Quatermass and The Pit part 6
This topic contains 12 replies, has 9 voices, and was last updated by 
Nick 10 years ago.
-
…and how is anyone supposed to follow that post, @bluesqueakpip? 🙂 Excellent stuff.
I think anyone who hasn’t seen this before should take the opportunity. The final episode effectively pulls the strands that have been worked out in the previous episodes into a terrifying whole.
The vision of “Hob” looming above while chaos ensues is an iconic one for me, but as @bluesqueakpip notes, it’s the fact that these are normal people who are killing, joining the mob against the defenceless that is the troubling part. This is their genetic inheritance.
Putting aside the Martian aspect, this has a large element of truth within it. For a gregarious species we certainly base our group dynamics on identifying the weak. To seek out difference fairly ruthlessly on occasion. And we start at an early age, as any bullied child will tell you.
I once had the good fortune to be at a Q&A with Nigel Kneale (for a showing of Year of the Sex Olympics). It covered a lot of his work, but Quatermass featured heavily in the questions. When asked about the direct inspiration (was is race, was it the Nazis) he simply said “look around you” Before going on to say that, in truth it was all those. It was McCarthism (he’d seen some people he knew persecuted), and even time good people seemed willing to join a mob because it seemed a more immediately attractive idea that being outside it. It’s about human nature, and how we should strive to control its worst aspects. I still think he’s one of the most important TV writers we’ve produced.
I was about 11 when I purchased a second hand copy of the Script book for Quatermass and the Pit (it was the third edition, which was unusual for a script book – Arrow bought the rights after the immense success of the Penguin run). He kindly signed it for me later on but, if you are interested, here is what he wrote about the serial in his introduction a decade and a half after transmission.
—-
“Suppose a building contractor was excavating a site for a big office block and going really deep,” I remember saying, “and suddenly came across what looked like a space ship -“
“Let’s do it!” said Rudolph Cartier.
It was 1959, when a lot of reconstruction was going on, the final rebuilding of the blitzed areas. There were hoardings up everywhere with peep-holes cut in them for passers-by to inspect progress.
The idea made a third Quatermass story possible without dropping too obviously into repetition. It had to be about alien visitation, of course, and the professor instrumental in coping – those elements were inescapable. But whereas the first serial dealt with a contact in real time and the second one with an invasion already established for a year, this would be long after the event. The intrusion would have come 5 million years in the past, when no resistance was possible, so that it succeeded wholly and built certain undesirable characteristics into Earth’s future population. Quatermass would be fighting his own hereditary. A new pattern.
The first two serials had by now re-appeared in shortened cinema-film shape. The American actor Brian Donlevy, once an excellent comic heavy but gone quite to pieces, bawled his way through them in what was meant to be the role of poor Quatermass (For the record, the third and best of those films starred Andrew Kier as Quatermass).
Our new TV professor would be Andre Morell, a civilised and debonair figure. He would be the man in the middle, one of an almost symbiotic trio. On one side of him would be the primitive Breen, played by Anthony Bushell with his special brand of ice-cold menace, and on the other side the only too human vulnerable figure of Dr. Roney. Here the Canadian actor Cec Linder put in a memorably warm performance.
These three were to typify human variants, afflicted to different degrees by the alien tampering and driven by the implanted instincts into displays of superstitious fear and racial rigidity when the capsule in the pit warmed up.
The excavation became the main element of the story. To simulate it for the pre-filmed sequences, tons of mud were spilled into the BBC’s newly acquired studios at Ealing. The designer, Clifford Hatts, made it appear to get deeper and deeper by the simple device of raising its sides, so that a contractor’s hut first seen at ground level finished up thirty feet above the bottom of the hole.
The Kine-and-Wilkie special effects team, now rich with experience, turned in brilliantly effective devices. People still talk about their poltergeisted coffee-stall, the ground that moved beneath a man’s body, the space ship that became organically alive. They made excellent Martian monsters, too, both dead and alive.
All the technically risky sequences were gathered safely on film by Cartier with the flair that had stayed with him since his UFA days. But he never ceased to push his luck, making heads shake in the luxury of the Riverside Studios, newly converted to TV, when the show came to be transmitted there. It was still largely live, and that was where the rest of the characters came in: the woman who read tea-leaves, the cop with the frightened childhood memories, the clubmen and the pensioners and the rubbernecks and the rest.
It was a time when some delicate theories where being framed about the intimate medium and the small screen and the need for social commitment. I suspect we broke most of those rules before they had a chance to harden, with what amounted in TV terms to a cast of thousands. The audience wanted, needed, enjoyed its imagination being alarmed. Soon came all those accounts of council meetings being abandoned and pubs being emptied on Quatermass night.
No, we weren’t committed. But we had some style. We were pretty good.
——
I think “we had some style” is definitely underselling this. 😉
You must be logged in to reply to this topic.
