Thursday 19 December 2019

TWENTIETH

TWENTIETH

A spiral of gloom
In my own living room
Grips me
And the afternoon unfolds 

The twentieth is near
A month of no cheer
Has passed
Since the axe finally fell

A month of nothing achieved
Not quite true - I have breathed
About
What my future might hold

Confidence swiftly shatters
Believing you don’t matter
In a world 
So confusingly strange

Yet we still soldier on
Despite not having begun 
To find
Those peculiar answers we seek

And whilst we plod through these days
In something of a haze
We know 
Something will have to be done 

MAWH, 191219

Wednesday 18 December 2019

PODCAST 43 - QUATERMASS AND THE PIT Episode Two


Somehow I managed to stagger through reading this in the latest “Round The Archives" podcast from Lisa and Andrew (available at https://soundcloud.com/user-868590968/rta043-episode-43-the-legendary-festive-double-issue) - this is the text for anyone who couldn't understand my burbled nonsense...

PODCAST 43 – QUATERMASS AND THE PIT Episode Two

‘THE GHOSTS’

As my recent article about episode one of the BBC version of QUATERMASS AND THE PIT was so relatively well received by our dear listener, I decided that it might be nice for me to take a rather unprecedented step out of my usual ROUND THE ARCHIVES comfort zone and move beyond the confines of episode one and venture into the uncharted realms of episode two, and, perhaps some other time, even the rest of the remaining five installments of this six-part serial.

Well, it is a stone-cold classic, and so very influential for the likes of us who enjoy trawling our way through the archives, that it probably is the one thing that I might find to be worthy of such scrutiny.

Episode two of this six part serial was, as they all were, written by Nigel Kneale, and directed and produced for the BBC by Rudolph Cartier. Episode two is entitled “THE GHOSTS” and was broadcast on December the 29th 1958, just before the new year.

Happily, in the full version, after the opening titles there is a recap of silent footage from the previous episode “THE HALF MEN” which reintroduces most of the main players and explains the story so far. Tales of fossil finds and fragments, Roney and Judd reconstructing a clay interpretation of a “creature” – a word interestingly chosen to add to the sense of creeping menace alongside that already familiar occasional fanfare on the music track – and what appears to be an unexploded bomb being found at the dig site finally bring us round to Colonel James Breen and – ta-dah! – Professor Quatermass himself (!) whilst filling in the antagonistic backstory of the behind the scenes boardroom battles for control of the British Experimental Rocket Group.

The voiceover is fruity, and the film remains mute until…

The recap of last week’s episode and that realization that a skull of an impossibly ancient age was found in the rock strata somewhere above the strange unexploded bomb or whatever it might turn out to be, and suggesting that something else entirely might be going on here.

The Professor – played in this serial by the third actor to portray him, in an exceptional performance by Andre Morell – was interrupted for a week during his astonished utterance of “Five MILLION years…” but now that particular discussion with his new Deputy at the Rocket Group, Breen – played with stoic skepticism by Anthony Bushell – can continue, and he is faced with the concrete wall of Breen’s mind, as the suggestion of such great age is obviously poppycock given that the thing has hardly corroded at all.

John Stratton’s Captain Potter, the poor bugger who might be expected to defuse the thing, is more concerned about what it’s made of which leads to the old Professor doing some “off the cuff” experiments with a diamond ring and digging around in the dirt to find something – to Potter’s increasing alarm – that might be the horns of a sea mine (!) but turns out to be some sort of elaborate knob.

So, whilst Potter worries about strikers and fuses, the Professor is already making the huge leap about whether they once carried some kind of external mechanism. Then there’s just time for a quick name-check for “Carry On Sergeant” before Quatermass rather smugly suggests that Breen should take charge here as the Rocket Group could probably spare them both for a couple of days.

British Experimental Rocket Group – Days without accident: Two.

Anyhow, with the bizarrely unlikely admission that “this is a problem and I enjoy problems”, Breen persuades himself to stick around, and it turns out from the Civil Defence records that Captain Potter has acquired that there are no records of anything falling around here other than a few incendiaries and Christine Finn’s Barbara Judd, bright girl that she is, suggests that they might ask some of the people who live around here, and, because Quatermass has indeed spotted an elderly couple still lurking about, she heads off to do so.

Breen, the old misery-guts, tells Potter that he should go after her because “this isn’t a game…!” which says a lot about what they thought of women back then, and at least Cec Linder’s Roney has the decency to finally pipe up with a tart retort that she knows that.

