“THE SINISTER INVERSE”: ROB YOUNG’S ‘THE MAGIC BOX’

“Child be strange, dark, true, impure, and dissonant”
-‘Penda’s Fenn’

Subtitled 'Viewing Britain Through The Rectangular Window’, Rob Young’s latest book is self-described as “a riveting journey into the psyche of Britain through its golden age of television and film.” (Though I’ll concentrate on TV here, for reasons which will hopefully become obvious.)

It’s not intended as a compendium, cheerily mentioning only in passing things you might expect to see covered more closely. Though as comprehensiveness is not lacking I soon found myself using it as one, jotting down a list of things I’d not seen which I now wanted to.

But it does veer towards compendium, throws its net widely, and so more thinly than you might want. It can at times feel maddeningly uneven. The treatment of some examples is somewhat perfunctory, little more than plot summaries. But just when you’re rewiring your reading head to accommodate this, Young goes and says something striking. (As just one example, how had I ever missed the Arthurian references in ’Kill List’?)

And if it feels uneven but at unpredictable points compelling, then that makes it remarkably similar to much of the material it covers. Overall, this doesn’t read at all like a career writer working through a shopping-list of marketable subjects, it doesn’t even read like someone with an affinity for their subject. The book goes into occasional anecdotes of Young’s own screen-fixated youth. But even without them you’d guess he’d been fed on this diet from an early age, and now has it in his marrow.

Young never names his subject, finding the commonly used ‘folk horror’ too narrow, and worries little over coming up with a robust definition. About which he’s probably right. Much of the dramas covered here are made up of things nearly said and sights nearly shown. The twisty, animate, billowing sheets of ’Whistle And I’ll Come To You’ seem a synecdoche of the whole thing, an apparition you’re not quite sure what you saw even as you’re seeing it, darkly ineffable.

Young speculates whether the protagonist has gone insane and is hallucinating this, akin to ’The Innocents’. But this may be a rare case of him missing the point. The order of events that got us here seems moot. The apparition is so sense-defying, not conventionally horrific yet so oblivious to our consensus reality, to see such a thing… it would doubtless drive you mad whether you were before or not.

Given which, trying to delineate all this may seem contrary to the spirit of the enterprise. It would be like trying to map the contours of that ever-shifting sheet. Grasp at ghosts, and they’ll just slip away. But then while words are inadequate, they remain all we’ve got. Let’s at least try to lay down some fuzzy chalk lines. True, it’s not as narrow as a genre, (which ‘folk horror’ may well be), and is better seen as a milieu.

We can say it’s more than just the stuff we liked when we were kids. I obsessed over, for example the space age shenanigans in ’Blake’s Seven’, but they would have no place here. I might sketch the boundaries a little more tightly than Young. To me there has to be at least a hint of the eerie.

So the children’s information film spookily narrated by the “spirit of dark and lonely water” does belong, with Donald Plesence’s voice-over, simultaneously lugubrious and sinister. Whereas for example ’Brideshead Revisited’ doesn’t, even if Young has illuminating things to say about it. (Or alternately am I trying to read a different book to the one Young has written? Reader, you must decide that one!

But this doesn’t restrict us to the literally supernatural, any more than it does the literally literal. It doesn’t have to feature wicked nudie Diabolists or New Agers dousing for ley lines. (In fact in the second case I’d prefer that it didn’t.) Watkin’s ’Culloden’, for example, has no hauntings. But its friction between historic warfare and modern reporting methods, allowing us to see the brutality of the past in current-day up close, includes it. And if any explanation were added, that these were a time travelling film crew or some such, it would only take the effect away. In fact “hint of the eerie” might well be a tautology. Too eerie and the eerie will negate itself.

Given which, its perhaps appropriate that one of the book’s central questions is only nearly said. Is this a milieu which, once coined, could be ongoing? Or was it the product of, and therefore something confined to, a specific era?

Busying himself with case studies, Young is quieter on the macro forces which led to this. But, to simplify somewhat widely… The post-war rise of America as the dominant super-power usurped Britain’s self-appointed role.The economic axis shifted from Old to New World. So we compensated with what we had - history. Which we claimed nourished culture, almost as an automatic process, maturing it like vintage wine. We might not have rockets and skyscrapers but we had Shakespeare and Stonehenge, or so we reasoned. Culture and nature, history and heritage became synonyms, and from them we drew our sense of specialness.

So, more and more, Britain fell back on exploiting itself. But not just the coal and iron it was already at work on. It started to strip-mine a projected image of its own past, when people either talked proper or knew their place. As Laurie Penny has pointed out: “With nowhere left to colonise, we gleefully strip our own history for the shiniest trinkets to sell. The past is a different country, so we’re allowed to invade it, take its stuff, and lie relentlessly about the people who actually live there.”

We did this at least initially to make ourselves feel more secure. But we also found that culture become monetisable, an export product to those who currently lacked it. Young tells us British TV’s export market in 2019 “amounted to £1.34 billion.” As Adorno said, culture is an industry. (How much this consolidates the trend and how much it changes it, made Englishness into an export good is a good question, but one for another time.)

And TV itself was a fine example of this. It was surely more cost-effective to buy in American shows than make our own, and they often proved popular with audiences. Instead they were strictly rationed, taking the same rare but treasured place in schedules that sweets did in my childhood diet. While heritage TV was the fibre and roughage, the “good-for-you” for forced mastication.

And what was more natural in that environment than to invert it? That past we identified with, that past we thought was ours enough to give us the right to sell it, was it even truly ours? Did we really grasp it? Wasn’t it actually foreign to us, ever-elusive but at the same time inescapable, forever seeping through into the present?

The past turned out to not be an heirloom like we thought, but a cursed object we now can’t return to the shop. Young calls it “the sinister inverse of a British Transport Films documentary-style portrait of the countryside.” By being associated with old cyclic notions of time, the past could be shown as still-present, unendable.

