Attention
please! This first installment in a series looking at the classic
'Quatermass' series of British TV SF is notably being posted on the
very day when, seven years ago, our first ever post looked at the Hammer movie version. We
don't just throw this show together, you know.
Further
attention required! Please note that this review is considered unsuitable
for children and those of an anti-plot-spoiler disposition.
”They
are to reach a height of fifteen hundred miles above the Earth and
there learn what is to be learnt. For an experiment is an operation
designed to discover some unknown truth.”
-
Opening narration
If
British small-screen science fiction has never exactly been
big-budget, with ’The Quatermass Experiment’
(1953) we can see how it’s Fifties origins were truly made from
sticky tape and glue. Whenever anyone answers the phone to say (in
clipped Fifties tones) “Experimental Rocket Group”, you can’t
help but be reminded of Wallace and Gromit bashing together moonships
in their basement. Indeed, its gang of high-minded well-meaning
boffins are often reminiscent of the BBC in themselves, stumbling
along between crises, extemporising history. In a way the title to
the first series gives the whole thing away - it was
an experiment, a prototype, built in such back-shed conditions you’re
amazed they ever got it to fly.
The
first series not only lacked for special effects, it was broadcast
entirely live with neither space nor budget for location shoots. (We
can only watch the first two episodes now, but not because the others
were lost. They were just not recorded in the first place.) The
‘monster’ which appears in the finale was created by writer Nigel
Kneale and his wife at home, by modifying a rubber glove from their
kitchen, when the BBC effects department despaired of his requests
and threw in the towel.
Nevertheless,
Kneale and his producer/director Rudolph Cartier created something of
more than mere historical importance. The Wright brothers may have
pioneered flight, but today you wouldn’t want to ride in one of
their planes - whatever the deal on air miles. Conversely,
'Quatermass' and its sequels are must-see items
for anyone with an interest in science fiction. Kneale and Cartier
took their limitations as challenges, as if writing a haiku, and
brought to the screen a science fiction marked by intelligence and
even social comment.
Dialogue,
for example, tends to the smartly understated rather than the
melodramatic. The rocket ship is simply described as having travelled
“far”. Phrases uttered casually often come back to haunt, such as
the pre-flight quip “bring something back”. (Made into the second
episode title.) Which indeed they do…
The
most obvious and major difference between this and the later film version is that, instead of Brian Donlevey,
Quatermass is played by an actor. To be specific, Reginald Tate (above), but
perhaps any actor would have been change enough. While the film
Quatermass is one-dimensionally remorseless, here he’s presented as
much more troubled - and with it much more sympathetic. His main
antagonist is Paterson, a member of his own rocket crew who takes on
and amplifies his own feelings of guilt. In a live television
broadcast, the big Q even asks for the world’s forgiveness. The
Donlevy Quatermass would have seized the opportunity to tell everyone
to stop bugging him.
The
second big difference lies in the ending. If the film was 'inverted
Frankenstein', this culminates in a more Prince Charles fashion. But
let’s lead up to that gradually. As mentioned in the film review,
the Thing represents the self reduced to a “pre-human state”. I
also casually called it a “walking corpse,” and indeed it has
many of the lumbering human-non-human features of the zombie. The
name 'Carroon' may have been chosen to echo 'carrion'. With the novel
'The Day of the Triffids' released only two years
earlier, it may be that vegetation was in those more refined times
used as a stand-in for the undead. (Notably, the opening of 'Day
of the Triffids' has since been recycled by '28
Days Later', 'The Walking Dead' and counting...)
In
the film the Thing absorbs life, starting with the two other
astronauts in the rocket, reducing them literally to powder. This
original adds an extra fillip, the men’s bodies are devoured but
their personalities are somehow retained inside the surviving
Carroon.
Which
doesn’t make for much in the way of logical sense. (There’s some
explaining away that this doesn’t happen to the Thing’s other
victims due to the ‘longer time’ it had to absorb the astronauts
aboard the rocket). But it allows for much narrative tension as their
personalities briefly burst to the surface of the stricken survivor,
and the three-into-one-schema vies with our assumptions about the
integrity of the self - and so underlines the theme of loss of
individuation.
