PODCAST 51 - THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN TITLES

PODCAST 51 – SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN INTRO

Listen on ROUND THE ARCHIVES episode 51:

https://soundcloud.com/user-868590968/rta051-episode-51-out-of-the-unknown-armchair-thriller-captain-zep

Being something of an artist myself, one of the things I most appreciate about watching television is the graphics that make up the title sequences to the shows, and so I thought it might be fun from time to time to do a little bit of deep analysis and dissect one or two of the more notable ones, and give us all the chance to appreciate the amount of effort and skill that goes into building these mini-masterpieces and make them into something memorable, or, at the very least, something familiar, and, perhaps something enticing enough to persuade us to keep watching.

Because there’s a huge leap from “Oh, this looks interesting!” to “I want to stay here and watch this!” which can, over time, transform into “Oh, this is cosy and familiar!” and yet sometimes the same thirty, forty, or fifty minute sequence does this for viewers, using exactly the same techniques that served both on-screen advertising and film trailers for decades.

The Simpsons has now played with those expectations for well over two decades by tampering with the established sequence on an almost weekly basis, and, in recent years, it’s almost become mandatory for some programmes to pretty much dispense with a title sequence altogether and just rattle on with the story and flash up a few captions and credits.

Shows like ELEMENTARY (for example) can still build exquisite sequences, but also offer up truncated versions for episodes where there’s just far too much going on.

However, in these rough and tumble times, it’s good that there is still a place for the good, old-fashioned title sequence that, in the case of certain “High-Concept” shows especially, is there to tell you just what the heck the show is all about.

And when the viewer is being bombarded by hundreds of channels, and thousands of advertising spots, pop-up captions, intrusive voiceovers, shrunken credits, and a whole host of other intrusions into the space the actual programmes get on the screen, building an attention-grabbing sequence that persuades you to stay tuned is one of television’s more subtle and finest arts.

One of the best-loved and perhaps most iconic pieces of film from American television in the 1970s was designed by Jack Cole, and begins with a blank black screen, backed by the throbbing tympanum that opens a theme composed by Oliver Nelson which somehow, at least at first, manages to mimic a heartbeat, which induces the same kind of anticipation as the drumbeats would at the start of Oliver Stone’s JFK nearly twenty years later, and I thought it might be fun to dissemble this minute and a half long piece of television gold from a show that so inspired and shaped a generation of young people like me from 1973 until its cancellation in 1978.

In the bottom left hand corner of the screen, a capital letter T appears in white sans-serif bold capitals, followed by an H and an E to spell out the word “THE” as an electronic trilling not unlike a trimphone is added to the incessant drumbeat, adding an urgent, computer-y hi-tech excitement to the soundtrack.

Mysterious flashing lights punch out of the darkness in the top half of the screen as, in a slightly larger font, the word “SIX” starts to appear letter by letter, accompanied by a heavily distorted voice bursting through as if via an intercom.

For years I’ve been unclear about what was being said here due to that distortion.

“TOSCA TO NASA ONE…?”

“TELL OSCAR TO NASA ONE…?”

But, such is the modern day miracle of the internet, that it’s all out there if you look for it and I’m convincingly informed that the line is:

“IT LOOKS GOOD AT NASA ONE!”

At the same moment, overlaid in a blood red tint, high-contrast footage of a radar screen appears, its scanner line sweeping around and around and around ceaselessly in a clockwise direction, as if driven by the same pounding rhythm, leaving the background images still visible through the shadowed area.

The background changes to a sweeping pan across the orange lights of a mysterious building lit up through a deep dark night as the next word placed on the same line as that SIX is finally spelt out: M I L L I O N and NASA ONE responds:

“ROGER!”

Now I don’t have to explain that this is a standard call sign do I? Nobody’s asking who the heck Roger is as they sit in their armchairs waiting for their programme to continue?

No?

Good.

Funny how certain phrases within our cultures need no explanation.

“B.C.S. ARM SWITCH IS ON…”

Well, I believe them.

And, as that panning shot continues we hear “OKAY VICTOR!” (here, I’m assuming, unlike Roger, someone WAS referring an actual “Victor”) as a third line of text appears D… O… L… L… A… R…

And the VHF radio communications continue over this:

“LIGHTING RODS ARE ARMED…”

Apparently… Though what exactly those might actually be I don’t know.

“SWITCH IS ON…”

“HERE COMES THE THROTTLE…”

“CIRCUIT BREAKERS IN…”

All of which is presumably spectacularly meaningless to the viewers at home, utterly irrelevant to any of the stories that the series will tell, but adds a vital and convincing enough verisimilitude to whatever it is that makes these grown-up science-y things seem almost hyper real, and left plenty of small children quoting these lines as if they knew exactly what was going on.

Incidentally, although it will reappear, the overlaid image of the radar screen vanishes before the same line of text continues and the final three letters of the last word M… A… N… appear to complete the title of the show…

THE

SIX MILLION

DOLLAR MAN

(In case you were still wondering).

A show that filled our evenings during the mid-1970s which was about the spy-fi adventures of a cybernetic human with incredible strength and speed built into his robotic solid state circuitry, a show that gripped us so much as schoolchildren that there had to be regular warnings for us not to try jumping off roofs whenever we went outside to play in super-dramatic slow motion, usually accompanied by the iconic DE-DE-DE-DE-DE-DE sound that tended to accompany this counter-intuitive yet surprisingly effective display of high speed.