Meanwhile Quatermass prompts Breen about whether he has any guesses as to what the thing might be, and Breen is convinced that this is some kind of experimental V-Weapon, a theory which Quatermass dismisses, even though “some pretty queer things were cooked up towards the end of the war,” as any viewer in the home counties at least would have been well aware of.

Interestingly, of course, the character of Quatermass himself would have been brewed up from the real-world equivalents working on rockets in Nazi Germany, and some of the strange things that did fall down on London less than fifteen years earlier might have been cooked up by those very inspirations. Indeed, if a large V-Weapon had landed in Hobb’s Lane back in 1945 and unearthed this strange artefact then, what a different outcome the world might have had.

Not only that, of course, but, within the narrative fiction of the Quatermass stories, at least one of Quatermass’s own rockets had fallen on London itself not half a dozen years earlier, but let’s not dwell.

“Not one of yours is it Prof?” might have been TOO metatextual for 1958.

Meanwhile, the sergeant played by Michael Ripper has been digging away at the ground with his group of sappers and has discovered some kind of hole in the side of the thing in the pit…

 Anyway, the elderly couple – Mr and Mrs Chilcott – are found on their own doorstep, being ushered away from their home by the policemen who allowed them to pop in during the previous week’s episode. Mr Chilcott is played in long-suffering silence by Howell Davies, but it is his wife played by QUATERMASS stalwart Hilda Barry who does all the talking, and she is, as ever, bloody brilliant.

Surprisingly, she turned up a decade and a half later in an episode of SPECIAL BRANCH I watched recently, still giving her take on dotty old ladies even then.

It’s a beautiful cameo, full of the need for long woollies, and indignity of being the rightful occupiers of a home they’re forced to abandon, creeping damp, more than one war, and no recollections of any bombs – well, they’d have heard the thump wouldn’t they? - other than those little fire ones. They were never going to be moved by bombs or builders, and, as they are hurried along by the increasingly exasperated police officers, we discover that the ruined building next door was not collapsing due to bomb damage but… something else… and it’s something that she really doesn’t want to talk about.

The policeman is less forthcoming, dismissing the fact that people won’t live in it despite the housing shortage as “some tale” but Mrs Chilcott is adamant that the place is haunted, and that reporters had come and everything, but she seems a little embarrassed by it all now, and ushers her husband away for his supper as our strange little tale of peculiar findings at archaeological digs quite suddenly and seamlessly turns into a ghost story.

It’s possible that the scene with the Chilcotts was only there to help with the set change to expose more of the buried missile, but what a delightfully eerie scene it is, and Nigel Kneale’s brilliance at building that sense of creeping menace is well served by it.

Quatermass meanwhile finds himself back in the world of science as the sappers dig out the hard-packed clay from some sort of hatchway.
Barbara Judd is more kindly disposed towards the elderly couple as Potter explains to Breen that she just started telling some kind of ghost story, which is exactly the kind of thing that makes Breen bristle. However, they are interrupted as, down in the deep dark shadows, by the lights of repositioned torch beams, the sergeant finds what might be a rock but turns out to be another – almost intact – human-like skull, which then fills the lens with the full intensity shading of any camp fire horror story like any good skull ought to.

Upon this new discovery, Roney leaps into action, something he hasn’t done much so far in this episode, and seems oblivious to something Quatermass seems to find quite odd, but that Breen has an irrational explanation for, that these particular finds seem to have been magnificently – if perhaps miraculously – preserved. Roney dashes off to his makeshift headquarters in CRISPIN’s hut and Quatermass is handed another find, which prompts him to follow.

Roney is over-excited and distracted by this new skull, and thinks that this new find will vindicate him in the eyes of his scientific rivals who remain sceptical about his claims. A little bit of foretelling comes from his babbled remarks about someone accusing him of being able to produce a monster from any collection old bones, but that’s a surprise yet to come.

It is Quatermass, however, using several long and meaningful stares, who finally gets him to question how these things were so well protected after being found inside what is still presumed to be a fallen bomb.

Another mystery is brewing.

Meanwhile, the Professor is somewhat amused to find out from Barbara that the Chilcotts had been talking about a haunted house, but they are interrupted by a suddenly very sombre-looking Potter announcing that they are to pack everything up, and that the Colonel would “like a word,” and we cut to a Geiger counter clicking away over the mud of the site.

1959. Radiation. The very word would strike terror into the hearts of viewers everywhere.

Breen apparently thought he’d better check, and has found low levels of radiation all around the end of the missile more or less where the mechanism they had previously assumed to be missing might have been.

Quatermass archly suggests that they were “clever fellows the hun” to have developed – then lost – the secret of nuclear propulsion so late in the war.

