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 22nd 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
MARTIN A W HOLMES, 2018
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