After that line about the circuit breakers, the screen momentarily fills in totally black again as the experimental sleek silver delta-winged jet aircraft that our hero is test flying is released from the brackets attaching it to its support aircraft and this silver marvel, a technological glimpse of the exciting world of space exploration in those giddy days of the late 1960s and the early part of the 1970s,  falls vertically away from us and we catch a glimpse of it in its full sunlight-catching glory, and, at the top of the picture, we momentarily see the ground so vertigo-inducingly very far, far below as we hear:

“WE HAVE SEPARATION…” accompanied by the Doppler roar of engines raising in pitch and almost drowning out that drum beat for a second.

This is, incidentally, all genuine film footage taken from the ill-fated flight of the M2-F2 lifting body which hit the ground doing about 250 mph on May the 10^th 1967 with a certain Bruce Paterson at the controls. He, incidentally, survived the crash, and – as far as we know - never had to be rebuilt (despite eventually losing an eye due to the crash), but the footage certainly adds a dramatic real-world veracity to the stories being told.

With more than half of the screen still being filled with the downward pointing sight of that remarkable aircraft, the pulsing soundtrack clearly informs us that:

We do indeed have separation.

“INBOARD AND OUTBOARDS…”

And there is a hard cut to the face of our star, in extreme close-up, framed by a frame-filling space helmet of silver and white, and the deep, rich blackness of the inside of that helmet.

More lights and readouts and numbers are reflected in the glass of his helmet’s visor, but his face is nevertheless clearly visible, as is his name, carved out in capital letters of the same white starkness of that bold font that made up the title of the show.

 

Starring

LEE

MAJORS

The word “Starring” is the only use of Upper and lowercase text so far, and remains in the slightly smaller font size and screen position that the capital “THE” had in the main title.

LEE MAJORS. One of the iconic TV stars of the 1970s, once a co-star in the Western cowboy adventure and/or soap opera series THE BIG VALLEY, and later also famously successful all over again playing the lead in the Hollywood Stuntman-themed series THE FALL GUY. Genuinely, he was as big a name in 1970s TV as Burt Reynolds was in 1970s movies. A superstar! Articles in magazines were written, gossip was gossiped, celebrity weddings were wedded.

He was married, for a while, to another 1970s icon FARRAH FAWCETT and, whilst you may not appreciate this now, dear listener, he had probably one of the most recognisable faces on the planet.

This guy was HUGE, although he always looks particularly short whenever they stand him next to his co-star, Richard Anderson.

The continuation of that line “…ARE ON…” hides the jump cut, and at this point the random three-digit numbers start appearing, overlaid in red over the bottom right hand corner of the screen, and appearing to be made out of those valve-based number displays that computers were still using before LEDs came in, despite what the 1950s INDIANA JONES film might suggest. Think of the countdown timer in GOLDFINGER and you’ll have more idea of the sort of thing I mean.

The numbers seem meaningless “+922, +993, +512, +256, +000, -384, +000, +640, +255” but probably represent all of those various computer codes that were constantly being bandied about when viewers had been following the moon landing broadcasts during the previous three years.

The same shot continues as Lee reacts, blinks and looks down towards those numbers, and the soundtrack continues with one of those lines that schoolkids seemed to enjoy endlessly quoting – at least in our playground:

“I’M COMING FORWARD WITH THE SIDESTICK…”

Whatever that means.

Still, it IS exciting, though, and, as we cut away from our fearless hero to a red-tinted view of something highly engineered that possibly represents a pilot’s eye view from the cockpit from an eye about to be lost, the soundtrack develops an urgency as engines start to whine, raising in crescendo to a more alarming pitch, and the voices become more urgent as the:

“LOOKS GOOD!”

And the inevitable:

“UH! ROGER!”

Response swiftly changes to a more urgent:

“I’VE GOT A BLOW-OUT IN DAMPER THREE…”

As something terrible looking flares in our eyeline, and alarmingly the view vibrates a little, whilst the cold, inevitability of those three digits change from a swift “+000” to a “+256…”

We cut to a distant view of the stricken aircraft, spinning in a wild trajectory thanks to a much-damaged, muck-covered blue tinted piece of old NASA research film all framed within the round-cornered rectangle of a fake TV screen, as that blood-red radar screen returns – presumably to add some drama whilst disguising just how battered that footage truly was.

The numbers click incessantly, remorselessly, unemotionally, “-511, +761, +961, -961” sometimes hidden by the red of that radar screen whilst the engine whine gets higher and higher and sounds more and more alarming and urgent.

Another cut and the screen is now filled with that old cine film footage, the radar scope vanishing, the reflected cockpit lights returning, as we focus totally with the blue halo surrounding the tiny spinning silver dart plummeting aircraft as it points towards the bottom right of our screens and, presumably, that hard, hard ground that seemed so far, far away mere seconds ago.

Meanwhile a voice calmly intones:

“GET YOUR PITCH TO ZERO…”

…and the numbers keep on switching “-144, -256, -001, +000”

And our hero, with a slight edge of rising panic responds:

“PITCH IS OUT…”

Cutting to the face of our hero, as before, although he is moving about within the frame a little more now, and covered with that returning radar scope effect.

“+000, +752, -001, -136”

 “I CAN’T HOLD ALTITUDE…”

And the repetitive whoop of a persistent alarm starts sounding in the background adding to the general air of urgency.

The calm, control room voice offers:

“CORRECTION, ALPHA HOLD IS OFF. TURN SELECTORS. EMERGENCY!”

