MAWH - In a dark corner of Lesser Blogfordshire: October 2019

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/rta041-episode-41-the-spooky-special) - this is the text for anyone who couldn't understand my burbled nonsense...

PODCAST 13 (FOR EPISODE 41) – QUATERMASS AND THE PIT

I have to say from the outset that I absolutely ADORE the original television serial version of “QUATERMASS AND THE PIT”, so this is unlikely to be an unbiased piece. From way back in 1979 when I picked up the Arrow reissues of the script books, I’ve found the story irresistible and large chunks of it made their way into my college thesis six or seven years later. Later on I pounced upon the first omnibus VHS release and adored it so much that I double-dipped for the DVD version when that came out about a decade later, and then triple-dipped when the restored episodic version came out a few years after that.

It is, quite frankly, an utterly brilliant piece of television and, as I’ve stated on numerous occasions in the past, is an absolute masterclass in writing for television and in creating a growing sense of unease and tension without having to overstate anything, or needing any shouty standoffs, or have any helicopters explode for dramatic effect.

Okay, a freighter aircraft is caused to crash by the manifestation of Hob which occurs quite late in the story, but that’s not really what I meant.

The tension simply drip feeds and the astonishing jigsaw of what’s going on relies upon the assumption that the viewers are intelligent enough to grasp hold of the subtle nuances and occasional nuggets of information in order to put the various pieces together for themselves.

It is, quite simply, masterful.

Long ago, alien creatures from the dying world of Mars manipulated and enhanced ancient humans in a way that meant their Martian philosophy would outlive their own civilization.

Over the centuries the descendants of those humans have spread across the entire earth, and the divisive violence against those unlike themselves which once maintained the racial purity of the ancient Martian hives has continued to manifest itself in humanity’s worst crimes against itself.

Meanwhile, at the crash site of one of the old Martian spacecraft, the symbiotic nature of the living hull buried deep underground has led to centuries of psychic manifestations of their ancient evil.

To place this serial in context, the two previous Quatermass serials had come first in the early nineteen-fifties at around the time of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth the second, pretty much the dawn of the era of a more widespread domestic television in Britain, and second in the mid-fifties when America was in the grip of McCarthyism and such fears of the so-called Red Menace were contagious.

The first serial involved a space rocket built by Bernard Quatermass and his British Rocket Group bringing back an alien parasite when it crash landed back on earth, and the second involved a creeping alien menace possessing humans with a view to colonizing the earth for their own needs.

The professor himself had already been played by two different actors – three if you include the two Hammer Film adaptations – the second of whom (John Robinson) had been a last minute replacement when the original actor (Reginald Tate) had died just before filming began.

For international marketing reasons, the American actor Brian Donlevy had played the professor in the two movies, but Nigel Kneale intensely disliked his performance and, to be honest, the British public were unlikely to accept that our rocket programme needed rescuing by an American, especially in a series in which he had been established as resolutely British.

In his introduction to that 1979 edition, Nigel Kneale stated:

The idea made a third Quatermass story possible without dropping too obviously into repetition. It had to be about alien visitation, of course, and the professor instrumental in coping – those elements were inescapable. But whereas the first serial dealt with a contact in real time and the second one with an invasion already established for a year, this would be long after the event. The intrusion would have come five million years in the past, when no resistance was possible, so that it succeeded wholly and built certain undesirable characteristics into Earth’s future population. Quatermass would be fighting his own heredity. A new pattern.

As ever, Mr Kneale always puts it so eloquently that I might as well shut up now, but, as that would make this piece rather short – mercifully short some might say – I’d better soldier on.

After a sudden realization I made in the summer, I became aware that the first episode of “QUATERMASS AND THE PIT” directed by Rudolph Cartier and written by Nigel Kneale was broadcast on the 22^nd of December in 1958, earning it a place as a Christmas special in my book, and having watched it again, I became very aware that in that brilliant first episode, “THE HALFMEN” nothing very much actually happens, and yet it remains utterly mesmerizing and, perhaps, still quite terrifying in its own way, and still stands up as thirty-five minutes of creeping intensity.