All
of which works to underline just what sort of show this is. The
rocket ship at first resembles a 'locked room' murder mystery, two
men dead with no conceivable way it could have happened. Notably, its
scientists and policemen who mull over this conundrum. But of course
the rug is soon and quite deliberately pulled from under this, and
the 'deaths' given a supernatural cause. The “something back”
'Quatermass' brings to SF is horror, rather than
Westerns with ray guns or adventure stories. Just as Superman is now forever associated with the intro line "faster than a speeding bullet", 'Quatermass' comes complete in the popular imagination with the BBC voiceover warning to "those of a nervous disposition". Notably, its a story
that starts with a rocket ship and ends with Westminster Abbey.
And
yet for all that its not a Gothic story; even if Kneale's initial premise was “science going bad” it's never
anti-science. Our protagonist is not only a scientist, he works with
Police Inspector Lomax and journalist Fullalove – a microcosm of
the enquiring minds within the British establishment. Here and later,
horror is associated with a form of ignorance, knowledge with
empowerment. Monsters (if that's even the term) are not part of the
fabric of things, to be shied from, but more like Bunyanesque giants
– to be toppled and overcome.
Which
throws an entirely different light on the whole business of setting
the finale in Westminster Abbey. However much Quatermass himself
changes between TV set and screen, the Abbey may well change more. In
the film the Thing appears by the end all-powerful, so you assume
either it chose to go there or it stumbled upon the place by
accident. But here Quatermass insists “it wasn’t chance” that
took it there, and explains the Thing’s existence is parasitically
contingent upon the existence of Carroon and the others. (Perhaps
it's three-into-one absorption could be regarded as some perversion
of the holy trinity.)
Addressing
them he explains “it can only know by means of your knowledge…
understand through your understanding. It can only exist through your
submission”. His comments even take on the tone of an exorcism
(“you will overcome this evil”), with the implication the Abbey
was chosen not by the Thing but the three astronauts, as a symbol of
human values from where to stage their final battle. (Albeit with the
corollary that London has been reduced to a hysterical, fleeing mob –
“like the beasts and the plants”.)
While
in the film the Thing is destroyed by electrocution, here the
astronauts are able to regain control enough to destroy it from
within – by willing themselves to suicide they destroy their
parasite with them. As Paterson, paralysed through guilt and blame,
is ’Quatermass’s shadow self (who also
sacrifices himself), so the Thing is the baser nature of the three
astronauts – and by implication of us all. It is our attempt to
leave the Earth that has brought it upon us, exposed our ties, like
rattling the bar brings the jailer. But human values win out. Though
initially juxtaposed, rocket ship and Abbey ultimately combine –
standing for something like brain and heart, uniting against the mere
brute body.
Kneale
disliked the changes the film made to his vision, changes he had no
part in. And he was right… about all of them except for this one.
For one thing, this sudden change of heart makes scant sense. It’s
what they’ve been trying to do all along, to little effect even
before the Thing’s growth had been so advanced. Apart from the
rarified atmosphere of the Abbey (presumably intended symbolically
rather than as literally powerful), there seems little reason why the
same trick should work now except for the fact we’ve come to the
end of the sixth episode.
And
while a fisticuffs ending might have felt equally hackneyed, there is
always something stagily unsatisfying about ending a story with a
rousing speech. It feels arbitrary and unresolving, almost a deus ex machina. More widely, this invoking of the basic decency
inside us all now seems (to put it mildly) a touch naïve – the
point where ’Quatermass’ stops seeming
pioneering and becomes merely quaint. It suggests problems can be
resolved not by action or change but merely by discussion and debate.
This
unconvincing ending first felt to me like a product of its time,
resting on notions of ‘chaps’ always ‘coming though’ when
things looked at their rummest. Perhaps, had 'Night of the Living Dead' been made fifteen years earlier, they'd
have given that the same ending – someone sticking on some Elgar
and the zombies rediscovering their inner humanity. But interestingly
Andrew Pixley’s notes to the BBC DVD edition reveal this was a
widespread complaint even among contemporary audiences. (One
commenting “the first five built up a terrific excitement but
Episode Six went off like a wet firework”.) With recent memories of
Nazism, perhaps such Sunday School notions of basic decency were
already antiquated.
It's
possible that Kneale took these criticisms to heart. If he had no
involvement in the film version, he went on to adapt ’1984’
- where Orwell quite deliberately set out to scupper such sweet
notions of some unbreakable core inside us. (More of which anon.) And
the idea that alien life can be engaged in conversation, let's see
how that fared in the sequels...
Coming
soon! As you may have already guessed, more 'Quatermass'...
Grateful
thanks to ‘Redsock’
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