And the camera cuts from the face of our stricken astronaut, leaving us with nothing but blackness, those reflected control board lights and numbers, and that inexorable radar-scope and the number, always the numbers.

“+000, +752, -001, -136, +508, +128…” Let’s be honest, those little red numbers keep on flashing up in seemingly random sequence in the same part of the screen throughout the rest of this, only vanishing when the final freeze-frame heaves into view.

And cuts, with the radar-scope overlay continuing to the series co-star, looking as concerned as he ought to be in this moment of great peril, with the actor’s name in the same font and layout as our main lead:

Also Starring

RICHARD

ANDERSON

Playing our hero’s boss, one Oscar Goldman, a role he would play in both this series and its spin-off THE BIONIC WOMAN a few years later, and beyond. Uniquely, I believe, perhaps both he and his later co-star Martin E Brooks, would ultimately end up playing the same character in two primetime series on different channels when one of the shows jumped networks towards its end.

As our hero begins to impart his famous not-to-be last words:

“FLIGHT CON, I CAN’T HOLD IT! SHE’S BREAKING UP! SHE’S  BREAK…”

We cut back to his face, blurred by the vibrations within the cockpit, and we see a third – again blue-tinted - view from somewhere behind his head as a helmet-wearing figure in some kind of ejector seat smashes his head against the shattering glass of a cockpit, with the blazing brightness of the sky and the brutal inevitability of the approaching ground diagonally splicing the screen.

We cut back to that long lens blue-blurred view of the aircraft, the radar-scope blinks off again, returning almost immediately as we see that view of the back of the pilot’s head, and once again cutting to our hero’s face, still blurred, still struggling with the controls, the whine of those engines almost screaming, and an horrific cockpit’s eye view of the ground approaching at a terrifying rate, and a jump cut to that once real aircraft rolling and tumbling across our screen with the addition of some quite astonishingly effecting smashing and crunching and grinding noises of the sickening, horrific impact.

Somehow it’s both worse and better that we know that this was a genuine failure of a genuine test aircraft, and that the pilot actually walked away from the crash.

And so, the screen fades to white in that “about to meet your maker” way that movies have, but no! Instead it pulls away to reveal the surgical lights of an operating theatre, and a team of surgeons struggling, presumably, to save this young man’s life.

A voice booms from nowhere:

“STEVE AUSTIN. ASTRONAUT…”

And we jump cut to a close up of the head of our hero, whose name we now know, although he’s looking the worse for wear. He is unconscious, in a hospital bed, his head bandaged, and a tube up his nose.

He is, as the voice continues to inform us as the screen cuts away to black from this intrusive moment.

“…A MAN BARELY ALIVE!”

These words might be supposed to be stated by Dr Rudy Wells, the genius cyberneticist responsible for the enhancement of our hero, as played by two long lived actors, first Allan Oppenheimer, and later Martin E Brooks.

We see a close-up of a heart monitor, the bleeps and pings of which are now added to the sound mix, before cutting away as some blue computer screen-like text starts to type its way across a black screen before revealing the word ”CLASSIFIED” in bright red, rather unfriendly capital letters, which flash on and off a few times to remind us of this, and all accompanied by the kind of ticking noises to let you know they’re working hard that, thankfully, computers have got over making nowadays on the grounds that they’d be bloody annoying in an office or home setting, and still more technological bleeps and pings begin to tell us that we are in a world of very hard science indeed.

The text cuts to some state of the art animated graphics, a blue grid on a black background representing a human head, and overlaid with those persistent heartbeat pulses from that heart monitor, which, like those flashing red numbers, now remain persistently over the other images we see.

The head graphic zooms out to full screen, this time staying on screen for long enough for the diagram of a Bionic Eye to appear element by impressive element, unaccompanied on this occasion by yet more computer writing, and we cut to a fast zoom onto an X-Ray plate of a human skull, and we mix to a very impressive artificial eye clutched in the ungloved fingers of an unseen surgeon, which sparkles with a decidedly – and appropriately - artificial looking starburst effect to make it ping and gleam.

We cut to a blue grid representation of an arm, as the diagram of what we are about to learn from the voiceover is a “Bionic” Arm to accompany that presumably also “Bionic” eye, starts to build its way across the screen, and the computer text pops in in a manner that would have been almost unreadable to our own little eyes back in the day to explain just what this thing actually is.

This graphics sequence, with its pops and whistles of a specific rattling sound effect representing “computers” in general which would become increasingly familiar to viewers of American TV Sci-Fi, is also accompanied by a now iconic voiceover, as spoken by Oscar Goldman, a statement almost as famous in its way as the ones introducing THE TWILIGHT ZONE or STAR TREK in the previous decade.

This entire voiceover sequence starts, however, with the kind of everyday sexism that betrays the world as it simply was back then, and its assumption that everyone involved with this hugely expensive, top secret, presumably military, project would obviously be a man:

“GENTLEMEN, WE CAN REBUILD HIM…”

…a line which, again, might be one of few quotes that might be used to identify this specific decade in Western culture, unless you count the next one:

“WE HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY…”

…which might be even more iconic in retrospect, even with its underlying braggadocio of the mighty United States of America being Top Dog at doing that sort of thing back in those times.

Of course, all of the transistors, insulated wires and valves we get to see contained within the artificial body parts we are about to see do suggest a slight ignorance of the miniaturisation that was going on in Japan and other places around the world at this time, but the props do look impressive, even if we now understand just quite how impractical they might actually have been.