Now you could argue that this is all down to expectation. Audiences in 1958 had already seen the two previous Quatermass serials at around three year intervals over the course of the 1950s and therefore would have been expecting something rather special and perhaps a little bit creepy. People talked about Quatermass and it was very much the “event television” of its day, with meetings rescheduled and pubs emptying when it was on.

A later episode shows people watching a television show in the pub which was either a tiny bit of product placement to remind viewers that they could go out and not miss out, but also serves as a reminder that not every household owned a television set, even as late as 1958.

Perhaps without the previous serials they might have switched on to episode one of this series and though “Ho-hum” but they didn’t, and the reason they didn’t is, in my opinion, down to two things.

The first is the script, which asks many questions, answers few of them, but keeps you interested enough to want to know the answers, whilst adding layer after layer of further mysteries being discovered to make even the most derisive of viewers want to see more and find out just what is going on.

The second is because of the astonishingly effective work of the newly formed BBC Radiophonic Workshop which manages to underscore some otherwise quite ordinary-seeming scenes with unearthly sound effects that are almost guaranteed to unsettle anyone.

The episode itself begins with a devastatingly disturbing piece of music that, despite the fact of that piece of music’s previous association with the Quatermass character is NOT that breathtaking extract from Holst’s “Mars the God of War” that pops into my head whenever Quatermass is mentioned.

This is interesting because maybe, of the three 1950s serials, this is the one most associated with the planet Mars, but there you go. That magical pairing of Kneale and Cartier was never going to choose a predictable route for one of their legendary collaborations.

With this theme, however, I think the notes and the tune are almost perfectly pitched to give a sense of foreboding and calamitous things about to unfold as the name of the serial emerges as the camera pans down ever deeper through the grime and rubble of the earth much as the growing menace is about to across the next six weeks.

We begin in Hobb’s Lane, with two Bs, SW1, otherwise once known as Hob’s Lane with one B, where we swiftly and convincingly cut from the studio to location footage taken at a building site - where a satisfyingly diverse cast play a group of workmen who - using an impressive array of modern excavation machines all but impossible to recreate inside a studio - uncover some human remains as they dig the foundations of a new office building, Baldhoon House.

One of the workmen, the foreman, incidentally, is played by John Rae, part of what almost seems to be the Quatermass Repertory Company, who also featured as one of the battling workers in both previous versions of Quatermass 2, and played the eyes of the yeti in another Cartier/Kneale collaboration “The Abominable Snowman” the year before. A lot of television producers and directors back then had their favourites – dependable, reliable actors who could be relied upon to give exactly the performance required of them.

Amidst the chaos of the building site, as it cuts back to the studio set, close-ups of the found skulls are accompanied by suitably creepy music, because, you know, skulls are quite creepy really, especially ones found in an unexpected place and, by this simple combination of sight and sound, the audience are immediately put on edge.

This vignette is accompanied by the voices of the workmen saying worrying things like “It’s all bashed in” whilst these blue-collar characters cleverly give us a little exposition as we learn that the skulls were fossilized and are possibly “maybe hundreds of years” old and that they “may be worth something…” which also brings a little nod towards human greed and the differences between people, even in a small cross section of society such as this. Meanwhile, one almost impossibly older-looking workman shudders as he ventures the simple fact that he doesn’t like this place…

And through these simple exchanges we have already had hints that this is indeed a troubled place.

More ominous chords take us through a time-lapse as several newspaper headlines simply tell the tale of further digging, and the archaeologists finding “three more bodies” in much the same way as they did when they dug up Reginald Halliday Christie’s garden half a decade earlier, and we are suddenly finding ourselves in the unsettling world of serial killer movie territory…

We then find ourselves at the Nicklin Institute where a press conference is taking place for both the vulgar newspaper men and, in another hint at human social division, a slightly snooty representative from the Paleontologist Magazine. Through him we discover that one of our heroes Matthew Roney, played by the Canadian Actor Cec Linder, one day to be Felix Leiter in Goldfinger, is the foremost figure in his field.

When we meet Roney, he is desperately worried, but perhaps not in the way we might expect. He needs help in being given time to complete his excavations of the site which he believes are of unparalleled historical importance, and – to a slight air of professional derision - he suggests that the skulls discovered might be three to five million years older than any previous human skulls yet found.

And they’re British!

