inserts survive in excellent quality for potential re-mastering of the story.
In November 1986 episode three, Imps and Demons, was selected by the BBC for transmission as part of their fiftieth anniversary of television season, although Kneale felt the broadcast of a single episode on its own to be a waste of time. He did, however, assist BBC Video with the preparation of a 178-minute two-part compilation version of the serial, which was released on VHS in 1987 — the only one of the original 1950s Quatermass serials to have seen commercial release to date. In 1995 this video was re-released by independent budget label Revelation, who also put out a DVD version of the same compilation in 1999. Fans are still hoping for a remastered and uncut release.
Plot
A pre-human skull is discovered while building works are taking place in the fictional Hobbs Lane — formerly Hob's Lane, from an old name for the Devil. In the film version the location of the building works is moved to the also fictional 'Hobbs End' tube station. The skull is found to be many thousands of years old and it has an unusually large brain area. Later, something that looks like a missile is unearthed. Military experts believe that it is a leftover from the war, some experimental Nazi V-weapon. As they continue to dig, the sheer size of the object, and its evidence of far advanced technology (the exterior shell is so hard that diamond drills make no impression) rules this out. Furthermore, pentagrams are painted on its sides. Professor Bernard Quatermass is called in to investigate; he is an expert on matters of unusual scientific background. (In fact he has just helped a friend invent a helmet device that, when worn, records mental imagery so they it can be viewed by others.)
While investigation of the ship is going on, one of the workers on the dig reports seeing ghostly figures walking through walls at a local hotel. A medical professional examines him but finds nothing wrong with him. Meanwhile Quatermass researches the history of the town to reveal reports of witchcraft and paranormal activity dating back thousands of years, including sightings of ghosts walking through walls and of poltergeist happenings (objects moving on their own.): this had been responsible for the bad reputation of the area and its name of 'Hob End'.
Finally the ship is opened and inside are found the remains of insect-like aliens resembling a kind of humanoid praying mantis with stubby antennae on their heads resembling horns. Other remains are found: skeletons of near-human beings with the unusually large brain areas in the skull.
Things get upsetting when some of the military personnel that get close to the craft begin to react oddly; they start to scream hysterically and walk around in strange patterns. Some report seeing ghosts walking through the walls of the ship. Further, a woman goes on board the vessel and witnesses a worker knocked unconscious by his own drill, which is floating erratically in the air around him.
Quatermass begins to suspect that somehow a psychic projection of these beings has remained behind on the ship and is being seen by certain people who come in contact with it. However, since they don't remember what they are seeing, Quatermass has a plan. They will use his brain-image capturing device on someone and send them into the ship. They do so, and the man emerges screaming hysterically and walking awkwardly, as others have.
When they review the tape a shocking revelation surfaces. This alien race had a kind of group intelligence, and something they called "The Wild Hunt." Every year members of their society who had developed more impressive abilities (essentially the "fittest") would literally hunt down and destroy the misfit and deviant amongst them. What people are seeing when they come in contact with the ship is a remembrance through the eyes of one of these aliens as he hunts down and blows up the heads of his own people.
Quatermass begins to have a working theory on what is going on. He believes that in its most primitive phase mankind was visited by this race. Some humans were taken away and genetically altered to have special abilities like telepathy, telekinesis and such. They were then brought back to Earth — the buried artifact was one of the return ships that had crashed. The idea was that, with their home world dying, the aliens had tried to make over our ancestors to have minds and abilities like theirs, created in their own mental image, but with a bodily form adapted to earth.
However, the plan was a partial failure: the aliens died out before completing their work, and as the human race bred and further evolved, only about half of it maintained these abilities, and they only surfaced sporadically. For centuries, the buried ship itself had been occasionally triggering these dormant abilities. This would explain the reports of poltergeists (people were unknowingly using their own telekinesis to move objects around them.) It would also explain a history of witchcraft and why people attributed it to a being they identified as the devil; the pentagram would have been the symbol for this alien race.
However, as Quatermass realises, it becomes clear that if these implanted psychic powers survive in the human race, there could also still be ingrained in us a compulsion to enact this "wild hunt." Quatermass is concerned that the ship will trigger that inclination and that we will begin to slaughter our own people. The powers over him ignore his warnings: the media coverage arrives, and the power cables that string into the excavation fully activates the ship for the first time, which starts drawing upon this convenient energy source, and awakening the ancient racial programming.
Those people of London in whom the alien admixture remains strong fall under the ship's influence; they merge into a group mind and begin a telekinetic mass murder of those without the alien genes, an "ethnic cleansing" of those that the alien race mind considers impure and weak. The alien ship melts and a holographic image of a Martian "devil" floats in the sky above London. Quatermass himself almost succumbs to the mass psychosis, but eventually comes to his senses and realises that the floating image is the source of the psychosis and psi powers. Only by shorting out the power can the madness be stopped; drawing on legends of demons and their aversion to iron, a building crane is swivelled into the image, shorting out its energies and restoring its victims to shocked and dazed normality.