The picture cuts back to the lights burning as that surgical team are working on their work in progress as Oscar continues:

“WE HAVE THE CAPABILITY TO MAKE THE WORLD’S FIRST BIONIC MAN…”

A prop arm is passed between surgeons and across some x-ray plates showing a hand, and we cut to a close up of that very same arm lifting a stack of weights in a gymnasium.

“STEVE AUSTIN WILL BE THAT MAN…”

We return to more artificial computer graphic animations (which do remind me a lot of the sequences made for the BBC television version of THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY by the way) to see the diagram of Steve’s artificial legs drawing themselves as Oscar assures us that he will be:

“BETTER THAN HE WAS BEFORE…”

Which is obviously open to some ethical debate… as we cut to a close-up on an electronic lower leg being worked on with a surgical clamp, cutting again to a wider shot showing us his foot and a lot of surgical instruments, and finally to those legs on a treadmill running as Oscar reassuringly continues:

“BETTER, STRONGER, FASTER”

And the theme tune starts to ramp up, and a rising tonal sound adds to the acceleration effect, and the heartbeat graphic overlaid changes to something far different, more hi-tech, and punchier looking, and which, like those ever changing little red numbers, will now hang about right until the final freeze-frame.

The treadmill legs moving impossibly fast cut to a side view of the face of our hero, Steve Austin, on the same treadmill, running in a blue tracksuit, with a computer sitting churning out presumably incredible printouts behind him, and a cut to a close-up of what is presumably a speedometer on the treadmill informs us that his speed is now an incredible 58… No… 59… No… 60 miles per hour.

We cut again to a wide shot of a presumably suitably impressed scientist watching four TV screens displaying Steve Austin doing some road work, now in his red track suit.

And, as we cut to a full screen version of the image that was on the top right screen, we see Steve running in the series trademarked slow-motion way, overlaid with moving trees shot from a moving vehicle and moving in the opposite direction, as the theme music soars ramped up to it’s fullest exhilarating mightiness, and we get a different view, now framed with that same round-cornered rectangle mask that earlier displayed the crashing aircraft, of “Real time Steve” running astonishingly fast in some speeded up film before we cut to that final freeze-frame title card of Steve Austin in his red track suit with the series title and a massive lens flare which remains one of the most familiar images in television history.

Not bad for a silly bit of sci-fi hokum from the 1970s.

That one minute and twenty-five seconds is just about as fabulous a sequence of editing and building excitement and there’s ever been, and is an object lesson in building a title sequence that has rarely – if ever – been matched in the several decades since it first appeared.

Its most famous variant, the one we’ve been examining today, was used from the second series onwards. The first season uses a slightly different voiceover, and that gets tweaked again later in the run, but this version, I believe, is the one most remembered by the generation that first saw it.

The main titles for the spin-off series THE BIONIC WOMAN played by the darling of my school year, the delightful Lindsay Wagner, used pretty much the same “accident, cyber graphics, exciting real world demonstrations of her new abilities” structure as the parent series, albeit filmed in a slightly more ‘romantic’ style to reflect her femininity or some such mid-1970s nonsense, but somehow fail to be anything like as iconic (although the blue grid representations of what was obviously the then still mysterious female form had a lot of my classmates paying very close attention indeed).

The reunion movies several years later failed almost completely to update the titles in any meaningful way and actually managed to be almost as ghastly as the original was wonderful but in a horrifically 1980s way.

Finally, we must give an honourable mention to the sub-James Bond style of the titles used on two of the three pilot movies that were produced before the first series, which use “exciting” scenes from the TV movies accompanied by a song sung by Dusty Springfield which deserves to be heard simply because it’s almost impossible to believe that these could ever have been considered appropriate for the series once you compare them with this most iconic of title sequences.

So there we are, the opening titles to THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN dissembled. I still think they’re superb and well worth a quick look next time you’re browsing the internet. If you do, usually you’ll be exposed to a whole host of other exciting and iconic title sequences from an era when they truly were works of art, and maybe, if you’ve enjoyed this one, I might come back and look at another one some time.

Take care.

Martin A W Holmes, July, 2020.

PODCAST 49 – QUATERMASS AND THE PIT Episode Six

PODCAST 49 – QUATERMASS AND THE PIT Episode Six

(listen at: https://soundcloud.com/user-868590968/rta050b-episode-50b-quatermass-nairn-night-gallery-talking-heads)

‘HOB’

The sixth and final episode of Nigel Kneale’s classic BBC serial “QUATERMASS AND THE PIT” entitled – rather ominously for those paying proper attention - “HOB” was first broadcast on the 26^th of January 1959 and attracted a whopping eleven million viewers.

This was the highest figure for the serial, and was up a further four hundred thousand on the previous week’s effort. This was indeed “event television” and, on cold winter Monday evenings, was drawing viewers in like they were possessed.

It’s hard to imagine now, in our strange, modern idea of what the 1950s were like, but word of mouth about some daft television horror serial must have been really getting around, and it was still nearly two years before CORONATION STREET would turn up, become a national addiction, and eventually wipe the floor with anything put up against it, even quality Science-Fiction.

Not that Nigel would have wanted us to think of it as science-fiction, of course.

Anyway. This is the big one. This is the proverbial “it!” This is where all of that hard work throughout much of the decade, the previous five instalments, and all that careful plotting we’ve been considering in these articles has been leading us to, so it had better not disappoint.

