British Science Fiction Television: A Hitchhiker's Guide (Popular TV Genres)

BRITISH SCIENCE FICTIOOJ TELEUISIOTU A HITCHHIKER'S S U I D E

• B V JOHfll R. C O O K AI"UD P E T E R LAJRIEHT

British science fiction television A hitchhiker's guide

E D I T E D BY J O H N R. C O O K A N D P E T E R W R I G H T

I.B.TAURIS LONDON - NEW YOHK^

Published in 2006 by I.B.Tauris & C o . L t d 6 Salem R d , L o n d o n W 2 4BU 175 Fifth A v e n u e , N e w Y o r k N Y 1 0 0 1 0 www.ibtauris.com I n the United States and C a n a d a distributed by Palgrave Macmillan, a division o f St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth A v e n u e , N e w Y o r k ,

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A full C I P record for this b o o k is available from the British Library A full C I P record for this b o o k is available from the Library o f Congress Library o f C o n g r e s s catalog card: available T y p e s e t in M o n o t y p e G a r a m o n d by illuminati, G r o s m o n t , www.illuminatibooks.co.uk Printed and b o u n d in G r e a t Britain by M P G B o o k s L t d , B o d m i n , Cornwall

Contents

Acknowledgements I

'Futures past': an introduction to and brief survey of British science fiction television J O H N R. C O O K A N D P E T E R

1

Quatermass JAMES

3

WRIGHT

and the origins of British television sf

CHAPMAN

Tardis at the O K C o r r a l : Doctor Who and the U S A NICHOLAS J. CULL

4

Countering the counterculture: The Prisoner

and the 1960s

SUE SHORT 5

T h e age of Aquarius: Utopia and anti-utopia in late 1960s' and early 1970s' British science fiction television J O H N R. C O O K

6

T h e man w h o made Thunderbirds:

an interview with G e r r y

Anderson NICHOLAS J. CULL 7

Everyday life in the post-catastrophe future: Terry Nation's Survivors ANDY SAWYER

8

T V docudrama and the nuclear subject: The War The Day After

and

Game,

Threads

DAVID S E E D 9

154

Resist the host: 8/oke's 7 - a v e r y British future UNA McCORMACK

10

174

Echoes of discontent: Conservative politics and Sapphire

and

Steel

PETER WRIGHT 11

192

Counterpointing the surrealism of the underlying metaphor in The Hitchhiker's

Guide

to the

Galaxy

M.J. S I M P S O N 12

219

' O K , homeboys, let's posse!' Masculine anxiety, gender, race and class in Red

Dwarf

ELYCE R A E HELFORD 13

240

British apocalypses n o w - or then? The Invasion:

Earth

CATRIONA

and The Last MILLER

Uninvited,

Train 263

Further reading

283

N o t e s on contributors

287

Index

290

Acknowledgements

We would both like to thank Philippa Brewster, our editor at L B . Tauris, for agreeing to take on this project and for sticking with it and sup­ porting it through all the various stages o f its development. Special thanks in this regard must also g o to J a m e s C h a p m a n , Series E d i t o r as well as one of the sterling contributors to this collection, for seeing the merits o f the project at the very outset and for encouraging us to submit it to Tauris as part o f the 'Popular Television G e n r e s ' series. His support throughout has been invaluable. Another contributor to this volume to w h o m w e both owe a special debt o f thanks is Professor Nicholas J . Cull for his very kind offer to us of publication o f his 2003 interview with G e r r y A n d e r s o n . A s evidenced by his contributions to this volume, N i c k has been a very enthusiastic supporter o f this project throughout, even to the extent of inviting one o f the editors (John R. C o o k ) to join him for lunch with A n d e r s o n during his 2003 'Visions o f the Future' conference at the University o f Leicester, at which A n d e r s o n was an invited guest. His kindness as well as enthusiasm both for the subject o f T V science fiction and this b o o k have been truly inspirational. In addition to the above, J o h n R. C o o k would particularly like to thank all his friends, family and colleagues w h o have helped (knowingly or unknowingly) in the process o f putting this collection together, including those colleagues and students at his current university, G l a s g o w Caledonian University, and those hitherto at D e Montfort

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University, Leicester, where he taught a module on 'Science Fiction Television' in the late 1990s whence the original spark for this volume came. A m o n g s t all these, particular thanks to Ian (I.Q.) Hunter o f D e

Montfort, w h o edited British Science Fiction Cinema (Routledge, 1999) through which he and Peter Wright first made contact and came to formulate this current project, as well as to D r Catriona Miller of G l a s g o w Caledonian University, w h o s e role as editorial assistant was invaluable to this v o l u m e during the final stages o f its preparation. Peter Wright w o u l d also like to thank Catriona Miller for her above role, in addition to Professor Alastair M c C u l l o c h at E d g e Hill College o f Higher Education for supporting his research for the book. T h a n k s are especially also due from him to J e n n i Woodward, to w h o m he dedicates his w o r k on the book. Finally, photographic illustrations were provided by B F I Stills, Posters and D e s i g n s and the B B C Photographic Library. Our thanks to S i m o n e Potter o f B F I Stills and Tariq Hussain o f the B B C P h o t o ­ graphic Library for their help and research. Our acknowledgements to the copyright holders o f the stills. While every reasonable effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions, w e invite the parties concerned to contact the publishers in the event o f any oversight o r incorrect

attribution.

I 'Futures past': an introduction to and brief survey of British science fiction television JOHN

R. C O O K A N D P E T E R

WRIGHT

A s this volume hopes to illustrate in abundance, British science fiction (or sf) television is a fascinating, if under-researched, area o f media and cultural criticism. T o o often it has been dismissed as laughably cheap in comparison to bigger-budget American rivals such as the various series o f the Star Trek franchise ( N B C , 1966—69; 1 9 8 7 - 2 0 0 5 ) , or severely wanting in terms o f its quality o f aspiration when regarded alongside sf cinema on the one hand and sf literature on the other. There is, however, a sizeable sf fan community around the world that cherishes British science fiction television and its distinctive contribution to envisioning and re-imagining the future in the many forms that may take. O n e can find evidence o f this community's considerable energy and voracious appetite in the pages o f science fiction and cult T V magazines, including Starburst (1977—), TV Zone ( 1 9 8 9 - ) and Cult Times (1995—), not to mention the cornucopia o f Internet websites devoted to particular British sf T V series that are still genuinely loved by their adherents, years after their original broadcasts have ended.

1

Within the academy, w h e n c e most o f the contributors volume originate, there has, in the past, been a certain

to this

sniffiness

towards British science fiction television. T h e exponential growth of media and cultural studies in universities and colleges has legiti­ mised the study o f film and television as an academic discipline, and science fiction studies has also consolidated itself as part o f

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literary or media-related academic programmes. B u t science fiction T V has perhaps too often been a neglected cousin, falling between the dense, ideas-laden creation o f alternative worlds characteristic of literary sf and the big-budget, special-effects-laden 'sci-fi' cinema of spectacle that in many ways has n o w become the dominant template for commercial movie-making. A m o n g dedicated scholars o f science fiction, the differing attitudes are perhaps best encapsulated by differ­ ences in nomenclature: the term 'sf ' being traditionally reserved for 'serious' forms such as the literary science fiction novel, in contrast to the popular generic label 'sci-fi', from which there has in the past been considerable distancing among science fiction critical circles on account o f its ascribed connotations o f pulp commercialised mass product, unworthy o f serious cultural attention. Happily, such attitudes are changing and one o f the aims o f this b o o k is to build a constructive bridge between the academic and the fan communities in terms o f helping to legitimise science fiction television as a worthy object o f sustained critical study and to do so in a way that will hopefully be accessible and o f interest to scholars and aficionados alike. In this regard, British Science Fiction Television sees itself as an informal companion to British Science Fiction Cinema (Routledge, 1999) — an earlier collection o f academic essays that tried to rescue British sf cinema from the shadow o f its dominant Holly­ w o o d counterpart and to which a number o f writers in this current volume, including its two editors, made contributions.

2

T h e r e have,

of course, been other scholarly, critical works which have considered science fiction television before, though these have tended to focus o n particular iconic series rather than offering a general national survey, or, as in the case, for example, o f J o h n Tulloch and Henry

Jenkins's Science Fiction Television Audiences: Watching Star Trek and Doctor Who (Routledge, 1995), they have engaged in a cross-cultural analysis concerned with the reception practices o f particular sf T V fan com­ 3

munities. B y contrast, the preoccupation o f this volume is less with the study o f audiences and more with critical consideration o f the texts themselves and h o w these might help illuminate wider social, political and cultural contexts exclusively in relation to Britain and notions o f 'Britishness'. T h i s is the value, w e hope, o f such a volume to the wider media and cultural community in terms o f both critics and historians, since

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it is our contention that analysis of past 'visions o f the future' can very much help us to understand the preoccupations, hopes and fears of the society and culture which produced them at particular points in time; perhaps more potently than analysis o f any other equivalent cultural form can do. T h r o u g h o u t its history, British science fiction television, being unable to afford the big-budget special effects o f its cinema counterpart, was ideas-led, though on the level o f plot, character and situation rather than having the luxury o f detailed descriptive re-creations o f alternative worlds axiomatic o f literary sf. Its plots often functioned as metaphors or allegories, reflecting wider social and cultural preoccupations at the time of their production, particularly political tensions, or anxieties about the effects o f new technology. Analysis o f these 'futures past' thus offers us a fascinating w i n d o w on to British society and culture as seen at different points in its recent history. Because o f its displacement o f social, political and technological concerns on to an outlandish, imaginative plane, British science fiction T V could often be more freely truthful about those concerns than any number o f news broadcasts or current affairs analyses of the period could ever be, precisely because o f the very indirectness o f its metaphorical approach. British science fiction creators were helped in this regard by the nature o f the T V medium itself. Particularly in its early days, the crabbed conditions o f viewing meant that in stark contrast to the public spectacle o f the cinema screen, television was very much a private medium o f domestic intimacy. S f T V practitioners were able to reach right inside the home, communicating powerful messages and where necessary manipulating audiences' fears, because programmes were watched by viewers in their o w n private space with all their public defences d o w n and so in that sense they became personal. This, in turn, may account for w h y numerous British science fiction television shows have b e c o m e so iconic, remembered and celebrated years after they originally ended. Television is inextricably bound up with our own personal history and individual programmes can evoke a tremendous nostalgia. While the 'terrors' sparked by particular shows may rapidly fade, audiences still feel affection for them because they grew up with them, to such an extent that these 'visions o f the future' paradoxically b e c o m e a w i n d o w not on to the future anymore but rather on to their own past, in a manner not entirely dissimilar to

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the way in which w e have already suggested such texts can be used by cultural analysts. A t the same time, this does not explain w h y British science fiction television has proved so culturally exportable. While popular indig­ enous T V drama, such as crime series and soap opera, seldom has much impact overseas, particularly in the United States, British science fiction television is different. Partly this may be just a symptom of a global audience appetite for science fiction and fantasy o f all kinds and the intense fan interest these genres especially attract. Shows like Doctor Who ( B B C TV, 1 9 6 3 - 8 9 ; 1996; 2 0 0 5 - ) and The Prisoner ( I T C , 1967—68), which have sold around the world and spawned international fan followings and conventions, also, however, seem to be offering something more, to which overseas audiences are responding. C o m ­ parison with Star Trek is instructive here: as Nicholas J . Cull argues in this volume in his essay examining Doctor Who's complex relationship with the United States, the voyages o f the Starship Enterprise in the 1960s were, in many ways, 'expansionist; integrating and co-ordinating newly discovered worlds into the inter-galactic federation' - in short, representing the forging o f a kind o f 'United States in space' in which 'Captain K i r k therefore seemed like an all-American hero' (see Nicholas J . Cull's chapter, 'Tardis at the O K Corral'). British sf T V was different. While America was assured o f its leadership role in the emerging space race and could look with confi­ dence to the stars as an extension o f the Utopian frontier possibilities of

the American D r e a m , Britain was having to cope anxiously in

the same period with the loss o f empire and general decline as a world power. T h u s the notion o f the British in space was not only a depressing impossibility but an outright absurdity. S o m e o f the basic differences in character between British and U S science fiction T V may be traceable to this: where archetypal U S series like Star Trek often confronted the future with a sense of gung-ho optimism, British equivalents were more prone to view it with pessimism, anxiety or, especially later with such shows as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ( B B C T V , 1 9 8 1 ) and Red Dwarf ( B B C TV, 1 9 8 8 - 9 9 ) , an alternative response o f absurdist humour; laughter rather than despair perhaps being the preferable long-term survival option in such circumstances. In U S science fiction TV, space was frequently shown to be a conquest of

noble courage and a feat o f collective national enterprise; in

COOK

AND

WRIGHT

Britain, by stark contrast, it was more often the realm o f whimsical individual eccentrics which, as with the Victorian frock-coated owner of the Tardis in Doctor Who, was less about boldly going into the future than using g o o d old-fashioned British invention and ingenuity to step back in time. Hence British T V exported to global audiences a more sceptical, perhaps even more 'realistic', view o f the science fiction future than American equivalents could traditionally provide, and this manifested itself by way either o f ironic humour and whimsical eccentricity, or frequendy o f something altogether more dark and despairing. Certainly, as w e shall see evidenced in this volume, there is an under­ lying pessimism to much British T V sf — many o f the fictions are about national catastrophe or future political nightmare, and in this they stand in a proud tradition o f British anti-utopian writing that includes such iconic texts as A l d o u s Huxley's Brave New World (1932) and G e o r g e Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). This darker, more 'political' vision can be seen reflected if w e now trace, briefly, the history and development o f science fiction on British television, concentrating in particular on some o f the key texts that individual contributors discuss in their essays. T h e foundations for British sf T V ' s political content were laid on 1 1 February 1938 when B B C T V broadcast a truncated adaptation o f Czech writer Carel K a p e k ' s stage play RUR (1920). This was the first ever piece of British science fiction television. T h e B B C had been running a regular scheduled television service from Alexandra Palace since 2 N o v e m b e r 1936, and early T V drama output included adapta­ tions from stage plays. M o s t significantly for the future development of British T V science fiction, RUR was a dark parable — it dealt with themes o f dehumanisation, mass production and the abuse o f p o w e r in its depiction o f an android revolt which destroys humanity. If RUR was the first example of British science fiction TV, another was not broadcast until January 1 9 4 9 , when producer R o b e r t B a r r staged a live studio version o f H . G Wells's famous