As Young recounts, the past, the buried, the concealed and – above all – the eerie are often taken as interchangeable terms. (Significantly, ‘buried’ includes names. Both ’Quatermass And the Pit’ and ’Penda’s Fen’ include the ‘real’, historic name of places as a revelation.) At a time when, as he he also recounts, American anxieties were fixed upon the sky.

There were inevitably those who took to this from the start. But, equally inevitably, it was most taken up by the succeeding post-war generation, and so reached its peak in the Seventies.

Which is why it’s so fitting that Young’s previous book was ’Electric Eden’, on the adoption of folk music. This often took the form of a younger generation claiming the folk tradition from their parents. But it had as much to do with de-claiming it, giving it back its unfamiliarity.

Which makes for a strange rebellion, in some ways a reactionary one. Youth in revolt didn’t just not reject what Marx witheringly called “the muck of ages”, it actively rejected the possibility it could be rejected. In fact it purposefully raked through that muck of ages, hoping to come across something thrillingly dangerous that could be set loose. 

Kneale’s vision of us in ’Quatermass’ as the lemming-like Planet people was an old man’s phobia, bur perhaps contained a smidge of truth. If folk horror isn’t the whole of this milieu, it tends to be where these contradictions come to a head. (As said over ’Blood On Satan’s Claw’.) Turning into, as Young terms it, “I fought the lore and the lore won”.

Further, form and content are never truly separable. The television technology of the time was ephemeral, its images dependent on (and akin to) our fickle weather, often fuzzy and indistinct, lending themselves to the spectral. ‘Ghosting’ was a literal feature, frequently coming up on our family TV. Added to which, TV wasn’t a constant. You would see it come on in the morning, and go off again in the evening. It arrived and left, announcing itself both times, it wasn’t ubiquitous.

(Young recalls wishing he was old enough to stay up for the closedown signal. I can remember watching the daily opening ceremony of Anglia TV, a camera revolving around a statue of a fittingly regal horsebacked knight. It was tedious but somehow also enthralling, the magic ritual by which the programmes were conjured up.)

Which lends itself to the notion that there’s something mediumistic about it, a metaphor to which Young often returns. So does that make all this the product of an era, enhanced further when combined with our own semi-ephemeral memories?

Perhaps we should push this more rigorously. Perhaps all this only comes into being when framed in our memories. After all the Seventies, where most of this material comes from, is now itself the past - a foreign country we only half-recall being citizens of. I cannot imagine a sleek updated version of ’The Stone Tapes’, it needs the clunky analogue technology of its time. Similarly, the box TV with its turny dial navigating a vortex of white noise can feel like a interchange between todays’ hi-def flatscreens and the medium’s table.

But of course at time of transmission that technology wasn’t an aesthetic choice, any more than Seventies London was in ’The Sweeney’. Today it feels perfectly natural to bundle all this material up together, whereas back then it wouldn’t at all. (Historical dramas, some of them literary adaptions, alongside science fiction shows aimed at kids?) Back then it just looked like TV, because that’s what TV looked like.

Added to which, we were the TV generation. Unlike our parents we were born after the box, took its presence for granted. Their regarding it as a semi-foreign object, whose transmissions needed to be carefully curated, seemed strange and arcane. Which means its nature only strikes us now, in retrospect.

Yet there’s also contemporary examples. A relatively small number, perhaps, but they’re there. True, because they’re riffing off this milieu. ’Kill List’ for example, has a quite Seventies aesthetic. Yet it’s contemporary-set, suggesting the milieu is not spent yet. 

Besides, new technology always opens new avenues. Mass broadcast was thought by many as a standardising, homogenising force which would kill off what remained of folk culture, something like the regulating Judge in ’Blood On Satan’s Claw’. Instead like was attracted to unlike, and it exploited its own nature to marinate with that folk culture in creative ways.

But there is something which has changed. It is never times that are creative, they only ever provide a context to be creative within. Only people can be creative. But they can only act creatively when given the opportunity to do so.

At the book’s end, Young points out how almost none of these programmes would have been commissioned today. “Television has become the source millions turn to for long-form episodic narratives, the media has had to focus on story and forward drive over ambience and atmosphere… the television has become part of the digital data flow and and the never-ending conversation of social media.”

Contrary to every single piece of received wisdom we’ve been spoonfed since the late Seventies, it was the stuffy old bureaucracy of the BBC (and similar institutions) which commissioned these left-field shows. And this was precisely because they weren’t micromanaging and focus-group-testing every single thing they produced. With income guaranteed from the license fee, they could afford to experiment with what might interest people. Not so today. Much of what’s ludicrous about the current moral panic over ‘cancel culture’ is its failure to grasp that most censorship happens at the commissioning stage.

But if this milieu isn’t over, it’s gone on some decades - making it possible to ask how effective it was. That quote from ’Penda’s Fenn’ up top, that can be a tricky combination to pull off. On one side, the past can’t just seem dark and foreign. ‘Bad stuff happened back then’ is in itself barely even a banality, and by itself merely suggests a haunted house whose door needs nailing shut. We need to feel estranged from the past, but also that we belonged there.

And as time went on, there was a counter-tendency which was possibly worse. The Right seemed in such control of the present, that the future was surely theirs too, and so the past became something of a refuge. To quote Evelyn Waugh, via Young, “when the waterholes were dry people sought to drink at the mirage.”

This yearning for a time before there were, like, corporations and stuff reached a risible terminus in doctrines such as Primitivism. Yet much like racism and the Right, it’s proponents were only saying out loud which seemed outrageous, but which others were already thinking. And so the colonialist projection of the Noble Savage reasserted itself. And ’Avatar’ ain’t eerie.

Watch this space! Of course the real question is - how does any of this apply to ’Doctor Who’..?

'NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR'

Contunuing our series on SF from classic British TV. After looking at Nigel Kneale and Rudolph Cartier's work on the pioneering BBC TV SF series 'Quatermass', we shift to their adaptation of 'Nineteen Eight-Four'

You could be forgiven for regarding Kneale and Cartier’s choice of follow-up to the successful 'Quatermass Experiment’ as an eccentric one. While much of the early part of George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel ’Nineteen Eighty-Four’ is given over to a man writing a diary, this later develops into scenes of him reading a book. It’s central question is not whether the totalitarian regime will catch dissident Winston Smith, which is rather assumed to be a foregone conclusion, but whether it can get inside his head and make him love Big Brother. As the old saying goes, you can’t photograph thought. So how do you dramatise thoughtcrime?

