PODCAST 47 - QUATERMASS AND THE PIT Episode Four

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/rta047-episode-47-keeping-up-appearances-and-cannon-ball) - this is the text for anyone who couldn't understand my burbled nonsense...

PODCAST 47 – QUATERMASS AND THE PIT Episode Four

‘THE ENCHANTED’

Episode four of the Nigel Kneale six-part serial QUATERMASS AND THE PIT was broadcast on the twelfth of January 1959 and at first it seems as if it is something of a procedural episode, full of exposition and explanation, as some kind of semblance of sense starts to be made as the various plot strands developed in the first half of the story start to weave together in an way that really refuses to underestimate the intelligence of the regular viewers.

Those regular viewers, however, have just spent an entire week wondering just what the hell those THINGS were that Professor Quatermass and Colonel Breen discovered behind that inner port as it was turned and opened.

Answers will come thick and fast in what - initially at least - is a very “talky” episode. The last ten minutes, however, will take the viewers on a very different – and memorable – journey, that really would have caused an epic quantity of “water cooler moments” if such things had happened in late 1950s Britain.

Assuming anyone had been able sleep that is, because this episode, entitled “THE ENCHANTED” goes to some quite terrifying places before it is over, and might even top the ending of the previous week’s episode for all out Primetime horrors.

That’s hard to measure, of course, because those things that were found in The Pit have been lurking in the public consciousness for nearly a week now, and despite the Professor’s assurances that they’re dead, and have been so for quite some time, the nation saw one of the blighters MOVE, didn’t they, and might not have been listening anyway with those cushions clamped firmly to their ears.

Fear is a peculiar thing, isn’t it? A sofa, or even a cushion, is never going to save you, but if you can shut out the noise, and shut out the images, maybe you can convince yourself that the horrible thing just isn’t happening over there, on the flickering screen in the corner of your own living room.

The titles fade, and the soothing, dispassionate voiceover tells us exactly where we are up to in the story, and helps us with the pronunciation of both Quatermass and Roney, in case any of us were still wondering, and uses trigger words like “haunted” and “hideous” to help us get in the mood, whilst quietly giving us the author’s preferred term for that inner hatch, a “port” as it is turned and opened into a reprise of those creatures and that sudden drop one of them makes again.

I wonder… I still wonder, if the audience still jumped when they saw it again.

Swiftly we find ourselves in a wide shot looking at our heroes framed by the circular door hole of what we can probably now properly refer to as the Alien vessel – unless you’re within earshot of Colonel Breen, of course.

Whatever those things actually are, it appears that they are decomposing fast, and this looks like a job for some archaeologists, if any might happen to be around…

Oh, wait a minute, we’re at an archaeological dig, aren’t we? It’s almost as if somebody was carefully plotting this story all along.

Anyway, this looks like a job for Roney, who bundles Barbara off to get some help from the institute. She exits the vessel and passes our chorus of sappers, who, like the audience at home, are still bewildered and want to know what’s going on.

Shaken, however, by what she has seen, she says nothing as she passes them by, and it is Corporal Gibson once again who pipes up with “She’s got the wind up”, but it seems that they all have.

Oddly, it is the obviously shaken Breen who first uses the words “colossal insect” and is visibly shaken by this challenge to his understanding of the world. Anthony Bushell is once again superb in this episode playing Breen as a man teetering on the brink of losing all self-control in the face of this absurdity that he simply cannot process on his own terms.

There’s talk of resemblance to crabs and locusts, to try and make earthly sense of these three-legged arthropods, creatures so very different from humanity and anything on earth, and a stench of rotting fish that even causes the reliable sergeant to have to make his excuses and go outside to throw up, where his eager squad are awaiting any kind of answers, to which “giant insects” probably isn’t what they were expecting. Gibson seems to be getting “the horrors” himself when he realises that they were the ones who dug the thing up.

Gibson shows genuine fear here and, as our audience identification figure of an “ordinary bloke” takes us along with him.

Meanwhile, Captain Potter is looking decidedly woozy himself as he leaps into the fray to help out Barbara as she returns with the preservation gear, and, as she is handed the body of one of these colossal insects, she 0nce again passes by the wide-eyed soldiers.

Quatermass remains inside the spaceship and is looking thoughtful as he considers the various strands of membrane that are the remains of whatever web was holding the three insect creatures in place for all those millions of years.

