‘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.
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.
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.
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