In fact the BBC had bought the rights to the book very shortly after publication, and Kneale and Cartier had quite distinct advantages over other adaptors. Though working a good six years after the novel’s publication (in 1954), they perhaps found it easier to reproduce the spirit of the book than the later versions. The Jewish Cartier had to flee his native Austria after the Nazi take-over, and lost family members to the Holocaust. Which, somewhat needless to say, might well have sharpened his feelings about totaliarianism. However, despite this dramatic sequence of events, it would have been more his later experiences in Britain that informed this adaptation.

Though the novel takes place in a scenario of perpetual war, Orwell wrote it after hostilities were over. And, like many others during theat period, he had become convinced that it had stratified the possible outcomes for history – into socialism versus totalitarianism. Hence his book is still steeped in ration-book austerity, the smell of boiled cabbage and ‘careless-talk’ style paranoia. (Aspects of it now seem dated to us, such as the Anti Sex League. They stopped trying to censor sex a long time ago. In fact nowadays it’s their favoured ruse to try and sell us shit.) Kneale, and to a lesser extent Cartier, would have been similarly steeped in such a spirit. Rationing, for example, did not end until shortly before the programme was broadcast.

Added to which, they perhaps had the advantage of irony. Orwell had based Smith’s work at the Ministry of Truth on his own experiences at the BBC, and prophesised the widespread adoption of TV (or ‘televisor screens’). Producing an adaptation not just for the BBC but on television therefore gives proceedings both an edge and a fillip. (It’s perhaps a peculiarity of British society that such apparent contradictions empower artworks as often as they emasculate them. As cultural commentator Martin Barker has argued, the best children’s comics of this era were produced for the most conservative publisher – DC Thompson.)

Perhaps more importantly, television of this time was by necessity ‘talky’. Though the programme begins with one matte painting of futuristic horror, any attempts to ‘sex up’ this cautionary tale would have run into an intractable Anti Sex League of budgetary constraint. If Orwell wrote long passages of conversation to explain the concept of ‘newspeak’, that’s exactly what is put up on the screen.

Admittedly, the sheer interiority of the book still causes problems. There’s an early point where Smith joins in a workplace chant of “we love Big Brother.” His thought voice then gets overdubbed – “I hate Big Brother.” You can see what they’re trying to convey, the way our own thoughts can take us by surprise. But it feels clumsy, even if we’re to accept that this is the first time Smith ever thought such a thing. Similarly, if typically for the era, the acting frequently veers to the melodramatic.

Nevertheless, the adaptation commendably displays both a feeling for and faithfulness to Orwell’s book. It may well be the best filmic representation of the book and certainly eclipses Michael Radford’s version (released, with typically limpid literal-mindedness, in 1984).

Of course Kneale is too smart a writer to attempt to literally hold up a book before a camera. Though I last read the book a long time ago, I was still struck by a number of large and small divergences. Take for example the scene where Smith is called to his neighbours’ flat to fix the sink, which is used to demonstrate the party’s effect upon the young. In the book he is challenged by the son with a toy pistol. Told at school to watch out for spies the children are now playing at this, using it as an outlet for their bullying instincts. (“Like the gambolling of tiger cubs who will soon grow into man-eaters.”) In the TV version they are led by the daughter who is in earnest in challenging Smith. Like Abigail in 'The Crucible' she is old and smart enough to have worked out that such claims give her power, that adults can be taken away merely on her word.

This also places a more sinister twist upon a later scene where she denounces her father. From the book we assume he must be ‘guilty’ of his thought-crime, in this version it’s more than likely she set him up. But this altered version is most likely to be in itself an adaptation, taken from a very similar scene in Brecht’s ’Fear and Misery in The Third Reich.’ (Cartier would go on to adapt Brecht’s ’Mother Courage’ in 1959.)

However, the deeper and more problematic alterations are to the political aspects of the book. Though, as in the book, the ‘counter-revolutionary’ Goldstein is depicted as resembling Trotsky, the adaptation’s main approach to the politics is to leave them out. As in the book, this tension is conveyed through Smith’s relationship with Julia. While Smith sees their affair as a springboard towards political rebellion, Julia sees it as their rebellion – they love each other and not Big Brother, and that is enough. (It would be interesting to know how, with homosexuality then still illegal, a contemporary gay audience responded to their clandestine affair. Smith’s description of his joyless, businesslike marriage sounds almost like a ‘beard’, while Julia’s ability to “tell” deviance equates to ‘gaydar’.)

Orwell’s own stance could be said to be ambiguous, implicitly siding with Smith’s political yearnings but then making his denouncing of Julia into his breaking point. But the adaptation almost explicitly suggests that Smith’s notions of rebellion are chimerical, and that Julia is right in her first instinct to shun contact with the underground.

It’s reminiscent of another Julia from contemporary fiction. In Waugh’s ’Brideshead Revisited’ (1945), Julia Flyte breaks off an affair with Charles Ryder because it would be “ a rival good to God’s”. Things are merely inverted here, for this Julia, for here that is the precise reason for going ahead. In Kneale and Cartier’s hands, ’Nineteen Eighty-Four’ becomes almost a secularised theological story, all about their love versus the love for Big Brother. Kneale and Cartier have not done anything so crass as to turn the book into a love story with a political background. But they have set up a story which counterposes love against politics, rather than one politics against another. Love ceases to be a form of freedom buts something paramount, and their affair holds the stage to itself.

There are a number of factors which could have led to this. One of these is the already-discussed interiority of Orwell’s novel. Goldstein’s book, for example, is quoted from only scantly and becomes more a totem than a source of political information, while Smith’s diaries are collapsed into the four words “I hate Big Brother”. The love story was simply easier to dramatise, a more attractive target.