1895 novel,

The Time Machine. This was a technically bold hour-long production, employing filmed inserts and back projection; it was the first occasion that British T V science fiction acknowledged the narrative potential o f 4

special effects. M o r e importantly, Barr's teleplay placed the figure of the scientist — the T i m e Traveller — in a central narrative position: a

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characteristic that would prove influential for the subsequent develop­ ment o f the genre on British television. The Time Machine's technical experimentation signalled the need for 'updating' what drama producer Rudolph Cartier perceived in 1952 5

as the 'stagy' qualities o f B B C drama. Cartier's fervour for narrative and stylistic innovation led to the wellspring o f much British T V sf: writer N i g e l Kneale's technically ambitious Quatermass trilogy o f the 1950s, which Cartier directed and produced. A s James Chapman shows in his chapter in this volume, the Quatermass trilogy, in its reflection of

contemporary British scientific endeavour, its post-war settings

and general C o l d War ambience, marks the true origins and indeed is arguably the epitome o f adult British science fiction on television. K n e a l e shared Cartier's impatience with theatre-like dramas that failed to exploit television's technical potential and with the sugges­ tion that television should foster a reassuringly intimate

relation­

ship between producer and consumer. While, as Chapman shows, the commissioning o f the first six-part Quatermass serial may have been the ad hoc result o f the B B C discovering a gap in its summer schedules, Kneale's decision to reach for science fiction served his creative ambitions well. Unhampered by the restrictions o f realism, sf could confront viewers with drama to challenge their perception of

a changing medium and a changing world. Hence the title o f

Kneale's first serial in the eventual trilogy, The Quatermass Experiment ( B B C T V , 1 9 5 3 ) , connotes both the subject matter and its creative approach to television drama. A s with Barr's earlier The Time Machine, in the Quatermass trilogy the scientist and the implications o f developments in science and new technology are placed centre stage. E a c h Quatermass drama is a variant on the theme o f an alien invasion uncovered by Professor Bernard Quatermass. E s c h e w i n g spectacle in favour o f invasion by stealth, K n e a l e captures the fear and suspicion prevalent in the 1950s. In an interview in 1996, he reflected on h o w

That decade has sometimes been called one of paranoia, which means abnormal, sick attitudes and irrational fears. I don't think it was irrational to be fearful at that time: there was a lot to be frightened of and stories like mine were a sort of controlled paranoia; inoculation against the real horrors. 6

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AND WRIGHT

7

While challenging the expectations o f television audiences, K n e a l e was also sublimating their fears o f earthly conflict. In the final drama of the 1950s trilogy, Quatermass and the Pit ( B B C T V , 1958—59), the scientist Quatermass discovers human aggression to be the conse­ quence o f evolutionary tampering by ancient, antagonistic Martians. 'If w e cannot control the inheritance within us,' he warns at the conclusion, 'this will be their [the Martians'] second dead planet.'

7

With this polemical speech, delivered straight to camera, the sublimatory strategies o f the earlier serials are stripped away so that the audience is directly engaged with the harsh political realities o f the 1950s. T h e fact it is spoken by a scientist, albeit a fictional one, gives the warning extra weight. B y the end o f the 1950s, the Quatermass trilogy had helped establish two o f the key characteristics o f British T V sf: the centrality o f the scientist and the reflection o f C o l d War fears. I n the 1960s, these remained fundamental but their dramatic presentation began to change, with much more o f an explicitly anti-establishment stance adopted. In 1 9 6 1 , for example, the seven-part B B C T V serial A for Andromeda was bold in its condemnation o f the political and military conscription o f science and scientists. Where such criticism had been implicit o r per­ sonalised in Quatermass, A for Andromeda showed a scientific community distrusted by and accountable to Whitehall. Written by astronomer Fred Hoyle and scripted by B B C producer J o h n Elliot, it pitted an idealistic scientist, J o h n Fleming (played by Peter Halliday), against a seemingly hostile alien supercomputer; a myopic British government; an unscrupulous multinational corporation; and a U S general intent on selfishly safeguarding 'aircraft-carrier Britain'. In so doing, A for Andromeda re-emphasised the moral and intellectual superiority o f scientists over politicians, first established in Quatermass? The notion o f a salvatory scientist as a politically and socially critical figure became fundamental to the characterisation o f perhaps the most famous renegade scientist in the history o f British T V sf: D o c t o r Who. A s Nicholas J . Cull comprehensively analyses in his chapter, 'Tardis at the O K Corral', Doctor Who was initiated by a Canadian, Sydney N e w m a n , w h o had experience o f working in U S commercial television, and the drama's genesis was profoundly influenced by America. A t the same time, however, it also reflected a very British liberal political and social agenda synonymous with the B B C ' s public

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service broadcasting ethos o f the period. T h e D o c t o r was a humanist scientist w h o occupied the neutral ground of 'tolerance' and 'balance', from which the misdoings o f the official and the powerful could be challenged and corrected, regardless o f which side o f the political and social spectrum these evils emanated from. T h e serial was thus a classic B B C public service form of 'balanced', 'responsible' entertainment. It had originally been conceived partly to assist the teaching o f science and history to children and with an avowed determination on B B C Head o f T V D r a m a Sydney Newman's part to avoid what he dismissed as 'the B u g E y e d Monster ( B E M ) S y n d r o m e ' o f pulp science fiction. A s Cull makes clear, however, it s o o n became apparent to the show's producers that the closer the D o c t o r came to B u g - E y e d Monsters and outer space adventures, the better the ratings. T h u s as Cull puts it: 'Doctor Who had found his niche as a British character living American B - m o v i e adventures.' A s Cull then goes on to demonstrate, it was the influence and dominance of A m e r i c a that would increasingly pull at the show in the decades to come, until, by the 1980s and 1990s, Doctor Who ended up as something o f 'a pawn in the transatlantic media game'. T h i s touches o n a very important point in relation to some o f the most successful British television science fiction: the need, often, for it to be internationally exportable, particularly to the lucrative United States market. E a c h o f the next three contributions in this collection discusses filmed series o f the 1960s that were made for commercial television and commissioned (all by famous T V mogul L e w Grade) with at least one eye o n p r o g r a m m e sales abroad. In 'Countering the Counterculture', Sue Short discusses perhaps the archetypal T V fantasy o f the 1960s: The Prisoner ( I T C , 1967—68). Created by and starring Patrick M c G o o h a n , this famous series united the paranoid uncertainties o f espionage narratives with sf's interest in psychology and altered states o f consciousness in order to produce a provoca­ tive political and philosophical discourse on the nature o f freedom. M c G o o h a n plays N u m b e r Six, an agent w h o resigns from the secret service but finds he cannot escape after he is abducted and taken to 'The Village': a bizarre amalgamation o f holiday resort and detention centre for the politically inconvenient. Here, he enters a battle of wits with a series o f administrators (called ' N u m b e r T w o ' ) , all of w h o m are determined to uncover w h y he resigned. T h e Prisoner's

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own quest, however, is to find N u m b e r O n e : the real manipulator of events and the mastermind behind ' T h e Village'. A s Short argues, the series stands in a problematical relationship to the 1960s' counterculture and the cultural ferment o f its times. O n one level, it seems to be the very epitome o f that decade's antiestablishment, libertarian values, yet there is an underlying social and cultural conservatism which at times leads creator M c G o o h a n to attack such values and their representatives, particularly in 'Fall Out', the surreal final episode ( 1 s t tx. ITV, 2 February 1968). Indeed the w h o l e series seems steeped in an ambiguity o f intention and motive and it is this which arguably continues to fuel its fascination for analysts and fans alike all around the world, since it leaves itself purposively open to all sorts o f differing readings and interpretations. A s such, it remains a uniquely challenging and ingenious series, dramatising the dilemmas involved in understanding and safeguarding one's indi­ viduality in a world o f increasing technological surveillance, together with the corresponding dangers o f political and social conformity this might bring. I f The Prisoner is therefore a classic example o f the segueing o f 9

British telefantasy with science fiction T V , it also seems to demon­ strate h o w some o f the most iconic texts we n o w associate as synony­ mous with the changes and challenges o f the 1960s are actually, if one analyses them, deeply ambiguous about and conflicted b y the enormous social and cultural upheavals w r o u g h t by that decade. This is a theme which J o h n R . C o o k takes up in his chapter, ' T h e A g e o f Aquarius: Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Late 1 9 6 0 s ' and Early 1970s' British Science Fiction Television'. Following o n from Short, Cook's focus is firmly o n h o w the hopes and ideals o f the late 1960s' 'Aquarian' counterculture were reflected and mediated across a number o f key British sf T V texts o f the period. As we have seen, British science fiction television tends not to d o optimism very well, but in the late 1960s and early 1970s as society started to liberalise and individuals began to experience a greater sense o f freedom and 'permissiveness' in their o w n personal lives, this was o n e period when it could dare to dream with s o m e sense o f genuine hope. S f T V thus became a natural vehicle for mediating some o f the Utopian dreams o f the 1960s o f a better future. It was, C o o k argues, the young w h o were the principal locus o f these hopes

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and w h o were seen as at the vanguard of social change. Hence it was perhaps not surprising that science fiction television aimed at children was often where the expression of Utopian sentiments during this period were at their most pronounced. C o o k traces the spirit o f utopianism across a number o f diverse children's sf texts such as Joe 90 (ITV, 1968—69) and T h a m e s T V ' s The Tomorrow People (ITV, 1973—79). H e also considers its more adult variation in what he labels 'the veritable sexual playground' o f the technological Utopian future presented by UFO (Century 21 for I T C , 1969—70): the first attempt by producer G e r r y Anderson's company, Century 2 1 , to break away from making science fiction puppet series for children and to m o v e into live-action production for a more adult audience; an effort that met with only mixed results. Yet while com­ mercial television, with eyes firmly fixed on international programme sales, was selling dreams of a bright, 'permissive' future of gadgets and girls to a mass audience, Quatermass writer Nigel Kneale was using the greater experimental freedoms o f the single television play at the B B C to present a very different vision of the implications of the 'permissive society'. Like M c G o o h a n with The Prisoner, his was much more o f a sceptical attitude. His 1968 T V play The Year of the Sex Olympics was the w o r m in the bud o f late 1960s' utopianism in the sense that he extrapolated the logic o f a future Aquarian world o f complete liberty, much vaunted by the counterculture at the time, and showed h o w the removal o f all restrictions might create the very antithesis o f the promised freedoms. Kneale's resulting drama is one which still has resonance for our own times, and perhaps it was most appropriate that it should be the creator o f Quatermass w h o with this play m o v e d British science fiction T V back to its more familiar dramatic territory: that o f outright anti-utopianism. T h r o u g h o u t its history, science fiction television has always had to contend with assumptions that its dreams o f the future and o f other worlds are fit only for children. A s C o o k suggests in his chapter, this was a c o m m o n assumption a m o n g controllers and regulators o f television during this period and it is certainly one which producer G e r r y A n d e r s o n had to contend with throughout his distinguished career, as evidenced by his mixed fortunes with UFO and other live-action sf series aimed at adults. We are very pleased to be able to reproduce an interview with G e r r y Anderson

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in this book — an on-stage interview that contributor Nicholas Cull conducted with A n d e r s o n as part of the 'Visions o f the Future' cultural history conference, held at the University o f Leicester in July 2003. Anderson, o f course, is most famous and celebrated as the producer o f the famous Tbunderbirds 'supermarionation' series o f the mid-1960s (Century 21 for I T C , 1965—66), as well as Stingray (Century 21 for I T C , 1964—65), Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (Century 21 for I T C , 1 9 6 7 - 6 8 ) and numerous others. B u t he has also worked in feature films and alongside UFO, has produced live action T V series such as The Protectors ( I T C , 1 9 7 2 - 7 4 ) and Space:

( I T C , 1975—76).

