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…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.
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“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.
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I think “we had some style” is definitely underselling this. 😉A new TV show to avoid: Intelligence.
I was recommended it by a friend, and can’t help but feel she was being mischievous, as the only alternative explanation can be that she has had most of her brain removed in some sort of freak accident. I’ve watched about three episodes of it with increasing incredulity.
It’s a shlocky action fest which sees Sawyer from Lost (Josh Holloway) have a chip implanted into his brain by Doctor Phlox from Star Trek Enterprise (John Billingsley). He works for a secretive Government Agency and he can access every bit of information on everyone. He fights for truth, puppies, freedom, etc. against people who want to “destroy our way of life” (honestly – Sawyer actually says this at one point, although I’ll give him points for looking fairly stunned as he says it, with gritted teeth).
The biggest problem I have with it is that I believe it is in danger of turning me into a conspiracy freak – something I believe I have successfully resisted for much of my life. Because I can’t help feeling this abortion was dreamed up by a committee of concerned parties in an emergency session of the CIA and NSA:
Boss: “We’re getting a lot of heat over our surveillance and data gathering…what can we do?”
Underling 1: “It doesn’t help that the media is producing shows saying that surveillance is a bad thing and something to be feared. We need balance. We need a show that tells it like it is to honest god-fearing American folk that only people with something to hide have anthing to fear. We’re the good guys!”
Underling 2: “Hell yeah! We could write it!”
Underling 3: “Do we have anyone who understands character and drama?”
Boss: “No we don’t. We’d better aim for network TV.”The underlying philosophy is “Oh, we will get into trouble if anyone finds out we’re doing this terrible thing. But it’s keeping us safe from some horrible people, and look, Sawyer has just taken his shirt off. And saved some puppies. Isn’t he a role model for super-snoopers everywhere?”.
Intelligence – It’s an insult to the audiences.
Are you worried about an etiquette faux pas? Worry not. It would seem Smith likes a bit of variety in cosplayers, and had been known to organise impromptu photo shoots at SDCC, like this one with KG in 2011.
The big question is whether your ten look beats the bloke in this picture. That’s bloody scary.
These are really comments on Episodes 2 and 3, because I’m catching up and others including @bluesqueakpip are covering other points so well. I’d wholeheartedly agree with the comment on Episodes 2 blog about this being very effective horror. Stephen King, also agreed, co-opting elements in his novel The Tommyknockers. Eps 2 and 3 really do a lot to advance a sense of creeping unease about the object and the area they are working in as @whisht observes.
Particularly effective at the time I would think is the exchange with the Policeman in Episode 2. A (presumably) level headed man-of-the-law who is really not comfortable talking or being in the house that terrified him as a child. It’s Dixon of Dock Green getting the heeby-jeebies!
I think this is why I prefer the serial to the film. Each serve their own purposes but the serial is far superior at cranking up the tension as we come to understand that this object has had a long term impact.
The end reveals another key plus for me – the creature design. I absolutely love it compared to the film version, which disappointed me by being a bit..well, bland. Differences below (to be honest, the colour palette of the film did nothing for the design.)