No, that’s not what he’s trying to imply, but we ought to note that mention of “Five Million Years” because it is going to come up again later on.

Despite the obvious skepticism he is facing, he has got his female (and therefore likely to be forgotten by scientific history) assistant, Barbara Judd – played with great sensitivity by Christine Finn - to attempt a reconstruction model which is rolled in under a sheet and then revealed in a manner not unlike a magician and his glamorous assistant.

Roney looks upon this half-formed clay figure with some fondness as he wheels out the sound-bites, describing the figure as not tall, still having the face of an ape, but having a big brain and, in his opinion, contrary to other primates of that time, stood upright like a man, which is another description that will come back and haunt us.

Next, via that time-saving and oh-so-clever use of another news headline so useful in cinema storytelling back then, and another reminder of that “Five Million years” phrase, we are transported to a private club where a skeptic full-on doubter is reading the headlines, which at least means that the press conference worked well enough.

One of the characters at the bar is Arthur Hewlett who in later years would become almost ubiquitous as the old man of the TV, but he’s far younger here so we begin to suspect that, much like Sidney James, he seems to have pretty much always looked like that.

And finally, a full ten minutes and twenty seconds into the episode we meet Andre Morell as yet another version of Professor Bernard Quatermass, a sage vision in bow tie and herring bone overcoat, grabbing a plain and apparently disappointingly cheesy lunch of sandwiches at his club on the way to the War Office.

War, of course, being a huge topic of concern in the nineteen-fifties, with a hot one only recently over and a cold one creeping its threat into the everyday lives of everyone, threatening to kill everyone in the era of the birth of CND and the Aldermaston marches, and, as we will later discover, perhaps the one lasting legacy of those pesky long dead reds, the martians.

At the club, Professor Quatermass runs into his “old friend” Roney who seems surprised that he’s off to the War Office as he thought the British Rocket Group were a civilian outfit.

Quatermass’s dry response of “We were” speaks volumes of the battles he must have had in the past few years and of how any scientific discovery can get corrupted for military purposes. As he offers to share both his sandwiches and his taxi with Roney, he makes the comment that Roney ought to feel lucky that there is no military value in fossil apes, a harmless-seeming aside that will come back to bite them both later on.

Back at the Hob’s Lane site, crowds of sightseers have gathered to try and see what excitement is afoot at this newsworthy place, and through a series of vox pops with the usual idiots who have to be heard having nothing of any consequence to actually say, we get a little bit of story development that embraces the cutting edge of modern news media, and was still a very useful bridging device in telling a story when Russell T Davies was giving us his vision of “Doctor Who” half a century later.

At the Hob’s Lane site, Roney is dropped off from his shared taxi ride and Quatermass gets a close-up as he contemplates the activities going on there, before heading off to the missile conference at the War Office, where we first meet Colonel Breen who represents another quite different human type to affable old Quatermass, and a group of idiot bureaucrats having a meeting.

Anthony Bushell plays Breen, and was a very respected actor and director in his day who turned up in other Nigel Kneale dramas, and played the captain of the Carpathia, the ship that hurried to try and rescue the survivors of the Titanic disaster in an excellent 1950s British movie called “A Night To Remember”.

Nigel Kneale had already touched upon his mistrust of bureaucracies back in “Quatermass 2” and here they are portrayed in little better light. The scene that follows, a bunch of stuffy elderly men around a table discussing the future of the whole of humanity is long, but it serves to demonstrate the two positions of the explorers and the warmongers very clearly, as well as explaining what has become of the Rocket Group and how its military possibilities have been spotted and are now to be exploited.

Quatermass’s stance would have struck a chord with many anti-nuclear protestors and research scientists in the late 1950s. Whilst they discuss policy, Quatermass tries to stress the intended peaceful nature of his previous work with the Rocket Group in what becomes an increasingly awkward meeting.

A reference to missile bases on the Moon and also on Mars gets an ominous close-up of a picture on the wall, and whilst the powers-that-be talk about “policing the earth” they simply demonstrate just what aggressive warmongers they truly are, which once again serves as a foretelling of what we are still to discover is the human/martian inheritance.