H e is still active within the industry and recently completed a new C G I (computer-generated imagery) version o f Captain Scarlet, which premiered on I T V in spring 2005. Relative to some o f the key themes o f British sf T V explored in this volume, Anderson's first-hand account is valuable in terms o f illustrating the Utopian values which as a practitioner he was keen to instil in those o f his series aimed specifically at children. A s he puts it: T had all sorts o f fancy ideas about the future. Y o u know, w e had the United Nations and I imagined that the world would come together and there would be a world g o v e r n m e n t . . . ' His attitude was: T . . . thought, well, hundreds o f millions o f children are watching these programmes and I don't want to contribute to a global conflict between two superpowers!' (see below, ' T h e M a n W h o Made Tbunderbirds: A n Interview with G e r r y Anderson'). A t the same time, more sadly, as his account o f the demise o f the original Tbunderbirds demonstrates, his brand o f expensive filmed series for commercial television was highly dependent on television sales to the United States networks such that w h e n these dried up, series that were still tremendously popular and iconic in Britain nevertheless had to f o l d .

10

A s the Utopian hedonism o f the 1960s gave way to the more sobering realities o f the 1970s, British sf T V similarly tended to turn inwards, away from international rescues and p r o g r a m m e sales and more towards a growing concern with domestic political issues. Human influence on the environment became a principal preoccupation at this time. Doomwatch ( B B C TV, 1970—72), for example, followed the efforts o f a government department to safeguard environmental and public safety from scientific, military or corporate negligence. Created

by Doctor Who script editor G e r r y Davis and environmentalist D r K i t Pedler, the series responded to growing scientific concerns over pollution, resource depletion and ecological mismanagement. A comparable insularity is found in Terry Nation's Survivors ( B B C TV, 1975—77), in which the remnants o f British society struggle to rebuild civilization after a plague kills 95 per cent o f the world's population. A s A n d y Sawyer argues in his chapter, the series explodes the myth o f cosy, middle-class self-sufficiency popular in the 1970s (and typified by the exacdy contemporaneous B B C T V sitcom The Good Life). Instead, it exposes the difficulties o f returning to a less industrialised existence. Its focus on middle-class characters in crisis, together with its tone o f cautious optimism and its combination o f political modelling and social criticism, borrows from the traditions o f British literary catastrophe

fiction.

Its politics, however, often

appear to be avowedly nationalistic and isolationist (perhaps as a reaction against Britain's growing involvement with E u r o p e and the

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C o m m o n Market during the time o f its production). T h e penulti­ mate episode, ' L o n g Live the K i n g ' (ist tx. B B C i , i J u n e 1 9 7 7 ) , seems to embrace conservatism over change, advocating the socially uniting benefits of a constitutional monarchy. Meanwhile, the aptly named final episode, ' P o w e r ' (ist tx. B B C 1 , 8 J u n e 1 9 7 7 ) , appears to suggest real power will lie with a self-reliant feudal society ruled over by warlords, where everybody will know their place. A s Sawyer comments: 'Either way, w e seem not to be offered much hope for the future of post-industrial society.' T h e collapse o f society in the wake o f national catastrophe is also central to D a v i d Seed's exploration o f what he terms ' T V D o c u d r a m a and the Nuclear Subject'. H e examines two British documentary drama-style representations

from different historical periods, each

depicting what might happen to society if there were ever a nuclear attack on British soil: director Peter Watkins's seminal The War Game ( B B C TV, 1965), which was controversially banned from television for 20 years, despite going on to win an Oscar in 1 9 6 7 , and writer Barry Hines and director Mick Jackson's Threads ( B B C TV, 1984). Seed also compares these with a U S T V example from the same period as Threads: The Day After ( A B C 1 9 8 3 , dir. Nicholas Meyer). In his discussion, Seed points out similarities between the three 'docudramas' but also highlights significant differences. Threads and The Day After situate their nuclear nightmare within more conventional dramatic narratives, following the effects o f devastation on identityinviting families played by professional actors. Watkins, by contrast, uses non-professionals, together with hand-held

cinematography,

natural lighting and sound, in order to simulate the effects o f a nuclear attack on K e n t , just as if the audience were witnessing it in an actual documentary. In Threads, Hines and J a c k s o n consider what might happen if there were a nuclear strike on Sheffield. A s Seed suggests, they evoke the image of civil society as a w e b in the sense o f its interconnectedness but also its fragility, such that if one strand is broken, many other threads may start to unravel too. B y the end o f the drama, British society is shown to have reverted to a state of medievalism only thirteen years after the B o m b has dropped, the web having been almost completely shattered. Threads formed part o f a series o f dramas and

documentaries

made by B B C T V on 'the nuclear subject', and its screening in 1984

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paved the way for the first television screening o f The War Game in 1 9 8 5 . T h e s e programming decisions were very much a reaction to a renewed increase in tensions in the Cold War during the early 1980s. T h i s was the period o f Reaganite foreign policy with its determination to stoke up the Cold War against the Soviet Union, whilst at h o m e Thatcherism was starting, in its own way, to unravel many o f the threads o f the British liberal post-war consensus. One key British science fiction television series coterminous with the early years o f Thatcherism, and which seemed to reflect much of the pessimism o f the period in terms o f the hopelessness o f the possibility o f any kind o f future social emancipation, was Blake's 7 ( B B C T V , 1978—81). A s U n a M c C o r m a c k suggests in her chapter examining this iconic series, Blake's 7 reclaimed the conventions o f space opera for a British context at a time w h e n the American Star Wars movies (US 1 9 7 7 ; 1 9 8 0 ; 1 9 8 3 ; prod. G e o r g e Lucas) were conquering the world's cinema screens. Created by Terry Nation, the series followed a rebellion by a g r o u p o f criminals led by idealist Roj Blake (Gareth T h o m a s ) and cynic K e r r A v o n (Paul D a r r o w ) against the despotic activities o f Earth's Federation, commanded over by the ruthless, Thatcherite-style President Servalan (Jacqueline Pearce). Taking inspiration from the anti-utopian writings o f Orwell and Huxley, Blake's 7, as M c C o r m a c k shows, was the antithesis o f Star Trek in the 1960s. T h e camaraderie o f the crew in the latter series was replaced with hostility and distrust among the principal characters that made up Blake's band o f renegades and outlaws; the seemingly benign United Federation o f Planets was countered with the militaristic Federation in the British series, while heroic individuals were supplanted by ambivalent characters with ambiguous motives. Where Star Trek advocated triumphant expansionism, the dystopian space opera o f Blake's 7 chronicled a series o f hollow victories and bitter defeats. B y 1 9 8 1 and the series' end, the climax of Blake's ineffective rebellion, which saw all but one of the rebels killed, reflected the sullen m o o d o f a Britain beset by economic decline, mass unemployment and civil unrest, all presided over by the increasingly strident premiership o f Margaret Thatcher. A s M c C o r m a c k also points out, Blake's 7 marked the B B C ' s last attempt at producing a mainstream, politically orientated science fiction T V series o f discrete self-enclosed episodes for a primetime

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slot on B B C i. In the more sober 1980s' world o f greater Thatcherite 'realism', speculations about what the future might hold would henceforth tend to be consigned to minority slots or channels, or be considered suitable for treatment only within flagship serial drama form. T h e heyday o f science fiction on British T V — which had peaked in the 1960s and 1970s — appeared to have passed. O v e r on ITV, however, one last gasp for serious use o f the form in a primetime slot was Sapphire and Steel (ATV, 1979—82), a twice-weekly series o f adventures created by crime drama writer P.J. H a m m o n d . In his chapter on Sapphire and Steel, Peter Wright reads the series as a direct reflection on Thatcher's premiership: a political allegory o f the triumph o f Conservative order over social chaos in a drama that is as sombre as it is deeply symbolic. Wright demonstrates how the programme synthesises tropes from the G o t h i c and the English ghost story with the rational, investigative processes o f science fiction and the golden age crime novel, in order to structure a conflict between the metaphorical representatives o f perceived contemporary social malaise - militant groups, 'wet' or ineffective politicians, immigration, faceless bureaucracy — and the eponymous Thatcherite protagonists, Sapphire and Steel. Authoritarian and uncompromising, Sapphire (Joanna Lumley) and Steel (David McCallum) are guardians o f the social and temporal order. Fittingly, for its Thatcherite times, the programme held them up as heroic figures, despite or perhaps rather because o f their obdurate, misanthropic attitudes. B y 1 9 8 1 , however, as economic recession bit hard, riots erupted in the inner cities and old liberal certainties found themselves inexo­ rably eroded by the emerging Thatcherite agenda, it was becoming increasingly hard to take science fiction o n British T V seriously at all, as opposed to in the cinema where huge technical advances in special effects had made the physical representations o f such visions of the future now highly believable. Faced with such circumstances, perhaps the only option left for British science fiction T V was to have a laugh at itself. T h i s was something which ^-Doctor Who script editor Douglas A d a m s had already intrinsically recognised with his hit Radio 4 serial The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1978), and w h e n it transferred to T V in 1 9 8 1 , the serial's absurdist humour continued with it. A s a writer o f science fiction, A d a m s was conscious not only o f the meaninglessness o f human existence but also the folly

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o f searching for meaning, and he understood that humour is often the only defence against such a bleak realisation. The Hitchhiker's Guide employs c o m e d y to recount a science fiction story that exposes the general absurdity o f the cosmos and articulates a sobering and melancholy misanthropy. In its anarchic, encyclopaedic plotting, the importance o f human existence is undermined, the pettiness o f human officialdom mocked, and the scale o f human

achievement

parodied. A s contributor M.J. S i m p s o n points out in his chapter, however, the T V The Hitchhiker's Guide has been unfairly compared in retro­ spect as inferior to the radio serial which preceded it, when in fact its special effects were state-of-the-art for the period, and the serial also succeeded in bringing A d a m s ' s h u m o u r and rich ideas to a mass audience for the first time, so much so that for a great many people their m e m o r y o f The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is the T V version. S i m p s o n is the author o f a well-received commercial biography o f D o u g l a s A d a m s , as well as a popular critical guide to

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and as a non-academic contribu­ tor he is able to bring the perspective o f a genuine fan, as well as expert, to his analysis o f the serial, in keeping with the volume's wish to bridge the gap between the academic and the fan communities. Playfully b o r r o w i n g his title from A d a m s ' s o w n dig at academic criticism in E p i s o d e i o f The Hitchhiker's Guide, Simpson's chapter, 'Counterpointing the Surrealism o f the Underlying Metaphor', also replicates s o m e o f the encyclopaedic breadth o f Adams's own work in its analysis o f biographical sources for many o f the late writer's highly striking ideas. A s Doctor Who tottered towards cancellation in 1989, the lesson from A d a m s — that h u m o u r was g o i n g to be the key to

future

survival o f British science fiction T V in a harsher cultural climate — was not lost on R o b G r a n t and D o u g Naylor's Red Dwarf ( B B C TV, 1 9 8 8 - 9 9 ) , which used the situation comedy format to revivify the various conventions and conceits o f T V science fiction, much to the delight o f British sf T V fans, starved o f any more serious fodder on television for much o f this period. Like The Hitchhiker's Guide, Red Dwarf resists denigrating generic conventions to mere devices in order to enliven standard comedy situations. However, where The Hitchhiker's Guide parodied bureaucracy, human hubris and the notion

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of ultimate knowledge in order to offer a w r y account o f humanity's shortcomings, Red Dwarfs humour is more intimate, deriving from personal, class and masculine conflict between its characters. A s Elyce Rae Helford argues in her chapter on Red Dwarf, the programme's futuristic setting opens up a potentially 'post-patriarchal

space' in

which the politics of gender, representation, masculine anxiety and male desire can take centre stage, even though, as she also c o m p r e ­ hensively demonstrates, its male characters choose in the series to cling tenaciously to traditional patriarchal norms. B y the 1990s, however, Red Dwarf appeared to be just about the only successful example o f British television science fiction still in production, precisely because it was a comedy, the genre as a w h o l e seemingly no longer taken seriously by British television commission­ ers and producers. Instead, particularly at the B B C , there seemed to be more and more o f a reliance on filling the vacuum left by the demise o f the iconic Doctor Who through importing and repeating increasing numbers o f U S T V series with their bigger budgets and more elaborate special effects, including the various series o f the Star