Another might be the six years that passed between book and adaptation, in which a newly forged post-war consensus appeared to make Orwell’s political predictions obsolete. (We got neither the predicted fully fledged totalitarianism nor socialism but, in a very British fudge, bits of both.) But ultimately, you can’t help but reflect that Kneale was a less political writer than Orwell and was consequently less engaged by the political themes.

Does this matter? In one sense, no. Kneale is free to adapt the work as he sees fit, which includes shaping it to his sympathies. (As a fan of Terry Gilliam’s ‘Brazil’, which borrows highly liberally from Orwell's original, I could hardly claim otherwise!) But, in another, yes. In an incident both famous and infamous, a group of right-wing MPs submitted a Commons motion effectively condemning the BBC for broadcasting such a programme. (Though, in a piece generally suggesting the show's controversy to have been overstated, Oliver Wake debunks any suggestion this motion ever reached debate stage.) Less well known, if admittedly covered by Wikipedia, is that amendments and counter-motions were drafted to defend broadcast, which included the following: "many of the inhuman practices depicted in the play ’Nineteen Eighty-Four’ are already in common use under totalitarian régimes.”

Like the saying goes, with friends like these... As mentioned when covering Atilla the Stockbroker's song 'Down On Airstrip One', written on the cusp of that auspicious year, Orwell had gone from prophet to hostage. Perhaps it even started with that very motion. If he hadn't deigned to write the book the British establishment wanted him to, it just needed reflecting in their distorting mirror. Fear what's over there coming over here! Pay no attention to that little man behind the curtain...

Of course, on a prosaic level, the counter-motion's words are correct. But they could not be further removed from Orwell’s purpose, which was to demonstrate how easily Britain could slide down such a road – how far, in many ways, it was already along it. Though Big Brother himself may resemble Stalin, adding to the antipathy between Orwell and Stalinists, the book is quite explicitly located in a Britain locked in with an American superpower. So thickly is the book steeped in Britishness, that even the most cloth-eared adaptations tend to retain this setting. This version even starts with the description of “one man’s alarmed vision of the future, which with dangerous ease might be brought about”.

(For that reason I would half-seriously suggest that the adaptations most true in spirit is the 1979 Dead Kennedys track 'California Uber Alles', which uses collage-like black humour to insert Orwell's dystopia into their contemporary California, where “the suede denim secret police... come for your uncool niece”.)

But that afore-mentioned opening matte painting shows the pyramid-like Ministry of Truth towering over familiar London landmarks such as Big Ben. Perhaps the problem is partly hindsight becoming a slippery slope. It’s impossible for us now not to see in it the germ of Dalek spaceships in Trafalgar Square, and all those so-familiar images of alien invasion. By sidelining Orwell’s politics, and centering the theology-of-love question, Kneale and Cartier have left the door open to such readings. This is unfortunately the most common way for the book to be read today, which in short is to mis-read it.

However, despite that serious but single failing, ’Nineteen Eighty-Four’ is a compelling and effective piece of drama which is both more effective and far more faithful to Orwell’s vision than most subsequent versions. It's doubleplusgood!

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954) by MargaliMorwentari

MONSTERS VERSUS ALIENS (THE LEGACY OF 'QUATERMASS')

This concluding installment of our overview of the influential BBC SF series 'Quatermass' is considered slightly less unsuitable for children and those of an anti-plot-spoiler disposition

It can't really be doubted that British TV science fiction started with a Q. In fact it’s almost a cliché to talk about 'Quatermass’s founding influence. A recent BBC series on the subject telegraphed this by calling itself 'The Martians And Us', borrowing a line from ’Quatermass and the Pit.’ (In much the same way as a documentary on music and fashion felt obliged to take its name from David Bowie.) Well ’Blake’s Seven’ fans may want to cover their ears now, but such a statement really means we’re talking about a baton being handed to ’Doctor Who’.

Kneale, who could be irascible, was defensive about the shows which took his prototype into production – and ’Who’ in particular he regarded as stealing his thunder. (Despite offers, he steadfastedly refused to write for it.) Indeed Derrick Shewin, Pertwee-era ’Who’ producer, has openly acknowledged the influence of ’Pit’ in particular upon the 'The Daemons' (1971). Not to mention 'Image of the Fendahl' (1977) or even the more recent 'The Satan Pit' (2006), also almost direct copies. And you know what they say about once being happenstance, twice co-incidence and three times enemy action. The Third Doctor and the Brigadier's relationship, a current of the Pertwee era, made them less feuding cousins to Quatermass and Colonel Breen.

But let’s look at the slightly wider picture...

In both, our protagonist represents the open mind - set against the closed mind of military or government types. Quatermass is always trustingly talking to journalists, while bureaucrats try to hush him up. Science fiction becomes an arena where we may battle not just against bug-eyed extras but between the best and the worst in our nature.

When Quatermass insists in ’Pit’ that we must “outgrow the ancient destructive urges in us” or “this will be their [the Martians’] second dead planet” he hit upon not just the concept but the very title of the Daleks’ first appearance. Consequently, adversaries are seldom defeated by might alone, if at all. Both shows contain a huge emphasis on sacrifice – victories are rarely full and never bloodless.

However, it’s also true to say that ’Quatermass’ set a bar that ’Doctor Who’ often struggled to step up to. Perhaps it’s unfair to compare three series by the same author to a production-line brand, particularly when one was aimed squarely at adults while the other had to stretch to appease a general family audience. But this is nevertheless the case. From the opening image of a space rocket crashing into an East End street, Kneale understood that the extraordinary was contingent upon the ordinary. With it's police boxes materialising on alien landscapes ’Doctor Who’ would seem to have picked up this lesson.

Or did it? Time and again ’Who’ reverted to familiar stand-in Nazi storylines, even in its better storylines such as the already-mentioned ’The Dead Planet’ (aka ’The Daleks’). Though closer to wartime and continually referring to its bomb-site residue, ’Quatermass’ never took anti-Nazism for a theme. In a historically authentic detail, ’Experiment’ makes one of the rocket group a German - Dr. Ludwig Reichenheim. But while the script might make some play of his ‘sinister’ German accent, Reichenheim is not just one of the good guys - the whole ending comes to be predicated upon his goodness!

