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The Quatermass Experiment

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Television

            The Quatermass Experiment
    The Quatermass Experiment opening titles.
         Genre
     Running time
       Starring
   Country of origin UK
   Original channel  BBC
                 TV.com summary

   The Quatermass Experiment is a British television science-fiction
   serial, transmitted by BBC Television in the summer of 1953, and
   re-staged by BBC Four in 2005. Originally comprising six half-hour
   episodes, it was the first science-fiction production to be written
   especially for an adult television audience. Previous
   written-for-television efforts such as Stranger from Space (1951–52)
   had been aimed at children, whereas adult sci-fi dramas had been
   adapted from literary sources, such as R.U.R. (1938 and again in 1948)
   and The Time Machine (1949). It was the first of four Quatermass
   serials to be screened on British television between 1953 and 1979.

Background

   The serial was written by BBC staff television drama writer Nigel
   Kneale, who had previously been an actor and an award-winning prose
   fiction writer before joining the staff of the BBC. He was interested
   in the idea of 'science going bad', and it was this interest in science
   and scientific concepts that led him to write The Quatermass
   Experiment. The serial was an expensive one: Head of Television Drama
   Michael Barry had to commit the majority of his original script budget
   for the year to the material. Kneale famously claimed to have picked
   his leading character's unusual-sounding name at random from a London
   telephone directory.

   The serial was directed by Rudolph Cartier, one of the BBC's most
   highly regarded directors, and transmitted live with only a few
   pre-filmed inserts from Studio A of the BBC's original television
   studios at Alexandra Palace in London. It was one of the last major
   dramas to be broadcast from the Palace, as the majority of television
   production was soon to transfer to Lime Grove Studios.

   The Quatermass Experiment was transmitted weekly on Saturday nights
   from July 18 to August 22, 1953. Episode one (Contact Has Been
   Established) was scheduled from 8.15 to 8.45 p.m., episode two (Persons
   Reported Missing) 8.25–8.55 p.m., episodes three and four (Very Special
   Knowledge and Believed to be Suffering) 8.45–9.15 p.m., and the final
   two episodes (An Unidentified Species and State of Emergency) from 9.00
   to 9.30 p.m. In practice, however, due to the live transmissions each
   episode overran its slot slightly, from between two (episode four) and
   six (episode six) minutes. The long overrun of the final episode was
   caused by a temporary break in transmission necessitated by a failing
   microphone which needed to be replaced. The dramatic theme music for
   the serial was provided by Mars, Bringer of War from Gustav Holst's The
   Planets suite.

   It was intended by the BBC that each episode should be telerecorded
   onto 35mm film, a relatively new process that allowed for the
   preservation of live television broadcasts. Sale of the serial had even
   been provisionally agreed with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
   In the event, however, only poor-quality copies of the first two
   episodes would be recorded before the idea was abandoned, although the
   first of these was indeed later shown in Canada. These two episodes are
   the oldest surviving examples of a multi-episodic British drama
   production and some of the earliest extant examples of British
   television drama at all, with only a few one-off plays surviving from
   beforehand.

Plot

   Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

   The story revolves around Professor Bernard Quatermass, head of the
   British Experimental Rocket Group, and begins with him anxiously
   awaiting the return to Earth of his experimental rocket ship and its
   crew, who have become the first humans to travel into space. The rocket
   is at first thought lost, having dramatically overshot its planned
   orbit, but eventually is picked up on radar and returns to Earth,
   crash-landing in Wimbledon, London.

   When Quatermass and his team reach the crash area and succeed in
   opening the rocket, they discover that only one of the three crewmen,
   Victor Carroon, remains inside. Quatermass and his chief assistant
   Paterson ( Hugh Kelly) investigate the interior of the rocket, but are
   baffled by what they find. The space suits of the others are present,
   and the instruments on board indicate that the door was never opened in
   flight, but of the other two there is no sign.

   Carroon is gravely ill, being looked after by the Rocket Group's
   doctor, Briscoe ( John Glen), who unknown to him has been having an
   affair with his wife, Judith ( Isebel Dean). It is not just Quatermass
   who is interested in what happened to Carroon: the newspapers and
   Scotland Yard's Inspector Lomax are also keen to hear his story.
   Carroon is abducted by a group of foreign agents whose government wants
   the information they believe he has obtained about travelling in space,
   but it is clear that there is something very wrong. He seems to have
   somehow absorbed the consciousnesses of the other two crewmembers, and
   is himself slowly mutating into some hideous creature.

   As the police chase the rapidly transforming Carroon across London,
   Quatermass analyzes samples of the mutated creature in the laboratory,
   and realizes that it has the ability to end all life on earth. A
   television crew working on an architectural program spots the monster
   in Westminster Abbey, and Quatermass and the army rush in to destroy it
   in the last hour before it brings about doomsday.