Trek franchise; The X-Files (Fox Television, 1993—2002); Quantum Leap (Universal Television, 1989—93); Sliders (Fox Television, 1995—2000) and genre fantasies such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer ( W a r n e r s / U P N , 1997—2003), all of which supplanted indigenous T V sf. W h e n Doctor Who returned as a one-off television movie in 1996 (a pilot for a putative series that never was), it exemplified the loss, in an increas­ ingly globalised entertainment market, o f the form's

quintessential

Britishness. Co-produced by the B B C ' s Worldwide division, Universal and Fox Television, Doctor Who the T V movie avoided the original serial's public service politics of humane scientific liberalism in favour of a more 'globalised' D o c t o r , reinvented by writer Matthew J a c o b s and producer Philip Segal as a kind o f Byronic romantic hero (played by Paul M c G a n n ) , w h o even at one point shares a chaste kiss with his new American assistant, G r a c e (Daphne A s h b r o o k ) . Revisionist intertexts, transformations of character and generic shifts had thus brought the hitherto itinerant time traveller bang into line with the homogenised requirements o f international television production for a new global market. As Catriona Miller goes on to examine in the final chapter in this volume, in the late 1990s, however, a renewed interest among

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British television executives in commissioning sf drama resulted in a number o f new h o m e - g r o w n serials being produced. In her chapter, she relates this to the phenomenal global success o f The X-Files in the m i d - 1 9 9 0 s and the keenness o f commissioning editors to cash in on its appeal, as well as to the approach o f a new millennium, with its cultural focusing o f attention on 'the end o f days'. Certainly, each o f the three dramas that emerged - The Uninvited (ITV, 1997), Invasion: Earth ( B B C Scotland with the Sci-Fi Channel, 1998) and The Last Train (ITV, 1999) — were fictions o f catastrophe and apocalypse that stood in a long tradition o f such sf on British television. Invasion: Earth, for example, was an attempt to recapture the mystery and suspense o f the Quatermass dramas in terms of its alien invasion narrative o f Earth caught in a war between the benign E c h o e s and the malevolent n D s , together with its apocalyptic climax. T h e presence, however, o f American actor Fred Ward, w h o played Major General D a v i d Reece and the co-production involvement of the US-based SciFi cable channel indicated the new realities o f producing big-budget sf T V in a globalised entertainment age. Like Doctor Who: The Movie, Invasion: Earth was aimed squarely at an international market. Writer Matthew Graham's six-part The Last Train (ITV, 1999) was somewhat different, drawing inspiration from a more locally indig­ enous British disaster tradition that includes Survivors. Disdaining the cliché o f nuclear conflict, the series deployed the most recent trend in apocalyptic scenarios — an asteroid collision — as the catastrophic event that wipes out most o f humanity. A group o f survivors, seemingly representative o f multicultural Britain yet still characterised stereotypically (Mick, for example, played by Treva Etienne, is black and a criminal), are preserved when their train from L o n d o n to Sheffield enters a tunnel at the m o m e n t o f impact. Frozen cryogenically by the contents o f a canister carried by one o f the passengers, the survivors regain consciousness and emerge from their tomb almost fifty years after the event. T h e serial then chronicles the quest they undertake from a shattered Sheffield (clearly a homage to Threads) to the catastrophe-survival shelter, A R K . Unlike The Uninvited and Invasion: Earth, The Last Train explores catastrophe intimately and without sentiment, dramatising the difficulties o f finding fresh water, food and shelter in a world remade by disaster. This intimacy is developed further as the drama asks, through dialogue, subtext and event, what

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drives individuals to survive? T h e answer forms the trajectories o f each of the characters as they m o v e across the blighted landscape. With its more thoughtful juxtapositions o f delusion and optimism, tenderness and cruelty, the mundane and the extraordinary, The Last Train marked a return to sf T V that at least considered its o w n cultural milieu. N o w , in the twenty-first century, there are hopeful signs that the long famine of indigenous sf T V , only intermittently punctuated in the preceding decade by dramas such as The Last Train, has c o m e to an end with a new home-grown B B C Doctor Who series launched in 2005, initially starring Christopher E c c l e s t o n as the D o c t o r (later replaced by David Tennant), that included scripts by top British T V dramatist Russell T. Davies. A d d to this G e r r y Anderson's new C G I version of Captain Scarlet, a revival o f Nigel Kneale's The Quatermass Experiment, transmitted live by the B B C (ist tx. B B C 4, 2 April 2005), plus a big-budget movie version o f The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (dir. Garth Jennings, U S A / U K 2005), long planned by the late Douglas Adams, and it seems that interest in the production possibilities o f the form is stronger now than it has been for many years. T h e appearance o f this volume, examining British sf T V ' s various 'futures past', therefore could not be more timely. While the diverse texts under consideration here fascinate and dazzle with their eclecti­ cism, one thing unites them. Whether Utopian or anti-utopian, comedy or catastrophe fiction, they all dare to dream o f other possibilities beyond their immediate present, and in that sense sf T V can be seen to constitute its o w n distinctive m o d e o f cultural criticism. E v e n though their visions o f the future may be wholly pessimistic and dark, all sf T V texts carry within them the seeds o f a latent utopianism, because appealing to the dreamer in all o f us, they refuse to accept the way things currently are, telling their audience, often to the latter's delight and mystification, that the way things are today is not the way they are always necessarily going to be. T o m o r r o w is most definitely another day and the future, they dare to tell us, can always be different.

NOTES

1. Starburst, TV Zone and Cult Times are all published by Visual Imagination Limited.

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2. I.Q. H u n t e r (ed.), British Science Fiction Cinema ( L o n d o n and N e w Y o r k : Routledge, 1999). T h e contributors to both this and the current volume are J a m e s C h a p m a n , A n d y Sawyer, S u e Short, as well as editors J o h n R. C o o k and Peter Wright. 3. Texts focusing o n iconic series include Manuel A l v a r a d o and J o h n T u l l o c h , Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text ( L o n d o n : Macmillan, 1 9 8 3 ) and Chris G r e g o r y , Decoding The Prisoner (Luton: J o h n L i b b y Media, 1997). A s well as J o h n Tulloch and H e n r y J e n k i n s ' Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Doctor Who and Star Trek ( L o n d o n and N e w Y o r k : R o u d e d g e , 1 9 9 5 ) , texts focusing o n reception studies o f sf T V fan communities also include M a t t h e w Hills, Fan Cultures ( L o n d o n and N e w Y o r k : R o u d e d g e , 2002). 4. E . G l e n n , 'Fantasy Flashback: The Time Machine', TV Zone 1 7 ( 1 9 9 1 ) , pp. 2 8 - 3 0 . 5. J . J a c o b s , The Intimate Screen: Early British Television Drama (Oxford: O x f o r d University Press, 2000), p. 1 . 6. A . Pixley, ' N i g e l K n e a l e Interview — Behind the D a r k D o o r ' , 1996, www. g e o c i t i e s . c o m / T e l e v i s i o n C i t y / 8 5 0 4 / k n e a l . h t m (accessed 21 N o v e m b e r 2003). 7. Quatermass and The Pit, E p i s o d e 6, ' H o b ' ( i s t tx. B B C T V , 26 January 8. A for Andromeda is also o f interest o n account o f its attitudes to gender. F o r further discussion, see J o y L e m a n , 'Wise Scientists and Female A n d r o i d s ' , in J o h n C o r n e r (ed.), Popular Television in Britain (London: British F i l m Institute, 1 9 9 1 ) . 9. B y 'telefantasy', it is meant p o p u l a r fantasy T V drama which eschews realism in favour o f glamour, escapism o r the construction o f alterna­ tive fantasy realms. British examples might include many o f the popular action adventure series p r o d u c e d b y I T C (Incorporated Television C o m p a n y ) in the 1960s such as The Saint (1962—69), The Champions ( 1 9 6 8 - 6 9 ) and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) (1969—70). With its world o f secret agents and its construction o f an anti-utopia based upon technological surveillance, The Prisoner seams to straddle both categories. F o r further discussion o f The Prisoner in the context o f British action adventure series o f the 1960s, see J a m e s C h a p m a n , Saints and Avengers: British Adventure Series of the 196'os ( L o n d o n and N e w Y o r k : L B . Tauris, 2002), pp. 4 9 - 5 1 . 1 o. I n 2004, a n e w live action m o v i e version o f Tbunderbirds was produced by W o r k i n g Title films in association with Universal Pictures, directed by J o n a t h a n Frakes. A n d e r s o n had no i n v o l v e m e n t in its production and refused to endorse the m o v i e .

2 Quatermass

and the

origins of British television sf JAMES

CHAPMAN

It is difficult today to appreciate the impact made by The Quatermass Experiment on British television viewers in 1 9 5 3 . This 'thriller for television in six parts' was the first drama serial to excite the public's imagination to the extent that, according to popular folklore, pubs were emptied on Saturday evenings whilst viewers o f a 'nervous disposition' were advised not to watch. It was an immediate success. A further two Quatermass serials were made during the 1950s — a belated fourth serial followed in 1 9 7 9 — and the first three stories 1

were all remade as feature films by H a m m e r Film Productions. The Quatermass Experiment has been described in such terms as 'one o f the most significant B B C drama productions

o f the early

1950s'

and 'a landmark both in B B C policy, as a commissioned original T V drama, and in intensity o f audience response'.

2

Its significance

within the historical development o f television drama is that it challenged received wisdoms about the technological and aesthetic possibilities o f the medium. It has been claimed by television scholars as representing an important moment in the 'opening u p ' o f the small 3

screen from the 'intimate' to the 'expansive' form o f drama. Y e t this focus on the formal and aesthetic properties o f The Quatermass Experiment has tended to obscure the place o f the four Quatermass serials in the generic lineage o f television science fiction. N o t only do the Quatermass serials exemplify many o f the key themes and tropes

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that constitute T V science fiction; they also represent an important attempt to legitimate sf as a 'serious' genre.

4

The Quatermass Experiment was neither the first instance of serious sf produced for television nor the first sf serial written specifically for television, but the extent o f its popularity and its influence was such that it can reasonably be seen as marking the beginning of sf as a significant television genre. Before Quatermass sf had only a sporadic presence on British television. T h e earliest examples o f the genre had been live adaptations o f sf literature, such as the Czech writer K a r e l Capek's RUR

(1938) — the play that introduced

the

word 'robot' into the English language — and H . G . Wells's classic The Time Machine (1949). T h e fact that neither o f these television plays seems to have made much o f an impact was probably due in large measure to the technological limitations o f early television, though another factor that needs to be taken into account is the difficulty of

adapting literary sf (which is predominantly about ideas) for a

visual medium such as television. This, at least, was the verdict of two B B C writers commissioned to survey the field o f sf literature in 1962: 'Audiences - we think — are not as yet interested in the mere exploitation o f ideas - the "idea as h e r o " aspect o f S E ' T h e report concluded that 'the vast bulk o f S F writing is by nature unsuitable for translation to T V ' .

5

In the early 1950s sf was seen, within television circles at least, as a juvenile genre. A m o n g the biggest ratings successes for Ameri­ can television had been sf series made for what Variety termed the 'kidvid' slot, such as Captain Video (1949—53), Tom Corbett — Space

Cadet (1950—55) and Rocky Jones — Space Ranger (195 3 - 5 4 ) / ' T h e sf movie serials o f the 1930s, such as Flash Gordon (1936) and Buck Rogers (1939), also enjoyed an afterlife when shown on television in edited form. T h e first British sf serial was Stranger from Space (19 51), shown in ten-minute episodes as part o f the children's programme Whirligig. N o n e o f the eleven episodes is known to have survived, but the serial seems to have been a predecessor o f Spielberg's E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) insofar as it followed the adventures o f a friendly Martian marooned on Earth w h o is befriended by a young boy. T h e foremost British sf hero o f the day was undoubtedly ' D a n Dare — Pilot o f the Future', the lantern-jawed hero of the flagship comic strip in the b o y s ' paper Eagle, launched in 1 9 5 0 , whose outer-space

JAMES

CHAPMAN

adventures thrilled a generation of British schoolboys. It is interesting to conjecture why D a n Dare was never adapted for television, as American comic strip heroes B u c k Rogers and Flash G o r d o n were 7

in the early 1 9 5 0 s , though there was a serial on R a d i o L u x e m b o u r g (1951—56) where D a n was played by N o e l J o h n s o n , w h o had a suitably heroic pedigree having already played Dick Barton — Special Agent on radio for the B B C (1946—51). H o w e v e r , the D a n D a r e comic strip was drawn with such a degree o f visual imagination by artist Frank H a m p s o n — and, moreover, was in colour — that any attempt to translate it to television would inevitably have disappointed.

