An experiment is an operation designed to discover some unknown truth. It is also a risk…
I just asked him to bring me something back
It is 1953 (64 years ago as I write this), Britain is still on rationing, Queen Elizabeth II has just been crowned at Westminster Abbey and Hillary and Tenzing have reached the summit of Everest. BBC TV is broadcasting live from Alexandra Palace. Sputnik and Telstar are still in the future and no human has yet breached the envelope of the atmosphere into space. Despite that perspective and context, it is still difficult to comprehend just how different the world was as The Quatermass Experiment aired – not just technologically – the jet engine was relatively new (it is referenced in the Comet flight to Australia here), the British Empire was right in the middle of it’s dissolution, Winston Churchill was Prime Minister, Joseph Stalin had just died, homosexuality was illegal and would be for another 14 years, the death penalty was still in use and swathes of Britain were still in ruins after the war. In the Soviet Union Sergei Korolev was secretly working on rocketry and the German V2 pioneer Werner von Braun had yet to persuade the US government that he was the man to lead the US into space. The swinging 60’s were still an absolute age away. The phrase ‘Cold War’ had only just been coined and it still had another 40 years left to run.
A writer for the new medium (at least in Britain) of television – Nigel Kneale, alongside the renowned TV director/producer Rudolph Cartier tried to imagine what an experimental space flight might be like, what might be out there and what might be ‘brought home’. Out of a gap in the TV schedule was born The Quatermass Experiment and it would prove to be hugely influential. It is year zero for British TV science fiction and provides the template for horror in Doctor Who. There are quite a few stories that I will be covering in these reviews that are fundamentally influenced by this story, not least Ark in Space. To my mind it a must watch (at least the episodes that remain) for anyone wanting to understand Doctor Who and its roots. It is also something that I love with a passion having first read the script book as a child, I have it here beside me now, slightly battered, but much loved. A few years later I would see the Hammer film version (somewhat shorn of the intellect of the BBC version), but it would be many years until I saw the remaining TV episodes and then the 2005 live BBC 4 re-make featuring David Tenant and Mark Gatiss. In the latter Gatiss recounts the joy of working on the Quatermass Experiment, as his friend told him he was going to replace Chris Eccleston as Doctor Who!
The Quatermass Experiment is not just massively important to Doctor Who or TV Science Fiction – it is hugely important piece of British culture full stop. It is one of the first original pieces of fiction written for BBC TV as such it was very influential. As a TV event it ran hand in hand with the coronation that year and helped shift the BBC to a TV corporation beloved of the nation as opposed to just a radio one in the eyes of the British public. It opened up the opportunities for other TV drama and particularly science fiction, as such Kneale is as important to the conception of Doctor Who as H.G. Wells. The TV audience was still quite small, despite the boost given the TV sales by the coronation earlier in the year, yet Quatermass notoriously brought the country to a standstill. It aired on a Saturday night, but unlike Doctor Who it was on at 8:45 and aimed at an adult audience. Years ago, I spoke to my parents about this, their memories of their reactions – they particularly spoke about how scary and exciting the opening music was (Mars, bringer of War by Holst) – startlingly similar to my own reaction to the opening Doctor Who theme in the 1970’s.
I will concentrate as best I can, on the original TV version. Unfortunately only the first two episodes were tele-recorded, the others were due to be recorded, but the quality of the first two was deemed too poor. If you think doing a Doctor Who marathon is hard work with the missing episode recons, spare a thought for anyone attempting a Nigel Kneale marathon – most of this serial is missing, as are The Creature and The Road and 1984 is still awaiting release. At least Doctor Who fans have the audio and if we are lucky telesnaps and the work of Loose Cannon. There are some photographs of this serial and someone has attempted an audio-free recon out on youtube. Anyway, I will primarily be relying on the script for the last 4 episodes – it is so involving I read it in one sitting.