The black-clad policemen in ’QII’ are continually referred to as “zombies”, but never once as Nazis - despite their robotic manners and autocratic killing sprees. (In fact the Camp Committee is full of ‘careless talk costs lives’ posters, more reminiscent of the Allied side of the War.) But perhaps most telling is Colonel Breen in ’Pit’, who hopelessly clings to the insistence the alien object is some left-over Nazi plot, a falsehood he clearly finds more comfortable than the truth.

And this detail leads us to an important distinction, perhaps most neatly summed up as monsters versus aliens. The ‘monsters’ in ’Doctor Who’, though theoretically alien, are always reducible to human foibles and hence are always explicable in human terms. The Daleks represent megalomania and paranoia, the Cybermen conformity and so on. There is an almost compulsory scene where the Doctor confronts them by counterposing human values to the error of their ways. Clanking pepperpots aside, they tend to be humanoid. Of course they have our shape – they're our shadows! Think of the first New Who story, 'Rose', when the character most needed re-establishing - and how the Doctor demanded to “seek audience with” the week's enemy.

Indeed the figure of the Doctor, essentially both human and alien, acts as a necessary bridge and familiarising force. He's always able to explain to his companions that the guys who have just showed up painted green are in fact Kleptons who are there to try and shoplift the Earth in order to get it through Galactic Duty Free, thereby representing the human sin of avarice, or whichever. The fact that he theoretically isn't human is just used to emphasise the supposed universality of human values.

But a rule of ’Quatermass’, which got entrenched more and more deeply as it went on, is that there can be no direct communication between human and alien – the alien always stays alien. However ceaselessly the ordinary and extraordinary are juxtaposed they never mix, they are inherently held apart – like oil and water.

The motif of an alien not as humanoid or pepperpot-shaped but as shapeless recurs throughout the series. It starts with the growing transformation of man into vegetable, finally losing all semblance of humanoid form, then continues through the churning things in the domes in ’QII’ and the pre-Mysteron swirling lights in ’Pit’.

‘Pit’ is perhaps central - the aliens induce something ‘buried’ within us, but themselves are not only inexplicable - their very presence is enough for us to lose our capacity to comprehend altogether. Then in the fourth series the aliens don’t appear at all, but remain merely supremely unknowable. As Mark Fisher comments: ”[Their] purposes remain sublimely, unfathomably opaque, like their physical forms. Anything we ‘learn’ about them is conjecture, inference, speculation. They are light years away from us. In every sense.” These other-worldly creatures are closer to Lovecraft’s other-dimensional demons than to 'Doctor Who's more straightforward morality play.

Let's end on a question- how do you get to be good? Aspiring to would seem a good start. ’Experiment’ at one point parodies ray-gun shoot-up sci-fi sprees, with a faux-film about Space Captain Dallas and his obliterator gun. The swipe was perhaps a little sweeping. (The Shakespeare-based ‘Forbidden Planet’, for one counter example, was made at a similar time.) But the desire to distance itself from such pulpy fodder was genuine and not entirely unearned.

When 'Quatermass' instigated small-screen SF in the UK it insisted on some basic rules – it should be done intelligently, take seriously both its nature as SF and its capacity to comment on current events, and it should be aimed at a general audience. It should ideally come with a thick streak of black humour. If most of what followed was to miss this bar, few fared worse for having such a bar to aim for. Even 'Who', which could more shamelessly plunder the cliches of space opera and horror, often felt some obligation to do something with those cliches once they were pocketed and brought home. In short, after 'Quatermass', even some of the failures failed better. Every now and again, reputations can be deserved.

Grateful thanks, as ever, to ‘Redsock’

Coming Soon! “And now it is nineteen-eighty-four…” (Actually, something else is probably coming sooner)

'QUATERMASS IV' (1979)

(aka 'The Quatermass Conclusion' or sometimes just plain 'Quatermass', depending on who you talk to)

This final installment in our series of Quatermass reviews is also considered unsuitable for children and those of an anti-plot-spoiler disposition

"...as if some primal disorder was reasserting itself."

’Quatermass’s fourth and final chapter was not to appear until 1979. It received a poorer contemporary response than its predecessors, and was commonly seen as a grumpy old man’s whingeing over a modern world he barely understood and (perhaps not coincidentally) concerned with out-of-date issues. Indeed it was quite literally out-of-date, Kneale had written the script during 1972/73 but a perfect storm of false starts and delays had served to push back its production.

It’s set in a dystopian near-future in “the last quarter of the Twentieth Century”, where society is almost on the point of collapse, beset by inner city gangs and power cuts “…as if some primal disorder was reasserting itself”. (In a case of life imitating art the series own launch was delayed by a strike at ITV.) However the end of human society is pretty much a backdrop. Kneale is primarily interested in the Planet People, gangs of hippy cultists who believe they will be mystically ‘rescued’ from the fading Earth and transported to another planet. (Helpfully labelled by them as “the Planet”.) When the first Quatermass series was broadcast, the teenager was barely a concept. Here the conflict of youth versus age is central, with Quatermass attempting to find his lost grand-daughter who he suspects has smelt the patchouli oil and joined the long-haired weirdos.

The passage of time has made Quatermass into quite a different character from previously, elderly and unsure of himself. It’s tempting to speculate that while he had once been a mouthpiece for Kneale’s views, here he’s a stand-in for Kneale himself. As he spends episodes anguishing whether he still has it in him to combat this new evil, you sense Kneale wondering whether he can still write ‘em any more. The storyline is strung around his travelling from retirement in rural Scotland to discover the degree of urban collapse, just as you suspect Kneale (an Isle of Man resident) did himself on infrequent trips to London.

