Things are indeed getting much spookier. We start with Private West, shaken and horrified. Claustrophobia? Overheard the ‘boffins’ talking about black magic?
It doesn’t seem so. Again, I’m admiring the adventurous direction on this episode; the cameras are set up so that one camera is at the (unseen) end of the ‘UXB’, shooting straight into the interior, facing the front. The others are all on the outside. It allows the action to move quickly between outside and the inside.
Ah, those days when they thought brandy was good for shock… 🙂
A neat bit of undercutting of the sceptical attitude in the script. No one believes Private West – until Barbara Judd starts reading out the 1927 description. West, of course, is too young to know about the 1927 outbreak.
Another way of telling the difference between the filmed inserts and ‘live’ – when the actors are enthusiastically digging up piles of mud, it’s filmed. When they’re trying not to pick-axe the studio floor – it’s studio. 🙂 But the deeply unconvincing digging does its job; Corporal Gibson is able to give the hidden hatch a good whack. But if it unscrewed from the inside – who or what came out?
Ghost stories. Hob’s Lane has a reputation for ghost stories that keep getting earlier and earlier and the ‘UXB’ keeps getting stranger and stranger. The material it’s made of can resist concentrated heat.
And both Quatermass and Breen are getting increasingly worried. Ghost stories. They don’t want these stories going wild; even Captain Potter doesn’t want West talking to the other men. Ghost stories have a habit of spreading. Ghost stories also have a tradition that it’s cold where ghosts appear; “it’s getting perishing cold down here.” Even the birds are freezing to death. Captain Potter and the Sergeant are getting what looks very like frostbite.
I always like Sladden, the drill operator. Richard Shaw was in Doctor Who as well; Underworld, Frontier in Space and an early Hartnell. Equally, by this point, I’m starting to want to smack Colonel Breem.
They’re both lovely performances; Anthony Bushell did generally prefer to be called Major Bushell rather than Mr Bushell, but reports from his extensive work with Lawrence Olivier and as a BBC producer suggest that his talent for playing military martinets was observation-from-experience rather than his real personality. He was invariably described as ‘affable’, ‘fun’ and ‘a great joy to have around’.
Whee! It’s the BBC Radiophonic Workshop! Providing the spooky sound effects for the mysterious ‘echo’. The one that flies all around the Pit. Incidentally, you may notice that the Pit appears to be dug deeper and deeper. It’s not – the floor always has to be the studio floor. What they did instead was raise the walls higher and higher and move the builders hut ever upwards. In episode one it was on the floor of the studio; then it was at the top of a ramp, now it’s up a ramp and a ladder.
One of the very few faults in Nigel Kneale’s script is that he appears to have confused ‘paleontologist’ with ‘anthropologist’ – or maybe it was just that he needed Roney to be expert in both fields. Anyway, the point is that the ghost stories about Hob’s Lane go back centuries. And always end by saying that the place was ‘long notorious’ for weird happenings.
In case you’d forgotten that this is a science-fiction serial and not a horror story, Quatermass posits that ‘ghost stories’ might simply be a description of genuine but badly understood/observed phenomena.
Nice to see that, even in the 1950’s, you couldn’t escape from journalists. 😉
The drill bit didn’t work, but a hole is slowly appearing in the bulkhead. And breaks through by itself – with an inrush of air. Quatermass has worked out, meanwhile, that it’s all about disturbances of the ground. Every time the ground around Hob’s Lane is disturbed, these events occur. And they’re always described as frightening, as evil.
The demons.
That’s the last shot of the episode; a monster that could grace any episode of Doctor Who with pride. I can’t imagine what impact it must have made on a TV audience in 1959. Horned, three legged, vaguely like a giant insect – and dead.
They’ve been dead for a long time.
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