And, of course it doesn’t.

This episode delivers in spades, and helps QUATERMASS AND THE PIT reach its now legendary status in the history of television, and, quite frankly, still pack a wallop to the viewer even now, more than sixty years later.

If anyone ever tries to tell you that old, or black and white, television was just primitive, slow, dreary nonsense, just remember that you’ve got this particular ace up your sleeve to play, because it is still, quite frankly, a brilliant piece of clever, innovative, and pacey television that really, really needs to be seen and savoured.

It’s not perfect, of course. Little television is. But it gets pretty darned close in my humble opinion.

Of course maybe your idea of televisual perfection is something completely different, and that’s fine, but I imagine in that case that you’re unlikely to have been joining us here today anyway.

Now, it gets tricky when you’re talking about the final episode of a thing, even if that thing has given you sixty-odd years of opportunities to find out what happens, because there are inevitably some people who are going to come to this piece without knowing what happens, and are going to scream “SPOILER ALERT!” at me for ruining the experience for them.

Well, if you’ve never seen the serial, what on earth are you doing here? Go away and watch it immediately, then come back and we’ll pick up where we left off. We are here to appreciate QUATERMASS AND THE PIT and not ruin it.

Have they gone?

Are they back?

Okay… Here we go.

The titles roll and, for one last time, the words carved out of a slab of ancient stone are revealed until the dramatic zoom on that one word title is attempted and, well… botched a bit.

The camera doing the caption zoom wobbles about all over the place in a manner that might have had hair being pulled out in that live television gallery, but also seems mildly appropriate given the way that television equipment in the pit has been thrashing about under the influence of those ancient martians.

Happily, for the sake of authenticity, the people attempting the excellent blu-ray restoration didn’t try and “improve” or “fix” this, but carefully recreated every frame of this undramatic wobble, and so history remains unwritten, and, ultimately, that one word “HOB” sits front and centre in our screens until the plummy tones of yet another announcer gives us the story so far – although for once, it’s mostly about the events of last week.

And this announcer seems to remain unimpressed by the minister’s actions, too, helping to point us in the right direction emotionally, just in case we’re still thinking that the viewers might also believe that the Minister was right in not going along with this crackpot theory about Martians in the underground, or whatever, and fails to be anything other than underwhelmed by the technological miracle of Roney’s brain-reading device.

He also mentions that term “Race Purge” because, well, it might be worth having that nugget of information tucked away to help explain the events of the next thirty-five minutes.

Anyway, we’re back live in the pit as the burnt body of that poor unfortunate electrician is carried away, having been pronounced dead, burnt up, and unlikely to need artificial respiration.

Well, yes.

The policeman suggests they get him into an ambulance anyway, and there’s a brief exchange about blame, or otherwise, when Quatermass rather tactlessly suggests that it might not have been an accident.

We are nowadays, living in an era of “blame culture” and it’s sometimes difficult to appreciate that it did exist back then, and has existed for a very long time.

Five. Million. Years.

Well, maybe not that long, but possibly that’s another facet of the Martian Inheritance that possibly never occurred to Kneale. We must remember, however, that nineteen-fifties Britain still hadn’t evolved enough to realise yet that the barbaric practice of Capital Punishment was uncivilised, and so the possibility of dire consequences for a deliberate act that results in the death of another human being were a real fear.

Just a small aside, probably not intended at all, but it explains the strength of that reaction.

Meanwhile, Barbara Judd, as played by Christine Finn, has her last moment to shine, as, once again possessed by the strange powers trapped in the ancient wreck, she is blindly drawn to look through the portal into the vessel, and see that strange organic pulsing and glowing that ended episode five, accompanied once again by that eerie music that we are now beginning to associate with ominous impending danger.

Her scream ramps up the tension further, but by the time Quatermass risks looking inside the spaceship himself, it’s all gone quiet again, and the glow has gone.

His concern for her safety finds her being handed into the care of the besotted Captain Potter, who, it turns out, might not turn out to be quite the safe pair of hands that he might have hoped.

Her “I don’t want to go!” may indeed speak volumes, and those five words might just – perhaps - have stuck in the mind of one young Welsh writer when he saw this serial.

However, this moment is interrupted by the blazing rage of that blundering blimp Breen, and Quatermass and him have their final head-to-head argument as Breen refuses to clear the site for safety reasons.

Quatermass does his best, of course, to get them all out of there, although his plea of “My name’s Quatermass. If that means anything to you…” might not sit too well with the members of the press given the fallout after his two previous appearances in the headlines this decade.

James Fullalove tries his best to jivvy the press pack to his way of thinking, but Breen entices them back with promises of the official statement continuing as planned, and, as ever, the press pack remain torn as to where the real story might actually be.

We all have our editors to please.

Quatermass and Breen have their face-off in full view of the cameras, as Breen suggests that Quatermass is tired, and needs a long rest, and, tellingly, that’s not just his view, apparently.

As it’s around twenty years before we’ll see him on our television screens again, maybe he makes a good point.

However, as the paraphernalia of television and all of that of lining up of shots business is played out, we move around the pit to find the future Professor Kettlewell, Edward Burnham, with that expressive face he always had, noticing that the pulsing glow has returned inside the ship, and those terrifying sounds start again.

We cut to a street scene, as several feet obliviously pass a newspaper vendor’s poster reading “ARE WE MARTIANS?” and the camera creeps back as the cries of “Gazette!” are heard, to announce that the whole thing is going to be on the telly.