Kneale’s portrayal of the Planet People is in many ways amusing. Of course he's riffing off the hippie fetish for the 'cosmic', as exemplified by the classic Hawkwind track 'Time We Left This Earth Today'. But there is no getting round the fact that he clearly knows very little about hippies or what made them tick. The critics had a point, it is in many way’s an old man’s perplexity at a youth culture - struggling to understand why they wear such strange clothes or gather to listen to their funny music, and ultimately finding something sinister in his incomprehension.

Just like in tabloid shock stories, youth culture is never actually the culture of youth. There’s always some manipulating force secretly whipping them up – Communists, Satanists or (inevitably for here) aliens. The series’ central premise is that aliens are manipulating our minds to make us gather together, the easier to be harvested - but only the young are suggestible. (The Planet People are essentially millennial cultists, who merely happen to see their heaven as a planet.)

There is also something generically science-fictiony about their portrayal. They are basically shoehorned into the role of the herd-minded Frankenstein villagers against the rationalism of the scientists. Both 'Experiment' and, to a greater degree, ’Pit’ had already utilised the standard SF fear of the crowd, but here this is turned up a notch. Quatermass’ new sidekick Joe Kapp introduces them by contrasting them to the gangs; “they’re violent in a different way – to human thought.” There are Luddite scenes of them smashing up laboratories and frequent cut-to’s of them massing mindlessly in the countryside, chanting their mantra-word “Lei”, filmed as if they were zombies. Kneale’s novelisation describes their movements as “an angular jerking and twitching of their legs and arms, a rolling of eyes.”

(There does also seem something zeitgeisty to this theme, however. The BBC series ’The Changes,’ about a global outbreak of Luddism which takes us back to the Iron Age, filmed the year Kneale first wrote his script , was broadcast in ’75. It also shares themes and several plot points with the 1974 'Tomorrow People' storyline 'The Blue and the Green'.)

Moreover, the Planet People become fuzzy within the storyline itself. They’re sometimes presented as a kind of ascetically amoral cult, oblivious to earthly matters like life and death. There’s a scene where they walk chantingly into a gun battle between youth gangs. The first wave are mown down, but as more follow the gangs find themselves dropping their guns to join the procession. Yet, as they’re Quatermass’ chief antagonists, every now and then they’re given something villainous to do in order to spice up the melodrama. When one member looks like deserting, ‘chief’ Kickalong casually and somewhat pointlessly shoots her dead. (However, he could point out in his defence that she was being played by Toyah Wilcox.)

Yet by 1979 many wondered just what hippies were doing there in the first place. Three years into punk, surely they were yesterday’s moral panic. “All that’s different from them an’ those they were reacting against”, Johnny Rotten had sneered, “is that they’ve got long hair and bowler hats.” Even tabloids like the ’Daily Mail’ were becoming quasi-soft on hippies, if only in order to paint punks like Rotten more blackly. In Grant Morrison’s comic strip ’Zenith’ an ex-Sixties superhero Mandala was transformed into a suited and scheming Tory MP, Peter St John. Morrison was admittedly writing eight years later, but his take on hippiness felt far more cogent.

In truth, the hippies were never homogenous nor neatly defined. Indeed, that’s perhaps even more true of hippy than most youth cultures. Talking about 'hippy' in the way you would about 'punk' or 'mod' feels strange; you instinctively tend towards the more pluralised term "the hippies". Nevertheless

Richard Cross recently attempted a broad (if vague) definition of the hippies' "common principles — a rejection of crushing social conventions; of miserable wage-labour; of war and militarism; and a celebration of freedom, both collective and individual”. Put like that, hippie culture even starts to sound appealing. Perhaps we should be passing the patchouli oil after all...

However, their ideology doubtless contained a strong dose of New Age claptrap where whatever felt good was automatically deemed to be right. It’s now generally accepted that when hippy culture went mainstream it became a prime instigator of our current self-fixated therapy culture, ‘positive thinking’ gurus and other such arrant but insidious nonsense.

Kneale’s novelisation frequently returns to the analogy of a mental circuit breaker – “when the senses overload, a safety cutout says enough is enough.” This is of course the Planet People in a nutshell, convincing themselves they could believe their way out of a bad situation without needing to lift a finger to fix it. They first disinterestedly dismiss signs of death among the alleged transported as “accidents – you always get accidents.” But when there comes to be too many ‘accidents’ this becomes ‘spillage’, those who weren’t pure of heart enough to make it through the cosmic pearly gates. Even harm in the here-and-now can be justified by comparison to the vacuities of the greater good.

And if that wasn’t a fair or rounded portrait of hippy subculture, why should it be? SF’s job description is to find fault, to hold a distorting mirror to the present - not a neutral or a flattering one. Moreover, Kneale’s penchant for black humour has not deserted him. When one Planet Girl spits at Kapp “stop trying to know things” it’s both chilling and hilarious. It’s in many ways a Swiftian satire, not a sociology lesson. (It contains, among other things, a 'Top of the Pops' parody, filtered through 'Clockwork Orange', called 'Titupy Bumpity' - you can't get much more Swiftian than that.) SF dystopias often contain more satire than is commonly recognized, for an important reason. The satirical element reinforces the metaphorical nature of what is being presented, with which comes it’s sense of warning, - without which the entire exercise would be somewhat pointless.

Moreover, while the above complaints may have some validity, perhaps they look at the series too much from the perspective of its delayed release date. Now we can see the whole thing in hindsight, why not get the benefit of it? Why not elongate that hindsight a little and imagine it had come out on time? After all there's much which was been dismissed on release, only to be later taken for a classic.

In 1969 Buckminster Fuller published a book titled 'Utopia Or Oblivion', three words which might well sum up an era. It’s difficult to capture in retrospect just how contrapedal Seventies culture was. And how science fiction, which had always held to a view of the future which was bifurcated verging on bipolar, was the ideal arena to capture that. The future would either turn into a fluorescent silver techno-fix or else fall into pieces, with neither middle ground nor third option.

The juxtaposition of the jaunty Thames TV fanfare bleeding into the series’ doomy synthesized theme makes for a perfect microcosm. Like Romero’s 'Dead' films, the horrific nature of Kneale’s dystopia was not that it presented as something incredible but conversely something alarmingly credible. Even the coda suggests the alien menace is only leaving us alone temporarily.