His imagination is running wild as he surmises that the membranes are the remains of instruments, and one cluster might have possibly been – in human terms – a bunk of some kind. Breen is of course dismissive, suggesting that he might be the kind of human who doesn’t possess an imagination.

There then follows an entire exchange on the nature of decomposition, and how Roney believes that most of it occurred in the last hour, which, once again, makes no sense to the flabbergasted and increasingly unsettled Breen.

And so they – and we – now understand about the nature of vacuum sealing and the corruption caused by the introduction to such an environment of the “filthy London air” still less than three years after the introduction of the Clean Air Act.

We cut to a wider view of the Pit, presumably a short while later, as some sombre-looking fellows in overcoats arrive carrying packing cases - which must have deliberately resembled three small coffins to unsettle us further - down the ramp and into the builders’ hut.

We cut to a close-up of one of the aliens being sprayed with a preserving fluid by Barbara who is wearing a surgical mask and suddenly looking quite sinister, and, as the bespectacled Klein is introduced, the science talk is all about horny shells and keeping the fluids separate, as it should be, and the viewers subtly learn a great deal about the genuine nature of these peculiar specimens, which is going to come in handy when certain things unfold at the ministry later on.

Meanwhile, Professor Bernard Quatermass, is still plucking at strands inside the ship as the sinister music creeps in again. By now we’re fully aware that this always suggests something unusual is about to happen, but, for once, it’s simply the journalist Fullalove appearing in order to have something else explained to him as the Professor considers a few more theories. These strands were put there, not grown and they remind him of close-up photographs of nerve endings, subtly suggesting that the creatures flew this thing by the power of thought and, perhaps, that their mental capacity was far greater than we humans could possibly imagine.

An explanation for everything that’s about to happen in the rest of the story; It’s all there, you know, in the dialogue, if you pay close attention.

There’s a slight fluff here when the Professor misses out a word in his explanation about the fibres terminating, but the consummate professional that is Andre Morell corrects himself and carries on.

And, do you know what, that’s exactly what people do in the real world when they’re explaining stuff, so it somehow adds to the realism of the piece in a way that the vocal perfection of modern retakes simply sometimes fails to convey.

Meanwhile, Fullalove asks the direct question that we all want to know: Could these things have originated on this earth, and the shake of the head that he gets as the only reply from Quatermass is very telling.

However, before they can pursue this, a visibly unsettled Breen turns up with Captain Potter, demanding that proper measurements of the structure will be taken, which does, at least, provide a logical reason for the one we see drawn on a chalk board at the end of episode six if you’ve ever wondered.

On meeting Fullalove, however, Breen becomes apoplectic, and whilst Quatermass attempts to be reasonable – finally pointing out that there is no bomb – the enraged Breen demands that Fullalove is forcibly removed, which might come back to bite him later, but certainly his fear is beginning to reveal itself.

We catch another moment of the sergeant waiting for his cue to actually start the forcible removing, and then we get the argument which causes the schism between Quatermass and Breen as Quatermass suggests that he may have made a mistake, and Breen’s fuzzy logic about the Professor’s nonsenses kicks in.

He knows the smell of death, and how long it takes, and has opinions about the “gutter” press. He has his own theories which he plans to reveal in his own good time, but further debate is stalled as the door of the hut opens and procession of what looks like people carrying tiny coffins emerges, and Quatermass quietly points out that he won’t be able to keep those a secret for long.

We cut, once again, to the slightly tiresome newspaper office, although it’s good to remind ourselves that, as this scene plays out, actors and scene-setters are flying around in a frenzy off-screen to sort out the next scene, so it does serve some purpose other than the plot points it delivers.

We are once again in the Gazette offices and James Fullalove is rightly furious at being bundled out of the pit by this blundering blimp, and we are again treated to that Kneale trope of seeing the cover of the late edition in as much as it furthers the plot and lets us all know quite where we are, and in a whirlwind of “Monster Insects” we are transported to a newspaper vendor outside the Nicklin Institute where the porter informs the gathering mob that they are closed, and, surprisingly, the crowd then simply turn around and go away.

Inside, however, Quatermass is now visiting Roney in his laboratory, and is standing next to what we might nowadays call a “hero” shot of the fine prop of remains of the creature rescued from the compartment earlier, and what a magnificent piece of work it is, especially as Roney maintains that this was the “worst one” in terms of preservation.