Anyone approaching the surviving two episodes for the first time; will have a few hurdles to deal with. Firstly, it is 10 years older than An Unearthly Child and at times it really shows in performance style – not of the leads so much, but the supporting cast. This is particularly true at the site where the experimental, nuclear-powered rocket crashes. These scenes seem to have come from the Ealing Comedy school of cockney working class performances and are imbued with the very recent at that point London ‘blitz spirit’. One of the scientists – Judith Carroon, wife of Victor (one of the astronauts), is played in a very BBC RP way by Isabel Dean. She is as BBC posh as Sylvia Peters, the announcer The Wire (The Idiots Lantern) is based on and who can be seen at the end of episode two, announcing the next episode. There is a more modern twist though in that as prim and proper as she appears, she has been having an affair with the rocket group’s Doctor Briscoe and was planning to leave Carroon on his return from space (welcome home dear, jolly well done. By the way I’m leaving you, chin up darling!). Also rather modern is that she is shown as a working scientist in part one and later plays a major part in working out what has happened to the crew and is a key player in driving the narrative along.
So, it so more the trappings and performance codes that date this than the script per se – if you can stretch as far back as An Unearthly Child this is just one step further – but right back to the inception of British TV as mass media. There are also lots of Doctor Who alumni associated with the production – Paddy Russell and George Spenton-Foster behind the scenes and actors Paul Whitsun-Jones, Duncan Lamont, and Moray Watson (there may be more – is a surprisingly long cast list).
Kneale’;s script is fantastic, Reginald Tate makes a first class Quatermass (Andre Morrell was first choice) and there are some really rather horrific ideas and concepts at the heart of it. Kneale also uses almost every modern storytelling trick up his sleeve to depict the story – newsreaders, TV interviewers, a press investigation, a police investigation, taped playbacks (basically found footage and finally a TV broadcast from Westminster Abbey, scene of the coronation earlier that year. These techniques have become overly familiar over the years (particularly during RTD era Doctor Who), but are used to great effect here and contribute to the piece feeling quite modern in its scripting. We also get to hear testimony and opinions from the general public via these devices. Countering this though is the grandeur of achieving space flight – the astronauts see the earth from space at one point and through this the story echoes the pioneering times. It also reflects the creeping horror of the cold war, but the timeless theme of the piece is psychological and body horror and the story of what happens to the three British Experimental Rocket Group astronauts – Greene, Reichenheim and Carroon and that is the aspect that this review will concentrate on.
If you don’t know the plot, Quatermass’s British Experimental Rocket Group, launch the first manned rocket into space, the plan is to orbit the Earth twice and then return. Contact is lost with the rocket as it travels far further into space than intended. When the rocket crash lands on a house in Wimbledon, only Victor Carroon is on board – Greene and Reichenheim, his colleagues and old friends of Quatermass are missing. Carroon is seriously ill and seems changed somehow.
What happens next is really the skilful, controlled release of information in a series of horrific revelations across 6 weeks. Firstly we have the disappearance of Greene and Reichenheim and the revelation that their spacesuits are empty, but the linked inner layer has not been opened – they have just vanished out of their suits. Then we have the survivor Carroon, who is now able to speak German and provide answers to technical questions that only Reichenheim would have known. When offered food Carroon uses the German phrase nicht verstarken– do not strengthen. When Mrs Greene meets Carroon he calls her Lou – which only her husband called her. Then we get the really unnerving revelation from one of the BERG team, Paterson that he has found a jelly-like substance packed behind the panels of the space capsule – that is really, really quite nasty and very Nigel Kneale.
This is something that I quite miss from modern Doctor Who – the time and space to build a mystery – the bits of world building and dialogue that fuel the plot and reveal little character moments. It is rare that the modern show has time for this, but I grew up with this style ‘tell not show’ – the opposite of ‘normal’ film making and I like it a lot – to create a world out of words or imagination, rather than another CGI vista or effect. Doctor Who could easily operate in a similar mode as Quatermass in the modern era – Torchwood: Children of Earth did something very similar striped across a week – something I would have liked to see experimented with the parent show. Telling a bigger story in a more adult way, with more room to breathe and develop – Doctor Who could do that, but it possibly means temporarily leaving the younger audience behind and I’m not sure that would ever happen.