We try to ignore his own attempts at nuclear powered flight that proved so handy towards the latter end of the previous Quatermass serial, of course. Here, his smugness is not about whether the B.E.R.G. had developed one itself later on, but at Breen’s insistence upon rearranging the facts to fit his theory.

Anyway things are packed away, samples are taken, and the site starts to get abandoned as lights snap off and we are plunged into an eerie darkness, in which Quatermass, his breath visible in the cold night air of the partially external set, glances up at the model shot of the collapsed end terrace house that has piqued his curiosity, before the practical trucks are loaded up, the police officers raise the barriers, and they start to drive away.

Quatermass is left almost alone in the dark emptiness of the pit, and there’s a so-called haunted house just waiting to be investigated, so he does.

The place is a ruin. A brilliantly constructed set of a ruin, but a ruin nevertheless, eerily picked out by torchlight, it proves to be a surprisingly effective-looking haunted house for a small terrace.

He is followed in by the police officer, Ellis, who recognizes him from earlier, and starts to point out that this is not bomb damage, and that he’s worked out that it must have been empty since 1927 after some ghost scare, and that people won’t live in it despite the post-war housing shortage.

He then tells stories of when he was a nipper because – significantly – he has local knowledge, and how children like him would come and knock on the doors for “dares” because there were tales of noises, bangs and bumps and “things” being seen.

He then opens the door to the kitchen, the part of the house that was considered to be “the bad place” which sets us up nicely for more dark fears.

Inside the kitchen, there are huge scratches cutting deeply into the walls. They’re just THERE. Nothing more is needed. Quatermass asks Ellis what they are and he dismisses it as the work of kids. Quatermass points out that they must be far bolder than when Ellis was a lad, and Ellis seems affronted, making the excuse that “it’s all quiet now…” and whilst he seems reluctant to admit whether he ever saw anything himself, Quatermass is disturbed by what he thinks is a noise, and his sudden shocking “Shhh!” is accompanied by that creepy music designed to set us all on edge deep inside that supposedly haunted house, although the subsequent “I thought I heard – No, I DID hear…” alarms both the police officer and Quatermass himself, but he decides that it’s nothing.

Now.

I bet it had a nation clinging to their cushions, though and jumping out of their seats.

The art here is all in the excellent performances, the lighting, and the soundtrack, and it’s deftly handled without resorting to any special effects whatsoever.

Quatermass’s curiosity has been piqued however, as he asks about the whereabouts of the Chilcotts.

We cut to close view of a teacup held, as we pull back, in the hands of Miss Groome, a fearsome looking lady played with bluff bluntness by Madge Brindley. She is a woman who claims to have the gift of second-sight and is reading the tea-leaves of both the Chilcotts – a sea voyage is imminent, apparently - although Mr Chilcott chooses instead to escape silently to his chair just as Quatermass comes calling to disturb the spirits.

“He’s a bit – you know – getting on” being one of Nigel Kneale’s terrific character building single lines that say so much.

He greets them with a cheery “I’m a scientist” which is expected to explain everything, much as characters in fifties police series introduced themselves with “I’m a police officer” and the plot would thicken.

Here, however, there is momentary confusion because he claims to be concerned with the bomb, and Mrs Chilcott is eager to find out whether they’ve fixed it.

Instead, however, he is there to discuss the goings on in the house next door to their own, and one of the great QUATERMASS AND THE PIT moments is about to occur as Hilda Barry moves front and centre to describe the terrifying events of the year after the general strike.

Miss Groome has little time for scientists it would seem, scornfully referring to them as sceptics, and whilst Quatermass claims to try and be a little more open-minded, our sympathy is firmly meant to be siding with the rational at this point, which is interesting, given where this serial eventually starts moving towards.

But we’re getting too far ahead of ourselves for the moment.

Hilda Barry’s performance describing the disturbances that gradually faded away is a delight, shot perfectly to get the most out of her expressive face as she describes the dreadful sounds they heard, the tapping and the knocking, and the furniture moving about, and the terrible night when Mr Earnshaw arrived screaming at their door after he’d seen a – remember this – “mysterious figure,” in the kitchen, all of which paints a vivid and unforgettable picture of life in that house in Hobb’s Lane thirty years earlier, and she, at least, has no doubt that those mysterious scratches were not the work of any children.

Sadly, they are still rather bitter at having been made to look foolish by the newspaper reporters back in the day, and this puts Miss Groome on her guard against non-believers of her version of the truth, as Quatermass becomes suddenly aware that Miss Groome – it would seem - is from the rather more foolish end of the occultist spectrum.