Quick and impressive workers these Nicklin Institute archaeologists…!

Being the worst one, they have chosen to display it this way, and not because it simply shows it off at its very best for the cameras, and there’s a lot of science chat about preserved fluids and liquids, and how they’ve handed the other two over to the “Insect Department” which is how he has chosen to classify them for all those experts mocking from their “Ask the Family” sofas at home.

So we’re now in the territory of arthropods, all of the insects, the spiders and the crabs, except for that pesky tripod leg formation so beloved of Martians (if you remember your H G Wells), although I’m never quite sure why we’ve decided that the inhabitants of Mars would have been three-legged.

And then there are those antennae, those… Pause for effect… Horns…!

Quatermass once again makes the connections and joins the dots for those of us paying attention at home, and reminds us of those prints and manuscripts that we were looking at during the previous episodes, and points out the resemblance that can’t have escaped the viewers to stone gargoyles that can be seen in the old churches across the planet.

Art imitating life, imitating art, given that those very gargoyles will have influenced the designers of those creatures that are so troubling us.

Roney is impressed, and draws his attention to the décor of the lab, which are reproductions of the cave paintings of thirty-thousand years ago, and pointedly points out the image of an ancient figure wearing a ritual mask that looks not unlike the specimen now standing on his bench and he now wonders just where they might have got the idea from…

Nod to the audience, twinkle, twinkle.

…as these creatures might be old friends that we haven’t seen for a very long time.

This scene is terrific as all the strands start to come together, and considers a world now dead that was once teeming with life, and all that talk of canals and boyhood disappointments, and the first use of that word “Martians” which was worn out long before something finally came along to claim it.

Because claim it QUATERMASS AND THE PIT certainly does, and with both hands.

We are no longer in any doubt.

At least as far as the Professor is concerned, these creatures are from Mars.

Think on that, dear viewer, as we fade to the scene of the barrier back at Hob’s slash Hobb’s Lane, where an irritated crowd of reporters and civilians is getting restless, and the long-suffering police officers are trying to keep them out of the pit as they are joined by Michael Ripper’s army sergeant.

Professional jealousies are much on the mind of the reporters, given that the banner headlines of the Gazette are from a story they are still being denied, and the sergeant is given a copy of the paper, which he takes back with him.

Meanwhile, in the pit, Potter is finally able to confirm that there are no further sealed compartments to be found, and he starts to wonder about whether the strands that are now turning to dust were some kind of apparatus - as Quatermass suggested – and starts wondering about quite how it might have worked, and whether the hull did a lot of the thinking for them.

This kind of lateral thinking is immediately stamped upon by the concrete-headed Breen, who is getting sick and tired of such stark idiocy, and suggests that such “nonsense” ought to be left to civilians, and not be the kind of thing that troubles military minds.

And talking of civilians… Remember that drill operator Sladden, from episode three? Well, he pops up again, and all he wants to do is gather up his equipment and go home.

His day, however, is about to get far worse.

However, so does Potter’s, a Breen has now been presented with that newspaper, and his bubbling rage becomes stratospheric, with the word “panic” particularly vexing him, until he has to take a telephone call from The War Office.

We cut back to the Nicklin Institute via a close up of a skull designed to once again underscore the “spookiness” of the entire serial, in case you’d forgotten its roots.

And whilst this skull fits in to the pattern of known evolution, this particular one is comparatively huge and, as Quatermass suggests, the seven or six sets of remains they have found might have BEEN developed by outside influences, which is seeding much of the events that are yet to come.

There is much supposition about the will to survive and how some ancient doomed species might have gone about achieving this, compared with a dry acceptance of just how rubbish human beings might be when faced with a similar fate, which, of course, with its dry observation of us all simply carrying on fighting with each other, which, of course, might actually be due to the Martian Inheritance he has yet to properly formulate his theories upon.

I told you this was an episode chock full of exposition.

If anyone asked - once it was all over – what the hell THAT was all about, they probably didn’t pay much attention to the first twenty minutes of episode four.

Either that, or they forgot all about it, given what happens during the rest of the episode.

Meanwhile, as Barbara points out via a hubbub and an open window, outside the institute, a crowd is gathering, convinced that something “sinister” (another good mood-making word) is going on. Crowds do a lot of that in QUATERMASS AND THE PIT, but maybe, we might find out eventually, it’s not their fault.