The first 3 episodes really build this mystery as Quatermass and his team, Lomax (the police inspector) and the press (primarily journalist Fullalove, played by Whitsun-Jones) try to find out what has happened to Carroon and the missing men. Then the serial switches mode and becomes much more involved in Carroon’s transformation and the search for him as he goes missing after a foreign power attempts to kidnap him. Carroon stumbles across a post-blitz London landscape of bomb sites. This is where the body horror starts to come more to fore. Carroon is changing, his skin coarsening, he absorbs a cactus into his hand/arm, before disappearing – leaving the body behind of a man who has had the life and energy sucked out of him. In the aftermath as the police organise a manhunt, Judith, Quatermass and Briscoe speculate on what might have happened in this scene:
JUDITH (slowly): We know the rocket wasn’t near any other planet or asteroid. Could a form of life exist somewhere in space itself? Just drifting?
QUATERMASS: A sort of .. plankton of the ether?
BRISCOE: It couldn’t be remotely like life as we know it.
JUDITH: Does it have to be? Why not pure energy, without an organic structure? It’s at least conceivable, isn’t? In some sense there might even be intelligence.
QUATERMASS: Think .. it’;s never approached the Earth, any more than a deep-sea fish comes to Piccadilly Circus. But when the rocket goes there … it, whatever it is, finds on board
JUDITH: Three living specimens. Cell organisms.
BRISCOE: And afterwards? After it invaded them?
QUATERMASS: To occupy the resultant structure – even by accident, might be the perfect means of acclimatization to life on Earth.
JUDITH: Yes. The resultant structure .. oh, my God!
Lomax has stopped writing, is staring at them, appalled.
BRISCOE: And then when it got here – to encounter other basic forms of life…
That is an amazing scene -three scientists trying to piece together what is happening, appalled where their deductions are leading them and the most horrific aspect -it is Judith – Carroon’s wife who drives the scene. As a scientist she is as fascinated and intrigued as she is horrified. Terrific writing.
BRISCOE: If what we found in the rocket was the residue of tissue that had undergone some transformation… and if the cellular structure of a plant like this could be subject to the same process…
JUDITH: Then there might be some sort of union between them?
BRISCOE: It’s unimaginable, that’s all. I can’t see how, and I can’t reproduce that breaking down of the cell-matter. Plant and animal.. it can’t happen?
JUDITH: What’s possible or impossibly any more? Gordon it is the final nightmare when you wake from it and find that it still goes on. You drug yourself into an hour or two of what was meant to be sleep and just as you come out of it you think for an instant: ‘it was only a dream’. Then you remember…
FULLALOVE: You mean those three men?
QUATERMASS: He looks like one of them, more or less. But if our theory’s right, what’s out there may represent the combined experience and .. scientific knowledge of the three.
Later Quatermass plays the flight recording of what happened to the crew, back to Carroon in an attempt to trigger his memories. It is quite horrible – a sound invades the space capsule and the astronauts try to fight being pulled apart – physically and mentally by the unseen intruder.
REICHENHEIM: Charles- what is it?
GREENE: Can’t you feel it, can’t you?
CARROON: What can we do?
REICHENHEIM: Try to fight against it! Oh God it is tearing me apart!
CARROON: Greene!
GREENE: Save me , save me
CARROON: Don’t give way or we are done! Hold on.. try to hold on!
In the later episodes, we see stages of development in Carroon’s transformation, sped up by chemical catalyst he has mixed in a chemist shop – we are never sure if this is the creature winning the battle or the astronauts attempting suicide. The final stages in the creature’;s development are in episodes 5 and 6. In St James’ Park the creature that was the astronauts leaves a living residue behind and the remains of dead wildfowl, basically just feathers strewn everywhere. Kneale describes this:
The cries of the waterfowl are loud here, close at hand there is a rustling among the undergrowth. Heavy, strained breathing .. then through the leaves crawls the soaked figure of Carroon. He is half-naked, dragging himself along on his stomach. He lies for a moment, panting. What can be seen of his skin is dark grey, with raised, gnarled patches. His right arm trails. Half a mile away, in another world, Big Ben starts striking the three-quarters, and at the sound Carroon looks about with his lost eyes, as if searching for some deeper shelter. He starts to move again, and as he does so swings his right arm up – a shapeless mass.