But perhaps the truly eerie thing about this series arrives when we see it precisely the opposite way up - its strangely prophetic nature. What had seemed past its sell-by in 1979 would come to feel more and more contemporary over the succeeding years. In one scene the Planet People riot when the police attempt to stop them reaching a stone circle, which seems to strangely foreshadow the conflicts over Stonehenge in the late Eighties. The Stonehenge Festival had begun in 1972, but was then a small affair known ony in marginal and counter-cultural circles. It wasn’t propelled into the popular consciousness until it was banned with the ensuing ‘Battle of the Beanfield’ in 1985 - six years after transmission. But there the scene is.

(It even has signs of being shoehorned in, as if it were attempting to insert a duplicate of a real event. It’s been established the police are now mercenary ‘Pay Cops’ who do nothing except for bribes, and are anyway unable to keep control in central London. Why they should find time and inclination to defend a bunch of old stones in the middle of nowhere would seem somewhat mystifying.)

The explosion of raves in 1988 (dubbed ‘the Second Summer of Love’) were also popularly presented as mass gatherings of blissed-out mindlessness. Environmental protestors (usually labelled as starry-eyed ‘eco-warriors’ or simply smelly ‘crusties’) were to become a stock-in-trade for hackneyed scriptwriters, trying to spice up their dull dramas or stodgy soaps… ‘Planet People’ were soon to be everywhere!

But even Kneale’s paranoid reading of youth culture was to gain more verity. In the Seventies, while some hippies had craved escape into oblivion the more militant ones had fuzzily imagined getting past the existing society and replacing it with something better. Whereas environmental protestors today increasingly talk of what's to be done when things inevitably collapse…

Another counterbalance to the somewhat caricatured portrait of the Planet People is the character of Joe Kapp. Kneale gives Quatermass an arc, from befuddled old man who’s lost his grand-daughter back into the scientist we knew. (He effectively marshals a gang of ‘oldies’ to match the youth gangs.) But he smartly gives Kapp the opposite arc, descending as Quatermass ascends. In their first encounter with the Planet People, Quatermass tries to engage with them while Kapp can only offer them disdain. (“They infest the land! Like bloody lemmings…”) Paranoid of his own wife and daughters going over to them, Quatermass’ sidekick is like his shadow - as fanatically devoted to science as the Planet People are to their cult. (Much as Patterson has been the shadow of Quatermass’ guilt in 'Experiment'.) While Quatermass’ efforts to communicate with the Planet People are fruitless, the encounters are enough for him to intuit what is happening to them. Kapp’s closed mind, meanwhile, leads to personal tragedy…

…not that Kapp’s the only character around here who will suffer tragedy. Quatermass’ private life had previously been kept at a rather English reserve from events. Peter Hutchings has written how he “remains a curiously isolated figure, bereft of anything resembling a meaningful relationship.” While 'Experiment' extracted melodrama from an adulterous subplot, Quatermass himself was uninvolved in it. He’s a father figure without a wife, a literal one in ’QII’ but with honorary daughters in both other series. Even here his connection to his grand-daughter seems remote, there are no flash-backs to their lives together nor, while we continually intercut to her with the Planet People, is her character ever developed.

Nevertheless, Quatermass’ search for her is the impetus of the series and their estrangement its epitome, like a thread not always visible but holding everything together. “That’s all that matters to me now!” he cries, holding up her photo. “A human face.”

Perhaps not uncoincidentally, all three previous series had been resolved with the sacrifice of another. First Patterson and the three astronauts; then the construction workers and finally Roney in ’Pit’. It is the new weakened, humanised Quatermass who is finally able to make his own sacrifice, reunited finally with his grand-daughter. Sacrifice, after all, only has meaning when you are giving up something meaningful.

Earlier in these reviews I compared ’Experiment’ to a flimsy Wright brothers plane. Created over a quarter-century later ’IV’ would be by comparison a jump-jet, making it almost absurd to compare them. (Though if measured against films that came out the same year, such as ’Alien’, it would be at best a paper plane.) Perhaps consequently ’IV’ became the most ambitious series, the first one to try and depict a dystopian future. (While there had been haphazard attempts to locate earlier stories in a near future, particularly with ’II’, these were easily overlooked.).

But ironically these fine days would bring their own flaws. ’Experiment’ was rushed through to fill a gap in the schedules, and extemporised on such timely events as the Coronation. ’IV’ sat on the shelf for years and the timing of its eventual release was poor. It’s tackling of youth culture was sometimes amusing for all the wrong reasons. Perhaps it was also too successfully dystopian for a mass TV audience. But far from the failure that is sometimes depicted, it holds up more strongly today than is often recognised. Like his chief character, Kneale's innate talents did not desert him.

And speaking of 'Titupy Bumpity'...

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Coming Soon! The last word (honest!) on ’Quatermass’...

'QUATERMASS AND THE PIT'

This third instalment of our Quatermass series reviews is also considered unsuitable for children and those of an anti-plot-spoiler disposition

”He wasn't very tall. He had the face of an ape, but he had a big brain. And he stood like a man.”

A shorthand summary of the third ’Quatermass’ series (made in 1958) might be ‘Von Daniken upside down’. A New Age guru, professional maker-up of things and all-round crank, Erich Von Daniken claimed civilization to be a gift bestowed on us by benevolent aliens. You know, just like those benevolent European colonialists were always giving the Africans stuff. (Disclaimer, yes I do know won Daniken was writing later. This is a comparison, okay?)

Inevitably, when Nigel Kneale reflects this in the darker mirror of 'Quatermass' the aliens instead keep us bound and fearful. As in Wells' ’War of the Worlds’, the Martians ravage first their own planet then turn to ours. But Kneale brings in contemporary knowledge, that Mars is a dead planet, to incorporate a vaster timescale. The Martian capsules arrived and buried themselves deep into our prehistory and brainstems, psychically manipulating us into their servants. Our most horrific folk images, gargoyles and devils, are therefore really projections of this Martian control – boogeymen, internalised prison guards.