Barbara is concerned that she might not get through them if they continue to gather and, once again underestimating her, Roney tells her not to worry, she’ll be able to get home.

Barbara, however, has other plans, because she’s forgotten her notes and, ominously, has to return to Hob’s slash Hobb’s Lane…

This plot point is left dangling because Quatermass receives a phone call from the War Office because, as he puts it, they’re in trouble.

And so we dissolve back to the War Office as last seen in episode one, where Robert Perceval’s Minister, alongside his secretary, Richard Dare, is, quite frankly is angry enough to be refusing to take any of the several telephone calls that are coming through to him.

The Martians have well and truly hit the fan, and it’s all about him, and he’s kicking downwards in the way that all government bullies have always done, and continue to do, even now.

There’s a significant moment which harks right back to Episode One when the Minister “mis-speaks” about Breen “taking over” at the Rocket Group which doesn’t go unnoticed, and yet still Quatermass tries to take full responsibility and gets castigated for his trouble for acting as if he’d been caught scrumping apples.

However, Quatermass then tries to explain his educated guesswork, and asks the Minister to suppose a great deal of information that might be considered preposterous by anyone not in full possession of all the facts that he has learned, and theories that he has developed.

Theories, basically, about little green men, and spaceships, and things not of this earth, and connections with the bones of ape-men found in Knightsbridge.

Granted, it’s a lot for anyone to take in, especially one who knows for certain that Mars is a dead world, and isn’t really listening to something he considered to be utter nonsense.

“You realise what you’re saying. That we owe our human condition to the intervention of… Insects…!”

You can almost smell the sense of indignation.

It’s much the same as the anti-evolutionists thought back in the Victorian Age when Darwin suggested they might be related to monkeys.

He is dumbstruck, at least until he hears another point of view which he much prefers - Breen’s theory when it is finally, smugly revealed; The Germans, back in 1944, during the last days of the war, launching a propaganda weapon designed to create exactly the sort of panic and speculation that the vessel currently is.

The Minister LIKES this, it has the Wagnerian Black imagination that could be believed of the painstaking people he calls “The Hun”, and feels confident and delighted that he can announce to the Cabinet and the press and that the entire thing has been an enormous hoax, and put the entire thing to bed in a nice, comfortable, convenient package, that he can see the “common sense” of, and he obsequiously starts looking to place the blame at the feet of those he holds responsible for this ridiculous tale.

And so, as he gets on the phone to explain the nature of this “false alarm” to his masters, we see the looks on the faces of both Quatermass and Breen and they are both, in their own way, priceless.

This has so much still to say about the manipulation of fake news and what people choose to believe, even when faced with a whole mountain of facts that don’t quite fit in with their view of how the world works, and if you don’t think that Nigel Kneale really was very understanding about the way the world worked – and continues to work – then you really haven’t been paying attention.

And so, back at Hob’s slash Hobb’s Lane, near to the barrier, and that big sign warning of an unexploded bomb, things can begin to return to normal. Much to the upset of the gathered masses hoping to see some excitement in another of those  “ordinary people” vox pop vignettes that Kneale observes so well. There’s going to be a short statement in the morning, and the disillusioned masses disperse so, quite frankly, the Minister, boorish though he is, might have done them all a favour, given what’s about to happen.

Yes, I know I keep promising exciting things, but I have to keep you on tenterhooks, don’t I? Otherwise you’ll think this is just the dull episode where everything is explained before the big finale happens.

Anyway, we’re here now. Sladden is hanging about, still waiting to retrieve his equipment, and muttering about the delicate work that he’s been told to wait for them to finish actually involving the slinging of sandbags.

As Gibson explains, however, Sladden is only a civilian and therefore he’s irrelevant in the pecking order, and our army chorus again fill us in on the frostbite the team have been suffering from as the energy is absorbed into the device, the fact that the “Sarge” isn’t all that bad, and whether or not this missile really was a “Jerry Job” as they are being told, although one of the sappers does point out rather shrewdly that they’d had all those stories about this place long before they had Jerries…

Give that soldier a promotion.

There’s also a little nod back to little sapper Westie – the “figure through the wall” guy from last week, remember, and the “Sarge” suddenly seems rather terrifying to them again.