Ultimately, having been put on the spot by an increasingly bothersome Miss Groome, Quatermass makes his excuses and leaves them to their tea leaf reading, and the close up of Miss Groome’s terror at the next sight she sees in her tea cup dissolves to a massive dinosaur skull at the Nicklin Institute that we find out is called Charlie.

Quatermass has decided to pay a call on Roney who is eager to get back to the site of the dig and as they discuss their mutual dislike of Breen, the camera favours a peculiar gadget on the shelves of Roney’s office which is his little hobby – an attempt as seeing the pictures of the mind’s eye which he calls a Optic-encephalograph which – perhaps amusingly – resembles the “popular notion” of what a space helmet might look like, which is nicely self-referential given that that popular notion was probably largely shaped by the earlier QUATERMASS serials.

That said, it’s an impressive piece of kit because, as we will find out in later episodes, the bloomin’ thing actually works…! Quatermass could indeed have come and helped him tinker with it once he’d been booted out of the Rocket Group, and they would probably have shared a Nobel Prize or twelve.

Anyway, with that plot point nicely seeded and packed away for future weeks, Roney opens up his Thermos flask full of coffee – no machines in the lobby back then – and returns to the looming clay figure based upon the discoveries that featured back in “The Half Men” episode the week before.

They may be nearly five million years old, but they fit in the established evolutionary line, so that’s one mystery resolved at least, or at least we think it is.

However, one line of human evolution does get explored here, in the small matter of human males being patronizing about the currently absent Barbara Judd who has taken the morning off – Roney, like an idiot, assumes it’s to have her hair done – and now he can’t find any of his notes, and remember it was Roney who leapt to her defence earlier in the episode.

Luckily, his “damn that girl” nonsense is interrupted by a phone call from an actual idiot, one Colonel Breen, who is, even now back at the pit lowering the surface level by several feet with mechanical diggers, and, in the process, destroying all the careful archaeological work that ought to be done.

Roney is, of course, aghast at this, but Quatermass is more concerned about other matters.

At his insistence, Breen also – rather dismissively - reads him the results of the radiation tests they did, and announces that they are clearly absurd as they suggest that the radioactivity is artificial – “man made” if you will (but we will soon discover perhaps not) - from some lost nuclear reactor unit which would have to be five million years old.

Breen latches on to that word “absurd” like a security blanket, whilst Quatermass is left to ponder.

We are again transported back to the Hobb’s Lane site, where the magnificent missile is now fully exposed.

This must have been shot on film because, even though there is talk of the set designers building the set ever deeper as the weeks progressed, this sequence appears in the same episode as the sequence earlier when the sergeant is feeling around inside the missile and finding the skull, so it’s unlikely – though not impossible – that the two versions of the set could have been dressed for live transmission.

Anyway, with its body all studded, and that circular hatchway opening, and the mysterious bulbous sealed compartment, it is, in many ways a very nineteen-fifties idea of what a spaceship buried for five million years might look like, but it’s also instantly iconic in a way that the Hammer Film version a decade later doesn’t quite manage.

And, of course, there’s so much about it that reminds you of another iconic science fiction design that’s only five years from being brought into being in another BBC serial which will assume some significance, but it’s probably best not to go there just yet.

Roney is furious, of course, as the bomb-disposal team use hoses to turn the site into a sea of wet sticky mud, but Quatermass is more fascinated at the structure that has been revealed, and, for a moment, as he grabs handfuls of the mud all around him, the language turns full colour as the greens and reds streaking throughout it suggest the decay of some ancient propulsion mechanism of a similar vintage to those “absurd” radiation test results.

Breen is, of course, more than sceptical about that, but we are saved from witnessing further argument as the camera favours a couple of sappers taking a break.

They are the ubiquitous Harold Goodwin as Corporal Gibson, and his nervy pal, Sapper West played by John Walker, and who is someone to keep an eye on as he’s about to suddenly move very much to the middle of the action.

For the moment, however, they are happy to notice just how stumped these bigwigs appear to be, although their high spirits are brought down with a bump – or a bang – as the loud tap of a hammer reminds them just how dangerous an unexploded bomb can be.

It’s a sight gag, and, just as it needs to, it breaks the tension for just a moment.

Or causes the nation to jump again. It’s hard to imagine the tension that might have been wrought upon first transmission, but it certainly made an impression.

As Roney tries to salvage what he can, “that girl” Barbara Judd returns, and seems rightly startled by the transformation the military mind has wrought upon their fossil dig.

Despite Roney’s protestations that they need to get on with things, she is rather eager to talk to the Professor and so he joins them.