Like ’Experiment’, ‘Pit’ is at root a Freudian fable; we all have a brutish unthinking id within us, buried no more deeply than the dug-up capsule which sets off the story. But ’Experiment’ drew its horror from a thing which absorbed three men. The capsule here isn't the rocket, it could reduce us all to savagery! Kneale has commented this upping of the ante was a reaction to the late Fifties, which he perceived to be “a more violent time”.

Argubaly it puts its two predecessors together, the resurgence of the regressive brutes hanging out in our back-brains from 'Experiment' combined with the sinister, unknowable, puppet-master aliens of 'Quatermass II'. And perhaps partly for this reason it was this third instalment which would become the fulcrum, the template for much Brit SF which followed.

Perhaps its shallowest but most widespread influence was the idea that scientists might have some place in science fiction. In pulpy sci-fi scientists were either megalomaniac adversaries for action men heroes, worringly brainy Lex Luthors to be struck down by brawny Supermen, or ray-gun-supplying equivalents to Q from James Bond. Here it is the scientists who are the protagonists, pitted against the military and bureaucracy. One stands for the open, enquiring mind; the other the closed and blinkered. Quatermass spends more time struggling against stiff shirt Colonel Breen than any Martians, who he describes as “a career militarist of the worst type... with a slide-rule mind.”

Of course, like most science fiction the science isn’t exactly what you'd call scientific. When Breen tells Quatermass “you’re letting your imagination run away with you”, you can’t help but feel the slide-rule mind has a point. For a scientist he seems to have a shaky grasp of the distinction between theory and conjecture. After deciding the capsule is from another planet he seems to pick on Mars almost arbitrarily, which then becomes canonical for the rest of the series. Not for these great minds all that slow slog of consolidated research, they proceed by flashes of insight. (Most commonly followed by dramatic music.) Roney’s opticencephalaorgaphi (to you and me, a thought projecting machine) turns out to have been built as a hobby, the way someone else might knit a sweater. When the script describes him as “unscientifically impulsive”, you sense this is meant as a compliment.

The shameless science-as-magic of ’Doctor Who’ is still some way off. But the scientist is being fused with the creative visionary who stands against the weight of tradition. In a telling exchange Breen complains “your imagination’s running wild” and Quatermass exclaims ”Yes! Isn’t yours?” If the buried capsule becomes a metaphor for the Freudian id, space stands for the ego, for imagination. In this way the lack of any genuine scientific method doesn't really matter, as the science is only there to stand for something broader. Hence Quatermass’ poetic plea against the militarisation of exploration: “We are on the edge of a new dimension of discovery. It’s the great chance... to leave our vices behind. Not to go out there dragging our hatreds and our frontiers with us.” Perhaps its not just von Daniken that's being reversed. Surrealism prized the imagination as a ticket back to the savage state. Here it's what takes us out of it. Surrealism placed the imagination with the id, Kneale with the ego.

’Pit’ is most commonly billed as a battle between science and superstition. As Mark Fisher asserts, it “attempted to wholesale swallow Horror into SF by tracing a whole slew of ostensibly supernatural phenomena back to scientifically-plausible phenomena”. Indeed it’s even tempting to read these themes back into its predecessors. After all, they both mixed SF with horror and ’Experiment’ at least focused on the human slide back into irrationalism.

In ’Experiment’, a colleague crossly tells Quatermass “I’m a scientist not a convert to superstition”. But here, despite Fisher, science will have surprising allies before the series is out. In fact, the storyline is almost strung along Quatermass’ journey of acceptance of superstition. Early on, he has an uneasy encounter with a reader of tea leaves. But when a local Vicar later expects Quatermass’ disdain he tells him “on the contrary I agree with you”. (Similarly in the later ’IV’, (aka ‘Conclusion’ the Kapps' Jewish ceremony is treated sympathetically.) “Ever study legends?” Roney asks him. “Legends gave us the first clue in this business.”

So it becomes the fusion of scientific knowledge and superstitious notions of the devil that save the day. Nigel Kneale is no Richard Dawkins. The serial closes with the Vicar sitting at Quatermass’ side, in an echo of the way he worked alongside a journalist and police inspector in 'Experiment'. Similarly, susceptibility to the Martian’s powers is – inevitably enough - greatest in the feebler craniums of women and the lower orders. But it’s also associated with enhanced mental powers – such as psychic sensing. We’re told the humans who served the Martians had been engineered “bigger brains”. Those bigger brains alone can mean merely better servants to the Martians, science alone is necessary but not sufficent for what the human race requires.

Pixley’s notes to the DVD collection mention the BBC hierarchy disliking Quatermass’ concluding speech, claiming it put him “into a pulpit”. (It was gone from the otherwise faithful film version.) Indeed, ’Pit ‘ does contain the same humanist notions as ’Experiment’; we are not merely the puppets of Martian monkeying, we have our own selves. But ’Experiment’ suggests our better nature can appear as soon as whistled for. Here there is nothing automatic about it. Quatermass’ speech does not solve anything but comes after the final battle. And he appears not as exaltory but somber and resigned; he walks out of the TV studio after making it, as if unconvinced of his own hopes. In short it will be a struggle to “overcome the Martian in us”; in the classic quote it is entirely possible that “this will be their second dead planet” if we don't get our thinking caps on. And our main weapons in that struggle will be knowledge and rationalism, catalysed by a heavt dose of imagination.

(Historical footnote: lest the big Q's reference to “race riots” now sound reactionary, it refers not to civil rights activism but anti-immigration riots which were then besetting England, most infamously in Notting Hill. The digging crew in the opening include a black workman. As noted in 'The Quatermass Trilogy: A Controlled Paranoia' his straightforward portrayal is replaced in the later movie version by “a stereotypical, superstitious Negro of the eyeball-rolling variety”, a shift which almost works to enhance the original intent. Yet as they also note he is the only black character in the original trilogy, suggesting intergration had its limits even to the liberal mind.)

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Coming soon! Not the last word at all about 'Quatermass'...