Anyway, Sladden finally gets permission to retrieve his gear, and to knock off the generator, and gets handed a pair of gloves to wear, and the bomb disposal team bid him a fond farewell.

Back at the barrier, Barbara is struggling to persuade the police officer to let her through, but she is rescued by Potter who distracts the police officer for long enough for Barbara to go through. Potter tells the officer that it’s all right, before adding a quiet, but significant “I think…” which are actually pretty much the final words spoken in this episode, as the tension starts to creep up again, and we slip into a lengthy sequence that is played almost entirely without dialogue as the diabolical forces start to build and build and build.

We see a view of Sladden taken along the axis of the interior of the spaceship, framed by the octagonal shape with all those depressed roundels in them, as the sound starts again, and that close-ups of Richard Shaw’s highly expressive face show a genuine sense of fear inside the now darkened hull.

And as the tapping and scratching increases, he panics and falls over, only to see his spanner moving towards him along the floor all by itself, and the various wires still attached to the hull and his drilling rig start to writhe and thrash about as if possessed by something, and the horrific noises build and build.

And suddenly Sladden is running, making a break for freedom, in some dreadful fearful parody of a human run, half alien, half primate, as almost all the previously inanimate objects – the planks, the cables, the rocks and the lamps - within the building site that is the pit seem to spring into life and seem suddenly determined to kill him.

As Barbara chooses precisely the worst moment to enter the pit, she too is caught up in this terrible whirlwind of objects and unearthly noise and, as the almost unrecognisably changed figure of Sladden – looking not unlike our mental picture of that figure that westie saw go through the wall - passes by her without being aware of her, she is struck by a flying object and falls to the ground.

Up at street level, the soldiers are frozen in fear as, in a clever piece of framing, the bizarre broken shape of the shadow of Sladden approaches them, and they react in horror as they (and we) finally see him as he passes them, and dashes through the frightened remnants of the dispersing crowds.

Potter heads off to rescue the injured Barbara, but all is quiet in the pit now, as the sound and the fury seem to have left along with Sladden.

Sladden pauses exhausted in a pool of light, clinging on for dear life to the streetlamp that provides it; for a moment, despite the fear in his eyes, it all seems to have stopped. But then the knocking noises start up again and he fearfully runs off into the night.

In a quiet street nearby, the proprietor of a mobile café is serving up late night teas to a couple, as a frankly exhausted looking Sladden staggers towards them all, and leans pitifully against the counter, his hand reaching out desperate for someone, anyone to help him.

But salvation can’t be found here and, in an astonishingly effective use of a simple physical effect, the piles of cups and saucers and plates start flinging themselves at him and he has to flee again, pursued by fragments of shattering crockery and that dreadful, almost unbearable howling sound.

What the viewers must have made of these diabolical manifestations of poltergeistery is anyone’s guess, but there is still more to come in this tour de force of an astonishingly terrifying series of event.

Sladden arrives at some heavy iron gates and we hear the voices of a church choir singing as he makes his way along a pathway bordered with gravestones.

As Sladden finalliy collapses on the gravel path of the churchyard he looks up pleadingly into the face of a vicar who we just saw leaving the church.

This is Noel Howlett. Later on he would be best known for his generally respectable roles in various sitcoms, but, for the moment, he says nothing. All of his dialogue will come in the next episode, but for now he simply stares down at the pitiful face of the poor wretch whose face is achingly pleading for some help and then the earth beneath his arm starts to move all by itself and, as we cut back to Sladden from the face of this astonished vicar, the gravel beneath him is rippling and rippling as the credits start to roll, eventually, mercifully, fading to black.

What on earth the nine point five million people who saw it made of that sequence when they first saw it is anybody’s guess, but I imagine the word of mouth and the “did you see?” brigade had rather a lot to say over the course of the following week, as a further one point one million viewers would be added for the next episode THE WILD HUNT the following week.

And even now, I still find myself getting utterly exhausted whenever I watch that sequence as it builds and it builds with nothing in the way of dialogue. It’s all in the astounding monochrome visuals – don’t let anyone tell you that horror always works so much better in full colour - and the sound effects and, just when you think it might be over, another terrifying image arrives to supplant it, and you do almost find yourself forgetting about all that exposition earlier on, and the fact that none of the main cast even feature in it as it unfolds to terrify a nation and remain firmly burned in the memories of those who first saw it live.

Astonishing stuff.

Martin A W Holmes, December 2019