8

Nigel Kneale, w h o wrote all the Quatermass serials, has always claimed not to be a particular enthusiast o f sf, remarking that T find my occasional sampling o f science fiction acutely disappointing; so much of it is the space equivalent o f Barbara Cartland, over-written 9

and peopled by very dull characters.' Y e t , rather like Terry Nation, another television writer w h o claimed not to like sf but came to be indelibly associated with the genre through his creation o f the Daleks for the long-running series Doctor Who, Kneale's sf television scripts have o v e r s h a d o w e d his other work, including writing the screenplays for T o n y Richardson's film adaptations o f Look Back in Anger (1959) and The Entertainer (i960). Kneale, a short-story writer, had joined the B B C in 19 51 and had quickly established a reputation as a skilled adapter for the television medium. H e so impressed Michael Barry, the recently appointed head o f drama (television), that a year before Quatermass Barry was telling his superiors that 'we cannot afford to lose his knowledge of Television built up over nine m o n t h s ' .

10

Kneale's pte-Quatermass work included an adaptation

of Charles Irving's apocalyptic thriller Number Three in 1 9 5 2 . Follow­ ing the first Quatermass serial he adapted G e o r g e Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954); he would later write a number o f thoughtful

and

challenging television plays including The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968) - a prescient satire of the sort o f 'reality T V ' that became popular some three decades later — and the chilling supernatural thriller The

Stone Tape ( 1 9 7 2 ) .

11

From early in Kneale's career as a television writer, he was keen to explore the visual as well as the dramatic possibilities o f

the

medium. T h e watchword o f most television drama at the time was 'intimacy'. Television was an intimate medium both because it was

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broadcast directly into the h o m e and because the television screen was small. T h e preferred style o f intimate drama was the outcome o f both technological and aesthetic determinants: television cameras and receivers were unsuitable for long shots, which lost their scale and définition on the small screen, but were ideal for close-ups, which not only captured the immediacy o f live performance but also allowed the producers to economise on sets. It was this style that characterised the so-called 'golden age' o f television drama in the 1950s with its spare sets, intense acting and psychologically oriented story lines. K n e a l e , however, disliked the intimate form of drama, which he regarded as being too wordy, and argued instead for the adoption o f film methods, including more extensive use o f

filmed

inserts in otherwise live transmissions. T h e use o f film, he averred, 'adds both physical freedom and atmosphere' and could 'provide a most useful extension o f the story beyond the cramped studio sets'. K n e a l e also disliked the conventional form o f television drama (the single play), preferring instead the serial form, in which 'it is pos­ sible to tackle a fairly complex idea in detail, using a full range of characters. It gives you time to shape a w h o l e background.'

12

While popular discourse around Quatermass has generally attributed creative agency to K n e a l e as the writer, K n e a l e himself was always quick to acknowledge the influence o f producer Rudolph C a r t i e r .

lj

Cartier was an Austrian w h o had worked at G e r m a n y ' s famous U F A studio in the late 1920s and early 1930s alongside writers such as E m e r i c Pressburger and Billy Wilder. H e came to Britain as an exile in 1 9 3 6 , worked in the British feature film industry after the Second World War and then joined the B B C in 1 9 5 0 . Cartier, described in an obituary as 'one o f the fathers o f modern television drama', was an innovator in the use o f film inserts to develop story lines rather than just to provide links between live sequences.

14

Cartier and Kneale

first worked together on an adaptation of a G e r m a n anti-war novel, Arrow to the Heart, in 1 9 5 2 . It soon became clear that they shared similar views about television drama and were keen to extend the boundaries o f the medium. Cartier claims to have told Michael Barry that 'the B B C needed new scripts, a new approach, a whole new spirit, rather than endlessly televising classics like Dickens or familiar 15

L o n d o n stage p l a y s ' . His outlook chimed with that o f Kneale, who, w h e n he was commissioned to write the first Quatermass script, 'saw

JAMES

CHAPMAN

it as an opportunity to do something different — an adventure yarn, something that wasn't people talking in drawing r o o m s ' .

16

1

There are differing accounts o f the origin o f Quatermass} Cartier later claimed that K n e a l e 'had all three stories in his mind from the start. We decided to do Experiment first because w e thought it would give us less trouble with exteriors and things like that.'

18

T h i s is flatiy

contradicted by K n e a l e himself, w h o has always claimed that the first serial came about as an ad hoc response w h e n 'one day in 1 9 5 3 the B B C suddenly discovered that they had a gap in the schedule, a slot for a serial, and nothing remotely planned'.

19

The Quatermass

Experiment was written for the Saturday evening serial slot that had previously included adaptations o f detective stories and thrillers such as Sir Arthur C o n a n Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and J o h n Buchan's The Three Hostages — both o f which had been adapted by film critic C . A . Lejeune - as well as original stories for television such as Francis Durbridge's The Broken Horseshoe. Quatermass can be seen, therefore, within a tradition of other critically lowbrow popular genres serialised for television. Kneale recalled that T churned it out fairly fast; in fact, I was still writing it while it was being transmitted. T h e r e were six episodes and I was still working on the last one w h e n the second one went out.'

20

It is evident that The Quatermass Experiment was intended from the start as a serious attempt at science fiction. Carrier, in a letter to the Air Ministry requesting technical assistance, described the basic idea of the serial thus: I am preparing a 'Science-Fiction' Serial, which will be in six episodes between 18th July to 22nd August. T h e background of it is in London and it deals with the activities of a fictional establish­ ment called 'The British Experimental Rocket Group', which attempts the first journey into space. I am most anxious to lift this production above the level of strip-cartoons and magazine thrillers, and we have secured technical datae [sic] and scientific support from responsible quarters. 21

T h e desire to provide a plausible scientific basis for the serial, especially in its depiction o f rocketry, links The Quatermass Experiment to early 1950s' sf films such as Destination Moon (dir. Irving Pichel, 1950, based

on Robert Heinlein's Rocketship Galileo, 1947) and Rocketship X-M (dir.

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K u r t N e u m a n n , 1950), which focused on the technology of space flight and, in the former case at least, had a reasonably plausible scenario (the first manned flight to the moon). It may have been these films that Cartier had in mind when he instructed his actors 'not to give away any details o f the serial to the Press as w e are in strong competition with films in science fiction o f this k i n d ' .

22

The Quatermass Experiment was nothing if not ambitious, especially given the nature of the technical facilities that were available at the time. It was broadcast from the B B C ' s television studio at Alexandra Palace using what K n e a l e claimed 'were literally the oldest operational cameras in the world, with fixed lenses and "watch-the-birdie" viewfinders, tracking on bicycle w h e e l s ' .

23

T h e entire serial was allocated

a budget o f £ 3 , 5 0 0 , o f which over half went on artists' payments, with £ 5 7 0 spent on sets and £ 3 8 0 o n film inserts (exterior shots and special effects shots that were incorporated into the live broadcast by telecine). In order to put this in context, a Sunday night play with a Thursday repeat, running for 90 minutes, typically cost between £ 2 , 0 0 0 and £ 3 , o o o .

24

T h e special effects were accomplished with

what can best be described as Heath R o b i n s o n ingenuity.

25

The Quatermass Experiment'has been described as 'the first television drama that genuinely gripped the entire nation'.

26

While this is some­

thing o f an exaggeration — in 1953 approximately only one household in seven had a television set - there is nevertheless ample evidence to indicate that the serial made a considerable and lasting impact on those w h o saw it. T h e B B C ' s Audience Research Department, which conducted qualitative research into the viewing preferences of a cross section o f the public, found that Quatermass had met with a higher than average 'reaction index' from viewers and concluded that most viewers 'considered it a most unusual, exciting and ingenious serial'. T h e r e was some disappointment with the last episode, largely because there was a technical fault during the climax which led to a break in transmission. A minority of viewers disliked the serial, stating that it was either 'too fantastic' or 'too horrific', while some condemned as 'tasteless' the setting o f the climax in Westminster Abbey. Overall, however, reaction to the serial was highly positive.

27

T h e r e is, further, much anecdotal evidence to support the popularity o f the serial: 'Will friends and acquaintances please note that I refuse to answer telephone calls during future instalments o f this serial?',

JAMES

CHAPMAN

C.A. Lejeune noted in her Observer column after watching the first episode.

28

A n d , significantly, there was immediate interest from the

film industry. O n 24 August, two days after the last episode o f the serial was broadcast, the B B C ' s assistant head o f copyright reported that 'I have had a letter from H a m m e r Film Productions L t d . saying that they would be interested in the purchase o f film rights in " T h e Quatermass E x p e r i m e n t " . '

29

H a m m e r had a relationship o f sorts

with the B B C , having already produced film versions o f the radio

serials Dick Barton — Special Agent and The Adventures of PC49, but Quatermass would be the first British television serial adapted for the big screen.

30

It is important to place the popular reception o f The Quater­ mass Experiment in context. T h e intrinsic interest o f the serial itself notwithstanding, its timing was exceptionally fortunate. Quatermass belongs to the historical moment w h e n television was on the cusp o f becoming a genuine mass medium alongside radio and cinema. T h e first half o f the 1950s was the most rapid period o f enlargement for both the potential and the actual television audience in Britain. When the television service resumed after the w a r in J u n e 1946 it was available to about 15,000 homes, m o s d y in the Greater L o n d o n area, but the building o f new high-power transmitters — at Sutton Coldfield in the West Midlands in 1 9 4 9 , H o l m e M o s s in Yorkshire in 19 51, and Wenvoe in South Wales and K i r k o'Shotts in Central Scotland in 1 9 5 2 — brought a potential 28 million viewers within its orbit. T h e B B C estimated that by 1 9 5 3 the television service was available to over 80 per cent o f the population. A t the same time the size o f the actual audience was expanding rapidly, as evidenced by the number o f combined 'sound and vision' licences (costing £z): 343,882 in 1 9 5 0 ; 763,941 in 1 9 5 1 ; 1,449,260 in 1 9 5 2 ; 2,142,452 in 1 9 5 3 ; 3,248,852 in 1 9 5 4 ; and 4,503,766 in 195 5 .

31

In three years,

between 1950 and 1 9 5 3 , therefore, the size o f the television audience had increased over sixfold, and it doubled again over the next two years between 1 9 5 3 and 1 9 5 5 . It is extremely unlikely that Quatermass would have made the impact it did if it had been made before 1 9 5 3 . Moreover, it followed a mere two months after the event that, in the words o f one commentator, 'symbolizes the point when television surpassed radio as the major mass m e d i u m ' .

32

O n 2 J u n e 1 9 5 3 over

20 million people had watched the live television coverage o f the

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coronation o f Queen Elizabeth I I from Westminster A b b e y (the majority o f them watching in the homes o f other people). T h e coronation would still have been a recent m e m o r y for viewers when the last episode o f Quatermass was broadcast. Peter Hutchings has suggested that s o m e o f the impact o f Quatermass can be attributed to 'a kind o f iconoclasm . . . a furtive pleasure in seeing the Queen supplanted by a deadly alien monster about to reproduce'.

33

Against

this, however, must be set the fact that some viewers were put off by the 'tasteless' climax and that the last episode had the lowest reaction index o f the w h o l e serial. Yet the success o f The Quatermass Experiment was due to more than an accident o f timing, however propitious. T h e serial tapped into other concerns that were current in 1 9 5 3 . Kneale averred that T don't like the term "science fiction", but if we're going to bandy it about, it could be applied just as well to the world w e live in . . . I try to give those stories some relevance to what is round about us today.'

34

M o s t obviously, the serial can be seen in relation to the

discourse o f scientific and technological advancement that was a major theme o f post-war sf. T h e war and post-war years saw a number of highly significant developments in the fields o f physics, chemistry and medicine in which British scientists (popularly known as 'boffins') made important contributions. T h e British engineer Frank Whittle had developed a working jet engine in 1 9 4 1 ; Sir J o h n Cockcroft and E r n e s t Walton w o n the N o b e l Prize for Physics in 1 9 5 1 for their pioneering research in nuclear disintegration (popularly known as 'splitting the atom'); Cambridge bacteriologists E r n s t Chain and H o w a r d Florey, along with Sir Alexander Fleming, were awarded the N o b e l Prize for Medicine in 1945 for their work in developing penicillin; and in 1 9 5 3 the British biophysicist Francis Crick and the American J a m e s Watson discovered the 'double helix' structure that is the basis o f D N A . K n e a l e is supposed to have taken the first name o f his Professor Bernard Quatermass from the British radio

fictional

astronomer

Bernard Lovell, w h o designed the pioneering radio telescope and observatory at Jodrell Bank. Quatermass is the archetypal 'boffin'.

35

H e c o n f o r m s to the popular image o f the boffin that historian Kenneth O. M o r g a n describes as 'the typically British combination of intellectual rigour and romantic amateurism that characterized much

JAMES

of British science in the post-war p e r i o d ' .