Quatermass is exasperated that the dead man’s deterrent would allow the last vestiges of humanity to go “up in smoke to avenge ourselves” whilst his classically educated reference to the Sword of Damocles gets thrown back in his face by an idiot bureaucrat suggesting that they could call the whole system “Project Damocles” which makes the rest of the toadies feel very smug and proud of themselves as they sit around the table congratulating themselves.

Nigel Kneale’s frustrations are reaching boiling point here, and, through Quatermass, he gets to rant about the notion of an ultimate weapon and the sheer folly of going into space thinking of war and taking all of our hatreds with us into these new frontiers, and his plea to “Not lightly agree to this plan” is met with an awkward silence from those who have already decided otherwise.

For his pains, Quatermass gets a proper telling off from the minister and whilst there is some to-ing and fro-ing about his objections and whether he ought to do what it’s obvious they’d like him to do and resign, we also discover that the deed is already done and that Colonel Breen has already been appointed by this committee of weasels as deputy head of Quatermass’s Rocket Group.

Once again displaying Nigel Kneale’s preference for using other media to help tell the story, still at this time a very innovative and contemporary method of doing so, remember, we cut to a radio providing the entertainment for the archaeologists back at Hob’s Lane and, just to shift the themes of the drama into sharper focus, the news is on, giving us woeful accounts of a conference in Vienna, a terrorist incident, and recent rioting and disturbances possibly being racially motivated.

The more things change, eh people…?

More bones have been found at the site, and Roney now estimates there are four bodies as we pan down to Miss Dobson, an elderly lady played by Nan Braunton, who is doing some of the excavating, and who starts to have a “funny turn” as the eerie music cranks up again.

She’s feeling a little light headed and describes the weather as “close” before getting slightly embarrassed at the spectacle she feels that she’s making of herself for the gaping crowd. Moments later, however, it is Miss Dobson who finds a “pipe” and is joking that it’s just as well that she wasn’t using a pickaxe, despite that eerie theme cranking up yet again to emphasise that whatever this is, it’s unlikely to just be a pipe.

Upon further investigation, we find out about its strangely “smooth surface” and very quickly the team are of the opinion that they don’t think it is a pipe and once someone mentions that it might be an unexploded bomb, they all down tools and have the general air of wanting to get the hell out of there as soon as they possibly can.

And who can blame them?

This time it’s Roney’s turn to be doing the pleading as he begs his excavation team to continue, perhaps in another part of the site, but to no avail, self-preservation wins out over scientific interest and we cut to a now empty street where the bomb disposal crew are arriving.

Amongst the crew are three very familiar actors to vintage television viewers. The always dependable Michael Ripper plays the sergeant, with a very young looking Harold Goodwin playing Gibson, one of the sappers, and heading up the team is John Stratton as our handsome and dashing young romantic military lead, Captain Potter.

Many, many years later, he would do an equally memorable turn as Shockeye in a late era story from the original run of Doctor Who, but his cannibal Androgum was certainly neither handsome nor romantic, but that’s career paths for you.

Also spotted at the window of one of the supposedly empty houses in Hob’s Lane is an elderly lady, one Mrs Chilcot, who is being played by yet another Quatermass “regular” Hilda Barry, but her key contribution to this plot is yet to come in the tea-leaf reading scene in episode two and her tales of strange goings on in the other houses. She had previously played the wife of a victim of the alien parasites in “Quatermass 2” and was obviously Cartier’s first choice for playing women who fuss around slightly senile husbands.

It is interesting, however, that this episode does have such a large cast and is able to give many of them very small bits of business to do to enrich the storytelling without necessarily adding much to the overall plot. This is because of the nature of live broadcasting and needing lots of bodies to be in just the right places when the cameras turned onto them, whilst the main cast hared about between scenes, and the show needed plenty of them to give a sense of scale.

It’s also a sign of just how prestigious a production this was in that it could get such a huge cast, but we should never underestimate the budgets available to those producing television in primetime.

Meanwhile, Captain Potter is examining the suspected bomb and makes reference to the possibility of it being a Satan, which is a carefully chosen word picked to give just enough of a jolt to the God-fearing viewers. We should note, however, that the Satan was a real bomb – a bloody great big one at that – used by the Germans during the war, although that convenient link to Hob and themes yet to be explored in this serial is very fortunate.