And so we cut to a close up of a television screen showing the scenes in the pit, as so many television sets in so many homes were currently doing, all overlaid with the audio of just the sort of general introductory blurb from an announcer that it’s surprisingly difficult to fake.

Kneale doing “metatextual” dlong before we even knew it was a thing.

The camera pulls back to reveal a smoky old pub full of the kind of folk who used to fill those kinds of pub in those days. A great social leveller, is the pub, as we see an “ordinary geezer” type chatting to a “posh know-it-all bloke in an evening suit” trying to have his way with Kitty, who we initially take for the kind of bar room lush of the “fur coat and no knickers” variety.

The idea of unaccompanied women in bars still being something that would have been frowned upon in many of the households sitting watching these scenes playing out, by the way, so the nation may have let out a collective “tut!”.

All human life is here. Sort of.

Anyway, as “posh-know-it-all bloke” starts boring everyone in the bar with his war stories, happily the programme proper begins and the customers’ eyes – as well as the camera – is drawn back to that flickering screen, upon which the presenter attempts to carry on as usual as scenes of panic and chaos start to unfold in the background, and then, there’s that unearthly sound again and, quite suddenly, the screen fades to black and an apology caption – something the viewers in those days would be very familiar with – appears.

There is a brief moment of jaunty music in the pub as they respond to this in – presumably – the very usual manner, and whilst “posh-know-it-all” tries to make up some nonsense about “vision on sound” to explain it all, it is Kitty who fearfully and astutely points out that “those people were running…”

Back at the pit, there is a scene of utter bedlam as all of the physical effects, the rattling planks, the whipping cables, the flying earth and rocks are brought into play, as the various supporting artists run around in terror, some tripping and falling over the suddenly animate objects.

John Scott Martin even gets to wrestle with a strangely angry-seeming television camera, which is nice.

The normally staid private secretary from the scenes at the War Office – one Richard Dare - is visibly terrified, but can get no help from Breen who is quite simply far too broken now, and as everyone starts to flee, making for those steps that will get them out of the pit, Quatermass seconds Fullalove into helping him to help one of the electricians to his feet and out of there.

But Quatermass clutches at his head, as he, too, is taken over by the powers in the pit, and, whilst Fullalove seems immune, and is busily snapping pictures with that little spy camera of his, Quatermass twists and turns in a strange throwback to the strange movements he made when he first heard those noises several episodes back, the strange twisted movements of Sladden, and, most tellingly, those Martian insects we saw during the Wild Hunt.

Our hero is lost to the madness. Our hero has the deadly Martian inheritance within him. Who can save the world for us now?

Breen sits down, mesmerised and possessed by that strange propaganda weapon that so irked him, completely still now, but strangely empowered by the forces consuming him, as he causes more of the wires and cables to thrash, and hurl rocks towards any threat, including Quatermass, as the chaos continues, and the fleeing mob fill the screen.

Barbara is thrashing and screaming and it is all Potter can do to keep hold of her, as the escaping crowd storm along the street past the police barriers and, whilst Potter wrestles to keep Barbara from getting away from him, even Quatermass can be seen being carried along by this mindless, angry mob.

The camera then holds on Quatermass looking confused, befuddled and utterly lost, and moves in to a close up on the dead man lying on the ground next to him, another victim of this collective madness as we fade to black.

Back in the pub, there are attempts being made to fix the now defunct television set, ironically because they are worried they might miss the organised fisticuffs of a boxing match, which is a nice touch.

The “posh-know-it-all” and Kitty are thinking about moving on to somewhere known as “Millies” when Kitty is overwhelmed by that strange headache as the Martian influence spreads.

However, a ruined looking man enters, demanding a drink – and another –quick. This is Sydney Bromley, by the way, a distinctive looking actor who was always reliable, and who is another carry over from the “Quatermass 2” cast.

He has tales to tell, and is able to deliver that lovely budget-culling line about there being “hundreds out there” before those unearthly sounds start to be heard within the pub, and, whilst Kitty shares a heartfelt “Don’t say it’s vision on sound for God’s sake!” – a rare light moment amidst all of the madness – as the lights go out and the pub is suddenly a whirlwind of physical effects, and the customers finally decide to flee, and, soon the pub is suddenly empty, apart from the body of the “ordinary geezer” that fails to escape the crush.

Back in the street, Quatermass is recognised, stopped and grabbed from amongst the mob by Roney, who is desperate to try and save him, and drags him through an open doorway into the ruins of that pub.

He flings Quatermass into a chair, and, because he’s Roney, he does at least manage to find some whisky amongst the smashed and broken bottles, and, whilst “it’s no way to serve decent whisky”, manages to get some down the throat of a very confused professor.

Yes, booze is always the answer, apparently, people.

Remember that.

This scene is phenomenal, by the way, and whilst Andre Morell is fantastic playing the confused figure of Quatermass, it is Cec Linder playing Roney who finally earns his pay after a couple of episodes being rather sidelined by the plot.

And amongst all this gasping and general air of confusion, we learn a lot about the nature of what’s going on. Roney, apparently, can’t see the vision held within the pit. He is one of the “some” that don’t, and this makes him different enough that he is a target for those with the Martian influence inside them.

Racial purity. Dislike for the unlike. Ah, you know.

Tellingly, as we learn a little about mass into energy, and that this is what is happening to the machine in the pit, we also learn, in another great line, how you simply don’t see this world any more.