Instead of having her hair done, Barbara has been off doing some research to help out old Bernard in her own time, and she produces a large sheaf of photocopies of her researches taken from the archives.

So we at ROUND THE ARCHIVES like her a little bit more already.

Reading through these various headlines she has brought for him, all full of tales of spooks and ghosts, Quatermass comes across as a really ungrateful so-and-so as he remembers the strange spiritualist world inhabited by Miss Groome and the Chilcotts the previous evening.

Barbara is, quite naturally, rather affronted at his dismissive response to all of her efforts, especially as she was only trying to help the old sod because he seemed curious.

“Won’t be doing that again” she muttered under her breath I’m sure, and even his distracted half-hearted “My fault” really does little to endear him at this point.

When you think about the lot of women working in the scientific world, and their struggle to get recognition and credibility in the Big Boy’s Club that it can be even now, this exchange seems significant, especially with regard to Watson and Crick and Rosalind Franklin in the earlier part of that very decade that the QUATERMASS serials were produced in.

I don’t necessarily think that this is an example of Kneale’s famed prescience, of course, but it does make for an interesting exchange in hindsight.

However, as she returns to her day job of measuring stuff for Dr Matthew Roney, which is unlikely to be a job for life, I fear, one of the other newspaper headlines she has gathered together catches Quatermass’s eye, and there is mention of a Tube Line Extension that was taking place at about the same time as the supposed manifestations which seems to excite him.

And, of course, a new Tube Extension would become the main reason for the excavations at another version of Hobb’s Lane made in another medium about a decade later, a time, perhaps, when the amount of post-war reconstruction and development might appear to be less of a reason to dig deeply into the earth below the centre of London.

Obviously there were those of us who watched those documentaries about the engineering of the Crossrail project in recent years who still crossed our fingers and hoped ever so slightly for them to come across something strange and unusual buried deep beneath the earth…

A hubbub sort of erupts, but less so in the close-ups, as, having moved inside the newly uncovered whatever-it-is, it has become apparent that there is a sealed compartment at one end of the vessel behind a solid bulkhead that cannot be accounted for.

Once again this could be explosives, or a warhead, or anything according to the army, but these scenes make the most of the mystery being once again all deep shadows and bright, swinging torch beams catching the bright white surfaces of the thing in the pit and the remains of the dark black mud that once entombed it.

Breen is convinced that this proves that it must have been some sort of experimental V-Weapon from the latter days of the Second World War, and, for a moment, even Quatermass seems prepared to concede the point as Breen sets about getting this particular nut cracked.

More water is required to clean it out and – uh-oh – a pump is brought over by Gibson and West to help clear it out again as it pools in the bottom of the glass-like surfaces they have to walk on.

The luckless Sapper West is despatched into the wondrous bowels of the missile and we get that first multi-faceted view along the length of its interior, all round circles embedded in walls like the gleaming white interior of some future time machine.

Probably.

As the walls of the bulkhead are washed down, some markings are discovered and, because they have a handy archaeologist on hand to identify such things, they are quickly identified as ancient cabalistic symbols – a pentangle of the sort associated with ancient magic.

Creep in the sinister music and, in all probability, a few streets away, the now all-but forgotten presumably Miss Groome gets a funny feeling that she’s been right about everything all along.

And as the professor is helped outside from the “slippery as glass” surface, a line that does so much to emphasise its alien qualities, there is a scream from within the vessel and we cut to the suddenly terrified-looking figure of Sapper West cowering in fear in the deep dark shadows and harsh torchlight.

He has seen something.

Something diabolical.

Like poor old Earnshaw thirty years earlier, Sapper West has seen a figure and “it went through the wall…!”

Our sceptic scientist can only look on agog as the titles crash in and an entire nation has to wait a week to find out – possibly - just what the figure he saw actually was, for we, the viewers have seen nothing other than the ghosts of our own imaginations.

And what an exhaustingly brilliant episode two that makes.

Again it’s difficult to get across the brilliance of that sense of creeping menace that Nigel Kneale manages to build using little but carefully chosen words, and all enhanced by clever use of light and shadow and sound and ideas.

To be honest, despite that devastatingly effective final scene, both these episodes have little that might be described as “action-packed” in the modern sense going on – an excavation, a couple of encounters with ordinary gullible people, and a bit of debate - and yet once again the slow building of questions needing answers and a growing sense of unease and fear is masterfully done in a thirty-six minute slice of probably one of the best six-part television serials ever produced.

And I love it even more every time I watch it.

Martin A W Holmes, November 2019