36

CHAPMAN

Quatermass, played in

the first serial by Reginald Tate, is head o f the British Experimental Rocket G r o u p and has designed a manned space rocket which, as the first episode begins, is returning from its first flight. T h e

fictional

device o f Britain having its own space p r o g r a m m e — also a feature o f contemporaneous films such as Spaceways (dir. Terence Fisher, 1952) and The Net (dir. A n t h o n y Asquith, 1953) - can be interpreted as an assertion o f Britain's world status. H e n c e the excited radio reporter in the second episode o f Quatermass w h o proudly announces that 'three valiant B r i t o n s ' have made the first expedition into space — correcting himself with the qualification 'or British subjects' when he remembers that one o f the trio is a G e r m a n scientist. Quatermass, in this context, belongs to a narrative o f national achievement and progress that it shares with films like The Sound Barrier (dir. D a v i d Lean, 1952) in which it is a British test pilot w h o first flies at the speed of sound in a British-designed jet plane (when in reality the sound barrier had already been broken by American pilot C h u c k Yeager in 1 9 4 7 ) .

37

T h e fact o f Britain's decline as a world power, strikingly obvious in hindsight, was less apparent to contemporaries. T h e early 1950s was a period of considerable optimism for the future. Britain had survived the war with her overseas empire substantially intact (it is too often forgotten that the granting o f independence to India in 1947 and Palestine in 1948 were the last major acts o f decolonisation for a decade). T h e Festival o f Britain in 1 9 5 1 'made a spectacular showpiece for the inventiveness and genius o f British scientists and technologists'.

38

Incidents such as the escape o f the frigate H M S

Amethyst from the Yangtze river in China (July 1949) and the valiant defence of the 'Glorious Gloucesters' at the Battle o f the Imjin River in K o r e a (April 19 51) drew favourable comparison with heroic feats during the Second World War. T h e year o f The Quatermass Experiment witnessed the successful ascent of M o u n t E v e r e s t by a British-led expedition and the coronation o f a young queen that contemporar­ ies were quick to herald as the advent o f a new 'Elizabethan' age. E v e n more symbolically, perhaps, the wartime leader, Sir Winston Churchill, was back in D o w n i n g Street. T h e r e seemed g o o d reason for believing that Britain was still the great power she had been before the Second World War.

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'I'VE A L W A Y S B E E N W O R R I E D T H E R E MIGHT B E S O M E T H I N G W E C O U L D N ' T C O P E W I T H ' Professor Bernard Quatermass (Reginald Tate) and team prepare to confront a nightmare from space in The Quatermass

Experiment

(1953)

M u c h o f the impact o f The Quatermass Experiment arises from its rupturing o f this m o o d o f post-war complacency. A s Quatermass himself remarks: ' I ' v e always been worried there might be something we couldn't cope with.' T h e Quatermass rocket may symbolise British technological prowess, but the experiment goes horribly w r o n g as the returning rocket goes off course and crashes on Wimbledon Common. (Ironically, the exterior o f the rocket is represented by film stock shots o f a G e r m a n V 2 rocket, which in 1 9 4 4 had brought its own form o f destruction to L o n d o n . ) It transpires that the rocket has c o m e into contact with an alien organism that has killed two o f the astronauts and has infected the third, V i c t o r Carroon, w h o begins to turn into a plant-like life form which threatens to wipe out the human race by spreading its deadly spores. T h e orthodox interpretation o f 1 9 5 0 s ' sf and horror is to interpret the 'monster' as a metaphor for

JAMES

CHAPMAN

the 'beast' unleashed by the atomic bomb, against which there was no conventional defence. In this respect Quatermass can be linked to films such as The Beastfrom 20,000 Fathoms (dir. E u g e n e Lurie, 1953) and Godzilla (dir. Inoshiro Honda, 1955) — in which prehistoric monsters woken from hibernation by atomic tests lay waste to N e w Y o r k and Tokyo, respectively - as well as anticipating British 'creature features' such as Behemoth the Sea Monster (dir. E u g e n e Lurie, 1959) and Gorgo (dir. E u g e n e Lurie, 1 9 6 1 ) . Quatermass posits a more imaginative means of destroying the monster than the military or scientific solutions provided by most creature features {Gorgo excepted): Quatermass uses a tape recording o f the other astronauts, w h o s e knowledge and memories Carropn has absorbed, to awaken the monster's last vestige of human feeling and thus cause it to destroy itself. A t the same time, however, The Quatermass Experiment WAS different from filmic sf, if only because technological determinants

required

its makers to focus on characterisation and ideas rather than visual spectacle. This was a matter o f necessity, as K n e a l e recognised, 'because there was no other choice, you simply couldn't launch into a load of special effects, because there weren't a n y ' .

39

A key scene

in the fourth episode (as described in the script) makes an ironic comparison between film and television sf. Carroon, on the run from the authorities, hides in a cinema which is screening an sf film called Planet of the Dragons. T h e 'film within a film' - referred to in internal production documentation as 'the " H o l l y w o o d " picture'

4 0

— involves

a space lieutenant and a space girl w h o find true love whilst battling against (unseen) monsters on a distant planet and seems deliberately parodie o f the juvenile style o f sf from which Quatermass sought to differentiate itself. Moreover, the film is being shown in 3 - D — the year 1 9 5 3 marked the height o f Hollywood's short-lived flirtation with 3 - D film-making in an attempt to lure back declining audiences — which requires cinemagoers to wear special spectacles. T h e experi­ ence is uncomfortable for one member of the audience (T dunno which is worse — with them on or with them off. G e t an 'eadache or be driven loopy tryin' to watch it.') and the scene thus suggests that the experience o f cinema spectatorship is inferior to watching in the comfort o f one's o w n h o m e .

41

Cartier felt that television was

a more effective medium for this sort of story on the grounds that special effects looked less risible on the small screen:

32

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When the viewer was watching these 'horrific' T V productions of mine, he was - I like to think — completely in my power, and accepted the somewhat far-fetched implications of the plot (such as the man who turned into a vegetable) without a murmur, while in the cinema, there was usually a titter of false laughter whenever one of these scenes came up. 42

G i v e n the popular success o f The Quatermass Experiment, it was inevitable that a sequel would follow. Quatermass II, broadcast in the autumn o f 1 9 5 5 , was part o f the B B C ' s response to the arrival of Independent Television — a strategy which had also, notoriously, involved killing o f f G r a c e Archer, a leading character o f the popular radio serial, on 22 September, the day I T V began broadcasting. Unlike the first serial, Quatermass II was given a regular time slot (8 p.m.) and all episodes were telerecorded to enable a repeat screening. T h e budget for the w h o l e serial was £ 7 , 5 0 0 , over twice that o f the first Quatermass. It was broadcast from the B B C ' s L i m e G r o v e studios, technically better equipped than Alexandra Palace, and made more extensive use of film inserts than its predecessor, particularly involving location w o r k at the Shell H a v e n oil refinery on the T h a m e s estuary. Quatermass was played this time by J o h n R o b i n s o n , a late replace­ ment for Reginald Tate, w h o had died shortly before the serial was due to be broadcast. Quatermass II aroused as much public interest as its predecessor.

43

Its first episode, watched by an estimated 58 per cent of the adult television audience — though with the caveat that in the autumn o f 1955 only 188,000 households were able to receive I T V — had a higher reaction index than the first episode o f The Quatermass Experiment, and 77 per cent o f the sample said they intended to watch the rest of the serial. T h e majority o f viewers found it 'intensely thrilling and m o s t exciting', though again there were some ' w h o objected strongly to this serial on the grounds that it was too horrific, especially for Saturday night viewing when children would probably be watching. In addition a small number dismissed it as quite absurd and alto­ gether too stupidly far-fetched.'

44

E v e n with competition from ITV,

however, the audience for Quatermass II was larger than it had been for Experiment, if only because the number o f homes with television sets had doubled in the last two years. Despite its popular success, however, there is evidence that Quatermass II was less well regarded

JAMES

CHAPMAN

within the B B C itself. Cecil M c G i v e r n , the controller o f television, put on record his view that it 'is not nearly as g o o d as the

first

"Quatermass" serial' and that the first episode 'had a lot o f far too complicated dialogue, incidents which were improbable even with reference to a serial which is based o n improbability . . . and far too litde action'. ' T h e programmes are being " s h o t " with considerable skill by Rudolph Cartier,' M c G i v e r n added, 'but what he is shoot­ ing is just not g o o d e n o u g h . '

45

Michael B a r r y replied: T have been

pleased with the present serial which, in my opinion, is developing more smoothly and with more maturity than the first " Q u a t e r m a s s " , which seemed to me very r o u g h . '

46

Kneale, w h o evidently was shown the controller's m e m o r a n d u m by Barry, responded by citing favourable press reviews o f the serial, noting the reaction from the film industry ('A firm bid for the script o f the new serial was made as soon as it was read, a w e e k before production commenced — by the same company w h o made the recent Quatermass film') and rebutting the criticism o f the dialogue with the claim that fans o f the serial 'ranged from the Oliviers to children and persons o f imperfect English'. His reply to M c G i v e r n also explained the rationale o f Quatermass II: I have tried to make this serial as effective as its predecessor, but in quite a different way: a logical extension. Given the publiclyexpected components of the dogged professor, rocketry and Things from space, in terms of (substantially) live television, the possibilities are not infinite; but I eventually worked out a story that seemed more than mere repetition. T h e 'gimmick' this time, of course, is that an invasion of the earth by Things is one year under way by the time the story begins. Instead of a normal world with one sinister element moving in it, as before, we have one normal protagonist (Quatermass) moving in an increasingly abnormal world. 47

While Kneale seems to have felt constrained both by the technical limitations o f television and by the conventions o f the genre - the success of The Quatermass Experiment inevitably meant that viewers would carry certain expectations o f the sequel — it is clear that he was concerned to vary the formula as much as those allowed.

constraints

34

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Quatermass II — Kneale disliked the numeral but admitted 'I couldn't 48

think of a better tide'

— explores different sf themes and tropes from

the first serial. Experiment had been an example o f the alien invasion narrative in which a 'thing' from space threatens the world with destruction but is itself destroyed through either the ingenuity and resourcefulness of humans (represented by the boffin Quatermass) or, as in the case o f H . G . Wells's The War of the Worlds — published in 1898 and filmed by G e o r g e Pal in 1 9 5 3 — by fortunate accident. It is a trope that still persists in recent examples o f both filmic and tele­ vision sf such as the movie blockbuster Independence Day (dir. Roland Emmerich, 1996) and B B C Scotland's Invasion: Earth (1998). Quatermass II, however, is more readily located within a generic lineage that emerged only in the 1950s: the paranoid sf thriller. Its most obvious generic reference point is Invasion of the Body Snatchers (dir. D o n Siegel, 1956) — which it predated by a year — in so far as it concerns the attempted colonisation o f E a r t h by aliens w h o are able to take over the minds and bodies o f human beings. It also anticipates the Quinn Martin television series The Invaders (1967—68), which was based on the similar premise o f an alien invasion by stealth. Quatermass stumbles upon the plot by accident when he is called in by Captain Dillon, head o f an army radar tracking station, to investigate a shower o f meteorites that have against all probability landed in close formation. A reconstruction

from remaining fragments reveals the

meteorites

to be hollow, from which Quatermass surmises that they are in fact capsules containing alien creatures which breathe ammonia

(those

w h o c o m e into contact with the capsules are affected by ammonia gas and subsequently are 'taken over') and which, it transpires, are building colonies on Earth. Invasion of the Body Snatchers — in which the aliens arrive in mysterious ' p o d s ' — has typically been interpreted as an allegory of American C o l d War paranoia and the McCarthyite 'witch-hunts' of the early 1950s. Quatermass / / o b v i o u s l y cannot be read in quite the same way - there was, after all, nothing really comparable to McCarthyism in Britain — though it does share similar themes, o f secrecy, phobia, mistrust o f outsiders and the sense that nothing is quite what it seems. While tracking the meteorites, Quatermass comes across a top-secret g o v e r n m e n t installation in a security area patrolled by sinister armed guards, w h o seize the meteorite fragments. Quatermass

JAMES

CHAPMAN

is puzzled because the installation seems to have been modelled on his own design for a m o o n colony. His efforts to investigate are thwarted when the committee responsible turns out to have been taken over by the aliens (they bear a telltale mark on their skin), and so Quatermass has to infiltrate the plant himself. T h e r e is a sense in which Quatermass himself is more o f an outsider than he had been in the first serial. Whereas in Experiment Quatermass had the assistance o f S c o d a n d Y a r d (albeit that his relationship with Inspector L o m a x was somewhat uneasy to begin with), in Quatermass II the various people w h o help him — Captain Dillon, a senior civil servant, an MP, a public relations man and a journalist — meet sticky ends (all except. Dillon, w h o has to survive as he is the fiancé o f Quatermass's daughter Paula). Quatermass learns that far from being a food processing plant, as everyone supposes, the installation is in fact a colony housing a large amoeboid creature which is growing in size by conjoining with the creatures in the meteorite capsules. H e has to win the trust o f the initially suspicious construction workers w h o , when they learn the truth, storm the plant. K n e a l e said that 'the idea was contemporary to the fifties. D u r i n g that time G o v e r n ­ ment bodies were building early warning radar bases, g e r m warfare factories, mysterious isolated laboratories, all of which were hidden 49

from the public in inaccessible places.' Kneale probably had in mind such installations as the A t o m i c Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston, Berkshire, which later became a focus of the anti-nuclear movement. Quatermass II expresses anxieties about the growth o f a secret state — 'This is a free country in time o f peace', Quatermass protests as he is escorted off-site by armed guards — and, with its narrative of cover-ups and quasi-military installations, anticipates Chris Carter's highly successful The X-Files (Fox Television, 1993—2002) by some four decades. T h e underlying paranoia that characterises Quatermass II suggests a society less at ease with itself than in Experiment. T h i s is apparent from the beginning w h e n the failure of the 'Quatermass I I ' nuclearpowered rocket signals an end to the British attempt to conquer space. Quatermass recognises the blow to national self-confidence this represents: 'It won't be easy to accept we're no longer part of the race.'

