THE CREEPING UNKNOWN

Jon Dear celebrates 70 years of Quatermass and its lasting legacy

The date of 18 July 2023 saw the 70th anniversary of the transmission of Contact Has Been Established, the first episode of The Quatermass Experiment, a six-part serial broadcast live from the BBC’s first home of television, Alexandra Palace in North London. It changed the face of television in the UK and gave us the character of Professor Bernard Quatermass. It left a significant legacy both on television and wider popular culture.

The story of Quatermass is the story of two people, writer Nigel Kneale and producer/director Rudolph Cartier. Born in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria but raised on the Isle of Man, Kneale came to work for the BBC in 1951, after winning the W Somerset Maugham prize for his book Tomato Cain and Other Stories (1949). The following year he helped with the script for Arrow to the Heart (BBC, 1952) helmed by Austrian-born Cartier.

They were well matched: Kneale would revolutionise television as a medium in its own right (Mark Gatiss credits him with inventing popular television), while Cartier constantly pushed at the technical boundaries of what television could achieve. Apart from the three Quatermass serials, their 1954 adaptation of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is still regarded as one of the greatest TV dramas ever made.

The three serials - The Quatermass Experiment (1953), Quatermass II (1955) and Quatermass and the Pit (1958/59) each present what is on the surface the same basic story of alien invasion but in wildly different ways.

The Quatermass Experiment gives us a pioneering astronaut infected by an alien organism, and Quatermass II has a covert invasion and infiltration of the government. But in Quatermass and the Pit, Professor Bernard Quatermass is five million years too late. The aliens have turned up and done their worst.