But Quatermass is struggling to retain control over his mind as they discuss the few people who remain at the excavation, including Breen. He battles to use a telephone, but the noise comes again, and the telephone is destroyed, and, ominously, Quatermass tells Roney, and us, that it’s changing, and getting stronger…!

We cut, briefly, to the newsroom of the Gazette where news editor Tony Quinn is mercifully alone, hanging onto a telephone receiver, and thanklessly covering another scene change. He is worried about, oh, pretty much everything, but mostly his missing ace reporter James Fullalove.

And so he should be.

Unfortunately, it’s another of those “tell not show” moments where he is able to describe the madness he has witnessed from the window of his office, but as he turns again to that window, he sees something horrible.

But we don’t see what, just yet.

Instead we return to the pit where, free of the influence, James Fullalove is busily snapping his photographs, as we see Breen and some other watchers gazing almost lifelessly at the ship as, in what is a model shot sadly lacking in scale, the glowing spaceship melts, and the smoke rises past that now all-too familiar row of houses in Hob’s slash Hobb’s Lane.

Inside that house once considered so haunted we find Captain Potter, another of those apparently immune to the Martian influence, busily knocking a hole in the wall that is right above the excavation. Across from him, the still, insect like body of Barbara Judd is watching him, and starts attacking him simply with the power of her mind.

Once again the rafters shift and rattle furiously – the physical effects in this are tremendous and must have given the behind the scenes staff tremendous fun as they did the wrangling live – and more mud and boulders are flung at the strangely smitten Captain.

Anyway, with a brief demonstration of what many thought was perfectly acceptable domestic behaviour back then, Barbara is knocked unconscious by the no longer gallant Captain Potter, but he does, at least, seem to regret what he feels he must do to stop the attack.

Within the pit itself the lights are pulsing brightly as Fullalove continues trying to chase his final story. He is spotted by Breen and his cronies, and the possessed people turn and stare at him with much the same fury in their eyes that Barbara had.

Fullalove is pelted by rocks and stones and eventually falls, ending up in a hole, killed by a stoning, and Brian Worth ends a story arc of the only other recurring Quatermass character (other than Professor Quatermass himself)  first played by Paul Whitsun-Jones in the very first serial seven years earlier.

Back at the pub, the camera pans across from a peepshow poster as a stiffly moving Quatermass advances on Roney, and it looks like there will have to be a fight to the death between the old friends.

Happily it seems that intellect manages to prevail over physical strength and, thanks to a fishing trip the two men once took – an unfortunate one for a twenty-nine pound pike apparently – Quatermass is able to use his brain and his memory to regain control of himself again.

This is shocking stuff, really. Our hero is trying to kill his best friend. He wanted to kill him, and he could do it without trying and without moving, simply because Roney was different. It’s not what we usually see in television drama – especially in the 1950s – but it shows how high the stakes are, and how the Martian influence can effect absolutely anybody.

And as we are about to find out, the stakes are particularly high, as they’re killing anything different, including the animals.

Yes, the dog actually dies in this one, people.

Although, thankfully, we don’t see it.

And it’s not only the animals, because, as Quatermass reminds us, THIS is the Wild Hunt, the savage compulsion to preserve their colony, buried with the spaceship in the pit, happening again, right now, five million years too late in contemporary London.

Morell is terrific in this, as he battles the agony of trying to retain control of his own mind, and it is a thoroughly disturbing and exhilarating tour de force of acting from this veteran and distinguished actor.

And, yet, simply by hanging on to that rather unlikely notion of Quatermass on a fishing trip, they finally escape the ruin of that old pub as the picture fades…

…to that familiar trope of using a newsroom to carry the bigger story, take us away from this small, human moment, and give us an idea of the huge scale of what’s apparently going on. It may be a familiar trope now, of course, but probably felt quite innovative back in 1959, and may very well have been. Clichés, after all, only become clichés, through overuse – but somebody had to do them first for them to begin the journey to becoming clichés.

Anyway, in the studios of the NYBCTV Newscast, the vaguely “American” sounding newsreader tells his viewers – and us - about the sudden unexpected paralysis of “London, England” using terms like “flash” which, perhaps, demonstrate how much in-vision news-reading has changed, and we ought to remind ourselves that this was something that had only begun on the BBC as recently as 1955.

Via the strange live link to the pilots of a freighter aircraft above London, we cut to the relatively convincing interior of the plane, and get a commentary on the spreading blackouts, and the collapsing buildings as, in another budget stretching “tell not show” sequence we hear about the fires and the smoke, whilst we visit that happy land known as “Stockfootage” to find repurposed film of London during the blitz, which seems to be curiously appropriate, given all of that nonsense that Breen was spouting last week.

Anyway, things do not end well for this brave aircrew. The co-pilot has collapsed, and the controls start thrashing about in an all-too-familiar manner, and the plane is suddenly flying towards a bright glowing light which falls on the face of the pilot as he screams, and we hear the worryingly familiar sound of a plane going down overlaid upon more stock footage of a ruined London.

The camera cuts once again to those familiar Hob’s slash Hobb’s Lane street signs, now lit by a throbbing glow and flames, and, above the model street, we get our first view of Hob, the horned devil, throbbing into being in the sky and, unsurprisingly perhaps, it resembles very closely one of those Martians found in the pit.

Below this beast, in the once-haunted house, Potter has succeeded in breaking through that wall, and the throbbing glow is now lighting the ruined interior of the room.