And so as that creepy, sinister tune is played in again, Captain Potter is finding this discovery to be a bit of a mystery. His microphone didn’t stick so it’s not made of steel, and there’s no sign of corrosion which would suggest that it’s not very old at all, and he is perplexed enough to suggest that it’s not any kind of metal…

This leads to one of those “who’s in charge” spats between Potter and Roney, and this is where we see Corporal Gibson and Sapper West - “Westy” - washing down the bomb/pipe/ancient alien spacecraft, and nervous old “Westy” is still a whole week away from getting his very own episode ending…

Mystery builds upon mystery and Captain Potter is making enquiries as to whether there was any sign of an entry hole, before finally deciding that he needs a second opinion.

Perhaps someone with knowledge of rockets or missiles or bombs might be of some assistance…?

Back at the War Office, the endless meeting finally concludes and Roney, in desperation, has turned up with tales of the bomb and complaints that the army have been roped in…

And so our various threads of plot start to weave together as we get a quick episode entitled “The Quatermass Manipulation” as he wonders if his new-found “friend” in the military might want to take a look at it to help smooth the wheels of their newly enforced collaboration.

At Hob’s Lane, Mr and Mrs Chilcot are at the barrier talking with the policemen preventing them from returning to their home. They want a few home comforts and the kindly old police sergeant who, significantly in part two, has lived around there since he was a child, lets them go inside.

We now get a rather wide and “Outdoorsy” view of the pit set, and it looks very much as if this huge set is open to elements, partially built inside and partially outside, which explains some of the visible breath floating in the night air and the fact that this one massive set is going to be home for this production for another five weeks. Heck, it even has a practical road which was most likely going to be the entrance to the scenery dock once it stopped being a building site.

Possibly.

It’s interesting, by the way, that when the live remake of “The Quatermass Experiment” was made in 2005, they too based the entire event around one massive set that had to be all of the locations mentioned in the script. Of course those making it in 1953 had certain advantages, and not only the fact that they were used to making live television because that’s all there was. At least in 1953 they could build extra sets in the gaps between episodes, whereas the 2005 crew had to find a “one size fits all” location and it struggled at times to convince.

Anyway, back to “Quatermass and the Pit” and, for 1958, that is one BIG set and it does give an impressively solid backdrop to all the episodes. This is “Quatermass AND the Pit”, remember, and that Pit is one heck of a guest star.

The other star, Quatermass himself, now arrives at the Pit, and introductions are made, and Breen asks to take a look at the now more exposed thing that is being unearthed. Still nobody knows what it is yet, but as they scramble about over the mud and the planks, Professor Quatermass is starting to put the established facts together and coming to some rather fantastic conclusions about why the skulls were found above the so-called bomb, and, as he keeps on asking those interesting questions about the age of those skulls, and putting two and two together – keep up audience – he utters an incredulous Five MILLION years…???

And we…

CRASH IN END TITLES!!!

So that’s it. In just over half an hour of classic 1950s British television, very little that is actually all that sinister really happens.

Think about it.

Some bones are dug up, there is a press conference, a meeting in a club, a meeting in an office, and a suspected Second World War unexploded bomb is found.

And yet it’s utterly brilliant and about to get even better if you tune in for the next episode entitled “The Ghosts” the following week.

There’s something about the dialogue and those freaky sound effects that just have you on the edge of your seat, even if the mystery of this mysterious capsule - or whatever it might be – possibly being older than humanity itself hasn’t yet been quite properly explained to the avid viewer.

After all, as cliffhangers go, an old bloke in a hat telling you how old something is might not be the most likely thing to draw anyone back next week, but come back they did, in their millions, and “Quatermass and the Pit” is quite rightly remembered as one of the greatest pieces of writing for television that has ever been produced.

When you consider how much 1950s TV is lost, we are incredibly lucky to have all of it to thrill us sixty years later.

I’ve said it before, but there’s really no doubting it’s an utter masterpiece.

MARTIN A W HOLMES, 2018

Thursday 31 October 2019

THE COLLECTED RTA DAILY CARTOON (PART TWELVE) OCTOBER 2019

A WORLD

SPOOKY SPECIAL

Friday 25 October 2019

PODCAST 41 – QUATERMASS AND THE PIT (1) "THE HALFMEN"

BLOG NOIR

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