12-05-2025
How The Quatermass Experiment terrified 1950s Britain
In June 1953, Great Britain was experiencing a frisson of optimism, unity and national pride as all eyes turned towards Westminster Abbey and the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Everest had just been conquered, rationing was coming to an end, the Comet jet was taking passengers to the other side of the world. The nation was dizzy as new heights were achieved and old frontiers were broken.
Writer Nigel Kneale – 50 per cent of the BBC's two-man script unit for the fledgling medium of television – decided that this celebratory fervour needed shaking up a bit. 'A sour note seemed indicated,' he later recalled, gleefully.
The result was The Quatermass Experiment, a six-part serial broadcast live from the BBC's original television studios in Alexandra Palace from 18 July. A trailblazing piece of work, it transformed what television drama could do, and has influenced practically every piece of quality TV science fiction that came afterwards.
The serial concerns the return to Earth of the first manned space rocket after it has been missing in the uncharted darkness of space for over 57 hours. It finally crashes down on a suburban street, echoing both the recent horrors of the Blitz and the looming threat of nuclear armageddon. When Professor Bernard Quatermass and his team from the British Experimental Rocket Group open the vessel, only one astronaut remains. He is almost catatonic, unable to explain the fate of his two colleagues, whose empty suits remain on board a ship which was sealed throughout its flight.
In a story of unfolding menace, what transpires is that the vessel encountered what Quatemass postulates was a 'plankton of the ether' which used the three astronauts to try to acclimatise itself to our world. The sole survivor is, in fact, an amalgam of all three men, and his body is slowly transforming into a mass of alien vegetation which finally reveals itself during a live television broadcast from… where else? Westminster Abbey.
Nigel Kneale had grown up on the Isle of Man, his psyche infused with its folklore and oral storytelling tradition; he had an aptitude for the unusual and a gift for creating tension through language and character. His producer on The Quatermass Experiment, Rudolph Cartier, was a Jewish Austrian emigre with a background in film who had escaped the Holocaust and was on a mission to improve British television with ambitious visuals and serious-minded intent.
Together, they worked their magic in difficult conditions: the bulky cameras were hard to manoeuvre around the pokey, hot studios at Alexandra Palace, the technology was primitive, and there was no special effects unit at the BBC. The final manifestation of the alien threat, therefore, was made by Kneale and his girlfriend. They dressed a pair of gardening gloves with latex and vegetation, which Kneale then donned and stuck through a photo blow-up of the Abbey, waggling his fingers. The shot stopped the nation in its tracks. The girlfriend who helped him, Judith Kerr, would soon be Kneale's wife. She's best-known now for making her own indelible contribution to popular culture through her children's classics Mog the Forgetful Cat and The Tiger Who Came to Tea.
Such were the technical hurdles of making a science fiction epic live in a small studio that life imitated art when a technical fault resulted in the action being interrupted at a key moment during the final episode. Kneale had already deployed the ingenious flourish of having his alien unleashed during a fictional television broadcast from Westminster Abbey, flirting with the idea of 'meta' even in the earliest days of the medium. In the story, the nation watches, horrified, as the creature grows and Professor Quatermass tells them to prepare for the worst: so when the actual broadcast was interrupted and a caption displayed reassuring viewers that 'Normal Service Will Be Resumed Shortly' they could have been forgiven for thinking that the creature on their screens might have been responsible. As technicians scrabbled to get the serial back on air, soothing music played. 'It should have been Abide with Me,' quipped The News of the World.
Fortunately, the creature was overcome – not by flamethrowers or explosions, but by Quatermass appealing to the last vestiges of humanity still residing within the horrific manifestation.
At the core of Kneale's work was the battle between science and superstition; the need for reason to guide humanity out of the darkness lest we revert to savagery. Dissonance was his stock in trade. His best work ponders the combustible clash of the rational with the irrational, the ordinary with the extraordinary, the ancient with the futuristic. He also used the tools of horror to tell his science fiction stories, but grounded them in the present with plausible characters. For instance, a pioneer's guilt hangs over the character of Quatermass; scientific progress is built on risk, and risk often brings disaster. He tortures himself that he might be an irresponsible charlatan rather than the daring explorer he'd hoped to be.
Kneale's hero-with-a-conscience – played in The Quatermass Experiment with an artful synthesis of dynamism and melancholy by Reginald Tate – got his memorable name after the writer flicked through to Q in the London telephone directory, looking for inspiration. His Christian name, Bernard, invoked the astronomer Sir Bernard Lovell.
While the fictional Quatermass tested the possibilities of science, his creators were just as pioneering in their own medium. The Quatermass Experiment won plaudits and spawned two sequels. Quatermass II from 1955 (starring John Robinson after the sudden death of Tate) is a paranoid conspiracy thriller which posits that aliens are already among us. They propagate themselves in large, mysterious factory complexes – which, with grim irony, are based on Quatermass's own designs to house humans in an alien environment. In 1958/59, came the peerless Quatermass and the Pit, and the compelling André Morell as the third actor to play the title role. It is a richly sophisticated blend of folklore, the supernatural and contemporary concerns about racial division and nuclear obliteration. The discovery of a mysterious object during the rebuilding of post-Blitz London reveals that our human condition – including our superstitions, tribalism and destructive propensities – was programmed, instilled into Neanderthal man millions of years ago by the dying insects of Mars, colonising us by proxy.
It's hugely sophisticated stuff, miles away from the B-Movie cliches that infused a lot of popular science fiction. Quatermass was not cult TV – it was mainstream entertainment that caused a stir and spoke to its viewers on a number of levels.
Alas, only the first two episodes of The Quatermass Experiment reside in the BBC archives: so crude were the techniques of the time that when a fly landed on the monitor from which the live performance was being recorded, the resulting pictures were deemed of insufficient quality and so plans to record the final four instalments were canceled.
But Quatermass has endured.
Each of the Quatermass serials was turned into a film by Hammer studios, and the good professor found himself influencing a generation of creatives, including Stephen King, Joe Dante, and John Carpenter (who hired Kneale to write Halloween III: Season of the Witch – although Kneale subsequently asked that his credit was removed). Kneale himself revived the character on ITV, now played by Sir John Mills, in a large-budget 1979 production about a nebulous, far-off alien intelligence using stone circles as a beacon and digesting gathering crowds of youths, and The Quatermass Experiment itself was remade as a live 90-minute drama by BBC Four in 2005, with Jason Flemyng as Quatermass.
Like the Martian inheritance he fought, Quatermass is now embedded in our cultural memory and traces of him can be found everywhere – from Doctor Who, via The X-Files and Black Mirror to The League of Gentlemen.
Nigel Kneale, a writer so preoccupied with the power that ancient stories have to implant themselves in our collective consciousness, himself created a character – a name – that lingers. He did so whilst pushing the boundaries of what was possible with television. As the opening narration of The Quatermass Experiment says, 'An experiment is an operation designed to uncover some unknown truth, it is also a risk…'
The Quatermass Experiment was a risk worth taking.