Quatermass and Roney arrive and find the senseless body of Barbara lying there, and, despite the fact that Roney knows it, Potter feels the need to reassure them both that she’s not dead, and Potter is suitably apologetic about doing what he felt he had to do.

The lucky slash unlucky immune ones are able to be picked out instinctively, and, in another “tell not show” moment, we discover that Roney could have been killed a dozen times on their way here, but that the presence of Quatermass confused the attackers.

The scientists then scramble over to see what is happening through that hole in the wall and it is left to Roney to pronounce “The Devil! The Horned Devil!” at our latest view of Hob.

And when the solution comes, it comes very easily.

From the kind of clear thinking and discussion the Martian Inheritance is designed to suppress.

The vessel has gone completely, the mass of the ship having turned into the energy of the figure now floating above them, and Roney reasons that the legends they’ve been exploring may also provide the answer that somehow works both scientifically and magically.

Iron and water were the traditional enemies of the devil, and iron and water might just provide the solution that they need.

The minutes left before the end of the story are now very few, so it will probably work, of course, even if, like Potter says, it seems far too simple.

Even if it is too easy, and really it isn’t, it had better work though. And, at the very least, the clues have always been there, throughout the entire six episodes.

Meanwhile, as Potter bravely heads back out into the street to retrieve some of that builder’s steel chain – it’s also been in plain sight throughout that we’re sitting on a building site remember - we hear a blood-curdling scream.

It is not Potter screaming, though. He returns, visibly shaken, to report that he was only saved by the fact that a blind man stumbled into the angry mob and drew their attention away from him.

John Stratton plays it very quietly here, which, as he would become a notoriously demonstrative actor later in his career, seems just a little surprising.

A lot of Londoners are going to wake up tomorrow full of remorse. At least, we hope they will. Maybe several won’t give a toss, given that some people can be very intolerant of the unlike, even those with disabilities.

This really is a story for the ages, isn’t it?

Meanwhile, Roney does some prop wrangling, attaching the chain to an old, forgotten fire grate which looks just like the one that used to be in my ramshackle old house, and Quatermass offers to do the fateful deed.

The camera angle shifts to outside that hole in the wall, intermittently lit so brightly by that throbbing glow, and we get what might be now considered a “Hero Shot” of Quatermass heading through it on his heroic quest.

And so this elderly hero – we don’t see that many of those these days – clambers endlessly down onto the now brightly lit roof of Crispin’s hut - such is the real time nature of real time television - but, because he is one of the enchanted, Quatermass falters.

Both Roney and Potter see this, and Roney begins his own fateful climb down back into the pit, as Quatermass arrives at the strangely waxy form of Breen who, fully consumed, is now a lifeless husk, which topples at his touch.

That’s either a fabulous model, or a rather brilliant make-up job and deadfall. I’m tending towards the latter, but that is finally the end of Anthony Bushell’s contribution as Breen in this story.

And Quatermass looks as if he might be about to share this fate. He staggers, falls to his knees, and drops the chain of salvation and, basically, our hero actually fails to save the day.

So it is left to Roney to seize that firegrate and, in a wide shot, fling it skyward, and there is a blinding flash as the screen bleaches out to a bright white, before fading, inevitably, to black.

We fade up on the staggering, bewildered figure of Professor Quatermass, shouting Roney’s name, and then, having spotted the huge circle of white ash that subtly explains his fate, almost whimpering it, as normality starts to return and people begin to return to the now perfectly harmless building site, and the music on the soundtrack begins to surge in more hopeful tones.

And we cut to a close-up of Quatermass – presumably pre-filmed as he’s his old neat and tidy self again – speaking at what appears to be the public enquiry about the entire incident, adding a coda that, apparently, some people wanted cut from the broadcast, which warns us that we now have the hope and the knowledge to deal with the situation should another Martian landing site ever be found.

As the rousing music, the final contribution to the serial by Trevor Duncan, swells, this speech, during which the camera remains focussed on the star as he walks forward serves as a reminder and a warning that if we cannot control the Martian inheritance within us, this will be their second dead planet.

And with that, Quatermass leaves the frame, and we see several of the main cast, including Sladden and Gilpin who return for just this one wordless scene (which makes me think it might have been filmed whilst they were making episode five) and - it is over.

The character of Professor Bernard Quatermass would never be seen again on BBC Television screens, and, apart from a repeat of this serial in two parts the following Christmas, and the Hammer Movie Adaptation in the late nineteen-sixties, his return to television would be in the form of Sir John Mills in the strike-affected Euston Films serial on ITV in the late nineteen-seventies, which is a very different, and rather troubled beast, and broadcast a year after the death of Andre Morell.

Nigel Kneale would survive until 2006, and is, quite rightly considered by many of us - if not those in the industry - to be one of the finest – and most prescient – television writers of that pioneering generation, but, arguably, possibly his career never quite reached the heights of this work, one which I consider to be his masterpiece.

Because, more than sixty years on, I really do think that it is simply just brilliant, and I hope, over the course of these six articles, that some of that enthusiasm has come across and, despite this rather forensic retelling perhaps spoiling the plot for you, I also genuinely hope you’ll give it a go sometime.

It is well worth it, and remains the only television serial I would have considered worthwhile enough to cover in an extensive set of articles like this. So if that doesn’t tell you something about how good it is, I’m not sure what will.

Martin A W Holmes, January 2020