Cast and crew
For the third time in as many serials, the lead role of Professor Bernard Quatermass was played by a different actor, this time the suave and dignified André Morell. The original Quatermass actor, Reginald Tate, had died quite suddenly shortly before production of the second serial, necessitating a hasty replacement with John Robinson, who neither Cartier nor Kneale were ever completely happy with. For Quatermass and the Pit, with more time to consider their options, they chose Morell, who had previously appeared as O'Brien in their famous 1954 adaptation of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Roney was played by Canadian actor Cec Linder, possibly with an eye on the potential of selling the serial to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Linder later appeared in Lolita (1962), and in the James Bond film Goldfinger (1964) as the CIA agent Felix Leiter.
John Stratton played Captain Potter, Anthony Bushell Colonel Breen and Christine Finn appeared as Barbara Judd. For the first time, Kneale used a character from a previous serial other than Quatermass himself: the journalist James Fullalove from The Quatermass Experiment, although like Quatermass he changed actor, with Brian Worth replacing Paul Whitsun-Jones.
Nigel Kneale went on to continue his successful career writing for film and television, returning to the Quatermass character a final time with Quatermass in 1979 for the BBC's rival, the ITV network. He also penned feature films such as The Entertainer (1960 — based on another John Osborne play) and The First Men in the Moon (1964, from the novel by H.G. Wells).
Rudolph Cartier continued as an in-house director for the BBC, helming many more highly successful productions such as the opera Otello (1959), Anna Karenina (1961, starring Sean Connery) and Lee Oswald: Assassin (1965). He died in 1994, at the age of ninety.
Film and sequels
As with the previous two Quatermass serials, the rights to adapt Quatermass and the Pit for the cinema were purchased by Hammer Films, although it was until 1967 before the film was made. They kept the same title, although in the United States the film was known as Five Million Years to Earth, and Kneale adapted his own script, with Scottish actor Andrew Keir starring as Quatermass. The film, although not particularly commercially successful, is regarded as the most faithful Quatermass cinema adaptation, and a very good film in its own right.
The scripts of Quatermass and the Pit were released by Penguin Books in 1959, as part of the series with script books of the previous two serials. Twenty years later in 1979 these were re-released by Arrow Books to coincide with the fourth and final Quatermass serial, Quatermass, which was then being transmitted on ITV.
This final serial starred John Mills, and proved to be the last screen outing for the character, bringing his story to a close. However, in 1996 Kneale penned a radio series entitled The Quatermass Memoirs for BBC Radio 3, which mixed a factual account of the character's history with a fictional strand of Quatermass writing his memoirs. Quatermass was again played by Andrew Keir for this production.
The 1971 Doctor Who serial The Dæmons features plot elements which bear remarkable similarities to Quatermass and the Pit, including an extraterrestrial race that was the basis for legends of demons and magic being explained as psychokinetic force. In a parallel to Hobbs Lane, the setting of The Dæmons is a village named Devil's End.
Parody
The 1959 Goon Show episode The Scarlet Capsule, written by Spike Milligan, is a parody of the BBC serial, complete with the original Radiophonic wail. Fans regard it as one of the best episodes.
Some workmen employed by Government's Dig Up the Roads Plan for Congesting Traffic Scheme, while working as an alternative to striking, unearth an ancient skull ("Must be a woman...the mouth's open.") Professor Ned Quartermess, a.k.a. Neddie Seagoon (Harry Secombe), sceptical of claims that the remains might be unexploded German skulls from World War II, discovers a fossilized Irish stew, and then uncovers a strange scarlet capsule containing the fossilized remains of three serge suits and the bones of a bowler hat. Several people are struck down by flying Irish stews, and Quartermess becomes convinced there is a poltergeist at work, and starts evacuating the local population — including Peter Sellers as a remarkably convincing woman whose seductive voice causes the script to be heavily censored.
Eventually the scheming Hercules Grytpype-Thynne (Sellers) persuades Quartermess to blow up the capsule — with his sidekick Count Jim Moriarty (Milligan), whose life he has coincidentally insured for a large sum, tied up inside. But the blast blows everyone up — at least until the next episode — and a BBC announcer (Andrew Timothy ) reports that the capsule was actually a London Underground train containing three striking Tube workers that had been shunted into a siding and forgotten. "Not a very good ending, but at least it's tidy, don't you think?" He is then struck down by an Irish stew.
The series was also parodied by the popular BBC television comedy series Censored page, in an episode entitled The Horror Serial, transmitted the week following the final episode. In it, Hancock has just finished watching Hob on the television, and becomes convinced that there is a crashed Martian space ship buried at the end of his garden. Sadly, this episode no longer exists in the BBC's archives.
External links
- The Quatermass Home Page — Fan Site http://www.geocities.com/TelevisionCity/8504/qhome.htm
- IMDb page http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051305/
- BBC site — I Love Quatermass http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/ilove/tv/quatermass/
Last updated: 05-03-2005 17:50:55