Cast and crew

   Nigel Kneale went on to become one of the most highly regarded
   scriptwriters in the history of British television following the
   success of The Quatermass Experiment. As well as the various Quatermass
   spin-offs and sequels, he penned such acclaimed productions as Nineteen
   Eighty-Four (1954) and The Stone Tape (1972). Kneale also appeared
   on-screen, in a sense, in the final episode of the serial: he 'played'
   the monster seen in Westminster Abbey at the climax, his hands
   operating the 'creature' stuck through a photographic blow-up of the
   interior of the Abbey. The monster was actually made up of gloves
   covered in various pieces of plant and other material, prepared by
   Kneale and his girlfriend, later wife, Judith Kerr.

   Rudolph Cartier had emigrated from Germany in the 1930s to escape the
   Nazi regime there, and was already one of the BBC's top television
   directors, once described as "the man largely responsible for the genre
   as we know it". He went on to collaborate with Kneale on several
   further productions, and became a major figure in the British
   television industry, directing such important productions as Kneale's
   Nineteen Eighty-Four adaptation, the two further BBC Quatermass
   serials, and one-off plays such as Lee Oswald: Assassin (1966).

   Of the cast, Quatermass himself was played by the experienced Reginald
   Tate, who had appeared in various films including The Way Ahead (1944).
   Sadly, he was to die just two years later, while preparing to take the
   role of the Professor again in Quatermass II. Victor Carroon was played
   by Scottish actor Duncan Lamont, who later appeared in the film Mutiny
   on the Bounty (1962) and as a different character in the film
   adaptation of Quatermass and the Pit (1967). Appearing briefly as a
   drunk was Wilfrid Brambell, who would later appear as a tramp in
   Quatermass II.

Reaction

   The Quatermass Experiment gained very favourable viewing figures for
   1953, opening with an estimated audience of 3.4 million people for the
   first episode, building to 5 million for the sixth and final episode,
   with an overall average of 3.9 million for the entire serial.

   As well as the ratings, the serial gained a very positive response from
   those who had watched, with several letters praising the production
   being sent to the BBC's listings magazine, the Radio Times. The writer
   and producer were also praised for their work by readers of TV News
   magazine, by which they were nominated for one of the publication's 'TV
   Bouquet' awards.

Film, sequels and DVD

   The popularity of The Quatermass Experiment did not go unnoticed in the
   film world, and Hammer Films quickly purchased the rights to make a
   feature film adaptation, which was released in 1955 and starred the
   American actor Brian Donlevy. It was directed by Val Guest, who also
   wrote the screenplay, and Nigel Kneale was very unhappy with the
   result—he had been unable to work on the project himself due to his BBC
   staff contract.

   For the cinema, the film had been titled The Quatermass Xperiment, to
   play up the film's X-certificate status. In America, the film was
   re-titled The Creeping Unknown.

   The BBC was also very pleased with the success of The Quatermass
   Experiment, and in 1955 a sequel, Quatermass II appeared. This was
   followed in 1958 by Quatermass and the Pit, and both of these also had
   feature film versions made by Hammer. The character returned to
   television in a 1979 serial, simply titled Quatermass, for Thames
   Television.

   A script book of The Quatermass Experiment, containing several
   production stills from the missing episodes, was published by Penguin
   Books in 1959, and re-published in 1979 with a new introduction by
   Kneale.

   In April 2005, BBC Worldwide released a boxed set of all their existing
   Quatermass material on DVD, containing digitally restored versions of
   the two existing episodes of The Quatermass Experiment as well as the
   two subsequent BBC serials and various extra material. This includes
   PDF files of photocopies of the original scripts for episodes three
   through six. However, they range in quality from readable to (in an
   extreme case in episode six) illegible.

2005 remake

   On Saturday 2 April 2005, the BBC's digital channel BBC Four broadcast
   a live remake of the serial, abridged to a single one-hour-forty-minute
   special from the original six thirty-minute episodes, although it was
   scheduled in a two-hour slot—underrunning whereas most of the original
   episodes had overrun. Adapted from the original scripts by Executive
   Producer Richard Fell, the new broadcast was directed by Sam Miller.
   Kneale acted as a consultant, and the production was the BBC's first
   live made-for-television drama broadcast for over twenty years.

   Actor Jason Flemyng played Quatermass, with Mark Gatiss as Paterson,
   Andrew Tiernan as Carroon, David Tennant as Briscoe, and Adrian Dunbar
   as Detective Lomax. The broadcast suffered only a few errors with some
   fluffed lines, several on- and off-camera stumbles, background sounds
   occasionally obscuring the dialogue, and, at the programme's end, a
   cameraman and sound man in shot. On two occasions near the middle of
   the broadcast a large on-screen graphic advising viewers that a major
   news story — the death of Pope John Paul II — was being covered on BBC
   News 24 was overlaid onto the action.

   The story was basically identical to the original, although set in the
   present day. The climax was moved from Westminster Abbey to Tate Modern
   (as the latter was easier to replicate in studio) and there is no
   visible monster.

   Although the broadcast was live, the colour and contrast were
   manipulated to make the picture look more like film—a common practice
   in modern videotaped drama, but one that could be seen as ironic in
   this case. Drawing an average audience of 482,000, The Quatermass
   Experiment became BBC Four's second-highest rated programme of all
   time, behind The Alan Clark Diaries. The production was released on
   DVD, with an audio commentary and various other extra features, in
   October 2005.
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