5 0

Quatermass II pre-dated the Suez Crisis by a year,

but all the same may be seen as an early example o f the narrative

36

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o f national impotence (Quatermass, metaphorically, fails to get his rocket 'up') that s o m e commentators from the m i d - 1 9 5 0 s .

51

have detected in British sf

Quatermass's confidence is so shattered that

he begins to question his o w n sanity: upon seeing the installation which so clearly resembles his o w n plan for a m o o n colony, he says to himself, T think I'm going mad.' T h e r e is also a suggestion of social unrest — a theme that would become ever more prominent in the later Quatermass serials. T h e notion o f Britain as a consensual society is shattered by the climax o f the fifth episode, where an uprising of workers — a politically highly charged theme if ever there was one at the height o f the C o l d War — leads to a pitched battle for control o f the plant. T h e workers have been shaken from their cosy complacency by Quatermass, w h o is forced to align himself with a marginalised group in order to save the day. Quatermass and the Pit, which duly followed three years later, is generally regarded as the best o f the Quatermass serials.

52

It was

allocated a significandy larger budget — £ 2 , 5 6 0 per episode - and was a m o r e polished production than the previous two. It was broadcast live from the B B C ' s Riverside Studios and introduced yet another new Quatermass in the person o f A n d r é M o r e l l .

53

T h e third Quatermass

serial made even more extensive use o f film — some 45 minutes in total — and succeeded in integrating them into the broadcast to the extent that K n e a l e claimed 'a surprisingly satisfactory number of expert colleagues failed to spot exactly which 45 minutes'.

54

This can

probably be explained by the fact that most o f the film inserts are not exteriors as in Quatermass II (except for the opening o f the first episode) but are either special-effects shots or crowd scenes filmed indoors at Ealing Studios (recendy acquired by the B B C ) . ' O n the technical side,' Kneale averred, 'it went about as far as possible towards exploding the "intimacy" fallacy. H u g e sets, long shots, crowd scenes were the order o f the day.'

55

T h a t said, however, much o f the power

o f Quatermass and the Pit derives from its highly atmospheric use of a handful of claustrophobic sets. Quatermass and the Pit achieved the highest audience o f any of the serials — reflecting again the increase in the television audience in Britain throughout the 1950s — with the B B C estimating some 1 1 million viewers for the last episode on 26 January 1959. But, according to the L o n d o n office o f the U S - b a s e d Nielsen Ripley organisation,

JAMES

CHAPMAN

which monitored viewing habits for the commercial networks, in those areas which received both B B C and I T V more were tuned in to Keep It in the Family on I T V .

56

households

S o far as qualitative

evidence o f reception is concerned, the B B C ' s Audience Research Department found that Quatermass and the Pit had a similar reaction index to Experiment but was d o w n slightly on Quatermass II. T h e r e were some complaints that 'the story had got off to a disappointingly slow start', though even so viewers tended to remain with the serial. Interestingly, given that the first two serials had been criticised by some for their horrific and frightening content, the first episode o f Quatermass and the Pit disappointed some viewers on the grounds 'that the bloodcurdling events foreshadowed in the trailer had not, alas, come to pass'. Many viewers watched the serial largely because they had seen the others, 'which were remembered with pleasure'.

57

Kneale described Quatermass and the Pit as 'a race-hatred f a b l e ' .

58

There is a greater sense o f topicality than in the previous serials in so far as Quatermass and the Pit was written shortly after the race riots that occurred in Notting Hill, L o n d o n , in the summer o f 1 9 5 8 , and the story takes place against a background o f social unrest including, as a radio news bulletin announces, 'a week o f racial disturbances' in Birmingham. This was a time o f increasing immigration to Britain from the Commonwealth, especially from the West Indies. In J u n e 1958 it was estimated that the black population o f Britain numbered 180,000, and, while the situation in Britain can never be compared to the institutionalised racism o f the apartheid regime in South Africa, there was nevertheless an informal segregation, with the majority of black immigrants settling in particular areas such as B r i x t o n in 59

L o n d o n and the St Paul's area o f B r i s t o l . T h e inclusion o f a black workman in the group o f construction workers w h o feature at the beginning of the first episode is indicative o f the sort o f

manual

job that most black immigrants were obliged to take. T h e scenes o f violent public disorder and mass hysteria at the end o f the serial, as people affected by irrational forces turn on anyone w h o m they perceive as different, can readily be interpreted as an allegory o f the race riots o f 1 9 5 8 . Yet the race-hatred parable o f Quatermass and the Pit is far more subtle and complex than such a straightforwardly reductionist reading of the narrative as allegory would allow. T h e story involves the

38

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discovery during excavation w o r k in L o n d o n o f a mysterious capsule, which the army assume to be an unknown G e r m a n secret weapon from the S e c o n d World War but which Quatermass suspects is an alien spacecraft that crashed on E a r t h millions o f years ago. T h e capsule contains two kinds o f skeletal remains: ape-like creatures with unusually large cranial cavities, and large insect-like creatures that putrefy w h e n the capsule is opened and they c o m e into contact with the atmosphere. Quatermass and palaeontologist D r Matthew Roney deduce from the evidence that the insect skeletons are the remains of Martians w h o evacuated their own planet when it became uninhabitable and w h o attempted to preserve their own species by tampering with the physiology o f the creatures they found on Earth. Quatermass uses a 'spectral oscillator' invented by D r Roney to record images from the past and is presented with a harrowing picture o f what happened to the Martians. It is surely not too fanciful to speculate that Quatermass's description o f 'a race purge . . . a cleansing o f the hives . . . a ritual slaughter to preserve a fixed society' would in 1958 have been understood by many as a reference to the Holocaust. T h e r e is certainly no ambiguity about the conclusion o f the serial. A t the end o f the final episode, following the outbreak o f irrational violence that has almost destroyed L o n d o n — and to which he himself nearly s u c c u m b s — Quatermass makes an impassioned television broadcast that is delivered directly to camera:

If another of these things should ever be found, we are armed with knowledge, but we also have knowledge of ourselves and of the ancient, destructive urges in us that grow more deadly as our populations increase and approach in size and complexity those of ancient Mars. Every war crisis, witch-hunt, race riot, purge, is a reminder and a warning. We are the Martians. If we cannot control the inheritance within us, this will be their second dead planet.

T h e most didactic scene in any of the Quatermass serials, this conclu­ sion was not to the liking o f Michael Barry, w h o complained that it was 'an extremely pompous & in some ways inconclusive end'.

60

While

it does not, admittedly, provide a clear resolution to the narrative, the scene as filmed does make for a very powerful and provocative ending to the serial.

JAMES

CHAPMAN

Quatermass and the Pit is unusual for sf in that it looks to the past rather than to the future and suggests that an alien invasion has taken place some 5 million years ago. It also bridges the traditional divide between sf (concerned with the scientific and the rational) and horror (delving into the supernatural and the irrational). It posits an intriguing, if disturbing, answer to the evolutionary question o f the 'missing link' between apes and men. A s a deeply sceptical g o v e r n ­ ment official puts it: ' Y o u realise what you're implying — that w e owe our human condition to the intervention o f insects.' It is little wonder, faced with this hypothesis, that the g o v e r n m e n t prefers to believe the army's explanation o f a G e r m a n secret w e a p o n . A t the same time, however, Quatermass and the Pit also draws upon occult imagery and motifs that defy scientific rationalism. Quatermass and Roney find the sign o f the pentacle on the Martian spacecraft and deduce that it is the inherited 'race m e m o r y ' o f the Martians that explains why so many different human societies throughout the ages have visualised the demonic in the same way as a horned beast. T h e Martians had a form o f telekinetic power that explains phenomena such as ghosts and second sight. In its linking o f science and the supernatural, Quatermass and the Pit anticipates Kneale's The Stone Tape, which supposes that ghosts are the result o f psychic residue and can be exorcised through a process analogous to wiping a tape. It is a combination o f scientific and occult knowledge that finally saves the day. With a fiery apparition o f a horned beast appearing over L o n d o n (not seen but described by an airline pilot), R o n e y remembers that iron and water are the devil's traditional enemies and destroys it by throwing a wet steel cable into the inferno, killing himself in the process. It is clear from the topical references throughout, and the closing speech in particular, that Quatermass and the Pit is set against an even more insecure world than Quatermass II. T h e C o l d War l o o m s more prominendy than in the previous serials: an early reference to deadlock in nuclear disarmament talks in G e n e v a provides the background to a subplot that involves placing nuclear missiles on the m o o n . ' T h e present state o f world politics leaves no doubt about that — w h o e v e r plants those missiles can police the Earth', declares the p o m p o u s Colonel Breen. Quatermass, however, resists the appropriation o f his research for militaristic purposes: 'We are on the verge o f a new

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dimension o f discovery. It's the great chance, leave our vices behind us, war first o f all. N o t to g o out there dragging our hatreds and our frontiers with us.' T o this extent Quatermass and the Pit needs to be seen in the context o f mounting public concern over nuclear proliferation in the late 1950s, which culminated in the founding of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament ( C N D ) in February 1958 by Bertrand Russell and C a n o n L . J o h n Collins. Quatermass is dis­ missive o f what he calls 'the dead man's deterrent' — the idea that pre-programmed missiles will destroy an aggressor even if Britain has already been annihilated — and there is no doubting that the serial, if not directly advocating disarmament, is sceptical o f the notion o f 'mutually assured destruction' ( M A D ) that underscored nuclear strategy during the C o l d War. A t one point in Quatermass and the Pit, Colonel Breen tells the professor: 'You're a tired old man and you need a long rest — that's not just my view, either.' It is tempting to see this as Kneale's comment on the future o f Quatermass at a time when Kneale was about to seek new challenges in the film industry. Quatermass was indeed to have the long rest prescribed for him, for it would be a full twentyone years before a new Quatermass serial was aired (a belated film version o f Quatermass and the Pit had followed some nine years after the television original). K n e a l e worked on the script of Quatermass IVin

the late 1960s, and in 1973 it was announced that it was to be

made by the B B C .

6 1

In the event, however, the B B C decided against

it, reportedly o n the grounds that the estimated cost o f £200,000 was deemed too expensive, and the serial was shelved. It was picked up in the late 1970s by E u s t o n Films, a subsidiary o f Thames Tele­ vision, which announced that it would produce a four-part serial, 2

n o w simply entitled Quatermass, at a cost o f £ 1 . 2 million/' Euston was responsible for some o f the most successful I T V series o f the 1970s and early 1980s, including Special Branch, The Sweeney, Van der

Valk, Danger UXB, Minder and Reilly — Ace of Spies, and had also dabbled in feature film production in the form o f the two Sweeney spin-offs. A c c o r d i n g to Verity Lambert, w h o became chief executive of E u s t o n Films in 1 9 7 9 : Quatermass came to us in the shape of four scripts which had been commissioned by the B B C and which had been turned down by

JAMES

CHAPMAN

them as being too expensive for them to make. It was very expen­ sive - I think it was the most expensive thing we had attempted at Euston Films at that point. A n d we felt that the only way we could justify the expense was to make sure that we could re-edit it into a film which could possibly have theatrical release as well as have a four-parter. 63

Quatermass was produced by T e d Childs (producer o f both Sweeney films) and directed by Piers Haggard (whose previous credits included the occult 1970 horror film Blood on Satan's Claw and the B B C ' s Dennis Potter serial PenniesfromHeaven in 1978). It starred Sir J o h n Mills as Quatermass and the cast included Simon MacCorkindale and Barbara Kellerman, both o f w h o m had film careers, suggesting that E u s t o n had international sales in mind. A s L a m b e r t indicated, a 102-minute feature film version was prepared at the same time, though in the event the planned theatrical release never materialised.

64

Quatermass was broadcast on the I T V network in the autumn o f 1979 but failed to achieve anything like the impact o f the

1950s'

serials. T h e largest audience was for the first episode ( 1 2 . 4 million) but even so it failed to register in the weekly top twenty. critical reception was lukewarm at b e s t .

66

65

The

T h e r e are a number o f

possible explanations for its relative failure. Its scheduled broadcast was delayed by a technicians' strike that took I T V o f f the air for several weeks in the autumn o f 1 9 7 9 and meant that the serial went out at short notice and with inadequate publicity when the service resumed on 24 October. Although it was a far more polished p r o ­ duction than its predecessors, due to being made entirely on

film

and with a substantially larger budget, Quatermass rather lacks the immediacy o f its predecessors. Ted Childs felt that it 'was perhaps too downbeat a story for a popular audience' and that 'the punters were used to a fairly high standard o f technical representation from American television — you k n o w you had had Star Trek and then

there had been movies like Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. A n d w e just couldn't afford that.'

67

Quatermass, which like the

previous serials was made for adult audiences (it was broadcast at 9.10 p. m. on Wednesday evenings), was outside the mainstream o f television sf as represented by the B B C ' s long-running Doctor Who (which reached the peak o f its popularity in the late 1970s) and by American imports such as Battlestar Galactica (1978—80) and Buck

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Rogers in the 2jth Century ( 1 9 7 9 - 8 1 ) . All those series, significantly, were shown on Saturday evenings around teatime, suggesting that sf was considered essentially a children's genre within the television industry. Kneale, for his part, simply felt that the themes o f the serial had dated in the decade since he wrote it and that 'Quatermass had had his d a y ' .

68

T h a t said, however, Quatermass is not without its points of inter­ est and has, arguably, been unfairly maligned in comparison to the earlier serials. Far from being a p o o r relation to its predecessors, Quatermass is a worthy successor that can be seen as a compendium o f their various themes. It returns to the idea o f space exploration {Experiment), again posits an invasion by stealth {Quatermass IE) and again makes use o f both scientific and occult motifs {Quatermass and the Pit). In particular its narrative o f social disintegration - a characteristic o f 1 9 7 0 s ' futuristic cinema such as A Clockwork Orange (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1 9 7 1 ) , Soylent Green (dir. Richard Fleischer, 1973), Sleeping Dogs (dir. R o g e r D o n a l d s o n , 1977) and Mad Max (dir. G e o r g e Miller, 1979) — suggests that Quatermass's prophetic warning at the end of Quatermass and the Pit has c o m e true. T h e tone is set by an anonymous voice-over narration at the start o f the first episode: 'In that last quarter o f the twentieth century, the whole world seemed to sicken. Civilised institutions, whether old or new, fell as if some primal disorder was reasserting itself. A n d men asked themselves: why should this be?' Quatermass pictures a Britain of the future (it is set approximately in the year 2000) in which order has collapsed: cities are urban wastelands with barricades and violent street gangs, while Wembley Stadium has been turned into a gladiatorial arena where gangs converge to fight each other. T h e two principal gangs are k n o w n as the 'Blue B r i g a d e ' and the 'Badders' — an obvious reference to violent anarchist groups o f the early 1970s such as the R e d Brigades and the Baader—Meinhof G r o u p — and the privatised police force (referred to as 'Pay C o p s ' ) is shown to be both brutal and corrupt. T h e government is represented as ineffectual and indif­ ferent: 'They call it urban collapse — then it's nobody's fault', remarks D r K a p p (MacCorkindale), an idealistic scientist w h o represents a younger version o f the now elderly Quatermass. In its scenes o f urban violence and gang warfare, Quatermass is particularly reminiscent o f A Clockwork Orange: it begins with the professor, on his way to a

JAMES

CHAPMAN

television studio, being mugged by a curiously well-spoken gang not unlike Alex and his ' D r o o g s ' in Kubrick's film. It also anticipates the apocalyptic thriller Mad Max 2 (dir. G e o r g e Miller, 1 9 8 1 ) in linking social disintegration to a fuel shortage: there are references to Britain's N o r t h Sea oil supply (which came online in the 1970s) having dried up and petrol rationing has been introduced. Quatermass, now retired and living in Scotland, is shocked by what he sees in the city and is unable to comprehend the depths to which society has plunged. All he can say - repeatedly — is 'Why?' T h e narrative o f social disintegration is linked thematically to the narrative o f national decline. N o longer a frontrunner in the space race (as she had been in Experiment), Britain has to watch from the sidelines while the United States and the Soviet Union attempt the first link-up in space. Quatermass, now deeply jaundiced about the whole space project, describes this bitterly as 'a symbolic wedding between a corrupt democracy and a monstrous tyranny'. H e recognises that Britain has lost her global role and blames this on the superpowers: 'Two superpowers full o f diseases — political diseases, e c o n o m i c diseases, social diseases. A n d their infections are too strong for us, the small countries, for when w e catch them w e die.' A n American commentator refers to 'that T h i r d World you're so keen o n joining'. In one scene — a visual reference to Quatermass II — Quatermass and K a p p drive through a derelict refinery and Quatermass muses that N o r t h Sea oil was 'going to put everything right', suggesting that the vision of national prosperity and energy self-sufficiency sold to the British public in the 1970s had not been realised. While the theme o f social decay is the most interesting aspect o f the serial, the main storyline concerns Quatermass's search for his missing granddaughter, w h o has run away to join a mysterious sect known as the Planet People. T h e s e are young people w h o have 'dropped out' of society and w h o believe that they will find refuge on another planet through meditation and transference. T h e Planet People converge on ancient sites such as Ringstone R o u n d (a stone circle rather like Stonehenge), where they are suddenly vaporised by an intense white light. Quatermass and D r K a p p investigate, discovering that the appearance o f the light coincides with an energy transmission from an unknown source that destroyed the US—Soviet space station. It transpires that the young people are in fact being 'harvested' by

43

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aliens — for what purpose it is never explained - w h o visited the Earth thousands o f years ago and left subterranean beacons (ley lines) to direct them to particular locations. Here there is an obvious link to Quatermass and the Pit through the device o f an alien threat from the past and the combination o f the scientific and the supernatural. Quatermass is unable to convince the Planet People o f the danger they are in — they distrust all 'science men' — and the

authorities

are equally sceptical. Quatermass is even more o f an outsider than he had been in the previous stories: shunned by establishment and counterculture

alike, his only allies are K a p p and a small group

o f scientists w h o represent rationality in an increasingly anarchistic world. Quatermass and K a p p set a trap for the aliens by creating the impression o f a large gathering o f young people but setting off an atomic bomb. T h e nuclear deterrent o f which Quatermass had been so sceptical in Quatermass and the Pit is now literally a dead man's deterrent: Quatermass apparently suffers a heart attack and, in a gloomily annihilistic climax, dies along with K a p p and Hettie, his granddaughter. K n e a l e never reveals w h o or what the aliens are; his interest seems to have been more in exploring the conflict of age versus youth. H e later made clear where his own sympathies were: T tried to have the older generation saving the young people, but I'm not sure if the young people were worth saving. T h e y weren't that interesting, and they were a bit out o f date: instead of p u n k s . '

flower

children

69

T h e relative disappointment o f the final Quatermass suggests that K n e a l e was correct in believing that 'Quatermass had had his day'. Perhaps it was for this reason that he chose to kill o f f the professor at the end o f the story.

70

It was largely a matter o f changing histori­

cal context. Quatermass originated in the 1950s and the themes that inform the serials — the role o f the scientist in society, the ideological background o f the C o l d War, the decline o f British power - are rooted historically in that decade. Y e t if the cultural relevance of Quatermass has passed, the historical significance o f the original Quatermass serials is incontestable. F o r one thing, they exerted an enormous influence on the future trajectory o f sf as a television genre. T h e thematic similarities to both The Invaders and The X-Files have already been noted; the influence o f Quatermass can also be identified in the B B C ' s own A for Andromeda ( B B C TV, 1 9 6 1 ) , Doctor

JAMES

CHAPMAN

Who ( B B C T V , 1 9 6 3 - 8 9 ; 1996; 2 0 0 5 - ) , Doomwatch ( B B C T V , 1 9 7 0 - 7 2 ) and Survivors ( B B C T V , 1975— 7 7 ) -

71

T h e real historical importance o f

Quatermass, however, is that the serials demonstrated the possibilities of sf written specifically for television that dealt with w i d e r political, social, scientific and ethical issues. Quatermass was neither juvenile nor risible — dangers always inherent in the genre - and p r o v e d that sf, intelligently treated, could win both popular and critical acclaim. It is for this reason that Quatermass may rightly be said to represent

the

origins o f sf as a significant British television genre.

NOTES T h e research for this essay w o u l d not have b e e n p o s s i b l e w i t h o u t the kind assistance o f the staff o f the B B C Written A r c h i v e s Centre, Caversham Park, Reading. M y thanks also to A l m a Hales for facilitating the loan o f tapes o f Quatermass II from the B B C F i l m and V i d e o A r c h i v e and to D r I a n H u n t e r for p r o v i d i n g a c o p y o f The Quatermass Conclusion. 1.

The Quatermass Experiment w a s broadcast in six episodes b e t w e e n 1 8 J u l y and 22 A u g u s t 1 9 5 3 , Quatermass II in six episodes b e t w e e n 22 O c t o b e r a n d 26 N o v e m b e r 1 9 5 5 , and Quatermass and the Pit in six episodes between 22 D e c e m b e r 1 9 5 8 a n d 26 J a n u a r y 1 9 5 9 . T h e film adaptations b y H a m m e r w e r e The Quatermass Experiment ( U S A : The Creeping Unknown, dir. Val G u e s t , 195 5), Quatermass 2 ( U S A : The Enemy from Space, dir. V a l G u e s t , 1 9 5 7 ) and Quatermass and the Pit ( U S A : Five Million Years to Earth, dir. R o y Ward B a k e r , 1 9 6 7 ) . T h e fourth serial, called simply Quatermass, w a s broadcast in four episodes b e t w e e n 24 O c t o b e r and 1 4 N o v e m b e r 1 9 7 9 . A n edited feature-length v e r s i o n o f the last serial w a s prepared for overseas theatrical distribution under the title The Quatermass Conclusion.

2. Catherine J o h n s o n , ' E x p l o i t i n g the Intimate Screen: The Quatermass Experiment, Fantasy a n d the Aesthetic Potential o f E a r l y T e l e v i s i o n D r a m a ' , in J a n e t T h u m i m (ed.), Small Screens, Big Ideas: Television in the ip;os (London: L B . Tauris, 2002), p. 1 8 1 ; Charles B a r r , 'Broadcasting and C i n e m a 2. Screens within Screens', in C . B a r r (ed.),^4// Our Yesterdays: po Years of British Cinema ( L o n d o n : British F i l m Institute, 1 9 8 6 ) , p. 2 1 ; . 3. J a s o n J a c o b s , The Intimate Screen: Early British Television Drama ( O x f o r d : Clarendon Press, 2000), p. 1 1 7 . 4. A n indication o f the ' l o w ' cultural status still attached to s f is that the serials are glossed o v e r in the 'official' history o f the B B C b y A s a Briggs, w h o s e only c o m m e n t o n the g r o u n d - b r e a k i n g Quatermass Experiment is that it 'was the first o f m a n y ventures in serialized science

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fiction'. B r i g g s also seems to confuse the story lines o f the second and third serials, writing that 'in the third series [sic] the Professor, operating in a Ministry o f Science that was dominated by " Z o m b i e s " (a key w o r d o f the period), discovered " n e w depth in himself".' See the fourth and fifth v o l u m e s o f his History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom: Sound and Vision 194J—H ( O x f o r d : O x f o r d University Press, 1 9 7 9 ) , p. 640, and Competition (Oxford: O x f o r d University Press, 1 9 9 5 ) , pp. 423—4. M o s t critical discussion o f Quatermass is to be found in cult television and sf magazines: Stephen R. Bissette, ' T h e Q u a t e r m a s s C o n c e p t i o n : N i g e l K n e a l e and the Birth o f Television Terror', Video Watchdog 1 2 ( J u l y / A u g u s t 1992), pp. 3 2 - 4 6 ; J o h n Brosnan, ' Q u a t e r m a s s ' , StarBurst 1 5 ( 1 9 7 9 ) , pp. 5—8; A n d r e w Pixley, ' G r a v e Situ­ ation: Q u a t e r m a s s E n t e r s ' , TV Zone 1 0 6 (September 1998), pp. 3 9 - 4 3 ; A n d r e w Pixley, ' T h e Martian Inheritance: We are the Martians', TV Zone 1 1 0 (January 1999), pp. 3 6 - 4 1 ; and D a v e Rolinson and N i c k C o o p e r , ' " B r i n g S o m e t h i n g B a c k " : T h e Strange Career o f P r o f e s s o r B e r n a r d Quatermass',y»»r»