These scenes are similar to those used in Ark in Space with Noah or Seeds of Doom with Winlett. Later scenes where they examine the living, moving ‘grey moss’ that the creature has left behind, as it develops sporangia in an incubator are echoed in Fury from the Deep& and influence lots of other similar scenes in Doctor Who.
Fungi.. it took those first. Lichens, algae .. even cultures of bacteria. Now there’s nothing but this grey, pulsating..
No living thing on Earth could fight against it. There would be no time to develop any natural defences.
As things start to get out of control and it is clear that the creature that the astronauts have become threatens all life on the planet, Quatermass – moral, principled man that he is takes responsibility and decides to confess to rest of the world in a TV broadcast.
Three days ago .. I thought I had achieved a technical triumph for my country by directing the return of a fully manned rocket from space .. ..There is no question of credit now only guilt. I have .. brought upon the earth what appears to be he the most frightful thing ever known. What came out of that rocket was not a man. It had been men. A human amalgam, possessed by the .. being that had entered some million mils away and transformed them. It has found the means of adapting itself to existence on this planet, means that ensure that only it shall exist..
If the worst should happen, I ask for your, your forgiveness.
The essential part of it
We are going to meet intelligence. Still at least partly human
They’re not dead. If only they were! They’re the essential part of it
The final transformation and confrontation with the creature is reserved for Westminster Abbey and forms the entirety of the final episode. Technically the creature is Nigel Kneale wearing a pair of gloves covered in leaves and lichen that he and his wife made (children’s author Judith Kerr of ‘The Tiger who came to tea’ fame – like Rudolph Cartier she was a Jewish refugee – her from Germany him from Austria) pushed through a still photograph of the abbey. So the author also had to build and operate his own monster after the BBC design team told him to do it himself! There is one surviving photograph of this and it looks surprisingly effective, this image is something I will return to later when I cover ‘Seeds of Doom’. This provides a focal point for the physical horror (something badly missing in the 2005 version) – but the psychological horror is provided by Quatermass entering the Abbey alone to try to reason with the creature and to essentially ask his friends to commit suicide. And this is something I like about all of the Quatermass serials, as driven and risk-taking as the Professor is, he takes personal responsibility for his actions and is always seen as the voice of reason and civilisation. He is a very moral figure and after Project Manhattan and the new world of the Cold War, it is very much welcome to see a scientist depicted in this way.
This is the scene in the abbey as Quatermass calls on his friends to save the planet. It is recalled in The Doctor’s appeal to Noah in ‘Ark in Space’, but something not too dissimilar is also used in stories as tonally diverse as ‘Seeds of Doom’, ‘The Lazarus Experiment’, ‘Meglos’ or ‘Love and Monsters’. The creature itself echoed in the Krynoid or Nestene creatures in Doctor Who. The scene here has never been bettered for me and forms a terrific ending to the serial – it is one which the film ignores in favour of simply electrocuting the creature and is all the poorer for it. The TV version offers electrocution or the army with their flame throwers as potential solutions. However as in many a Doctor Who story the army is left powerless or on standby as Quatermass attempts an entirely different solution:
And through the arches of the triforium, high above poets corner … something is moving … a mass of grey leathery surfaces, all pulsating… tendrils that writhe downwards.
JUDITH: Those spores will spread by the million, wherever there is air and wind. In a few hours or days., every living thing on earth will have changed .. [she nods at the screen] .. to that.
Cut to the interior of the abbey. Quatermass can be seen only momentarily as vast glistening surfaces shift, blocking and unblocking the view. Huge trunk-like forms sway quivering towards him, and tufted tentacles writhe.
QUATERMASS: I am here… Quatermass. This is Quatermass. I am here alone. Am I, am I alone? Carroon… Reichenhem… Charles Greene. I am talking to you… I am not to be killed. That must not be done. Charles Greene … Ludwig Reichenheim.. Victor Carroon… I am speaking to you now. There is … something else here… but I am appealing to you. I want you to remember. When you were in the rocket…at the farthest point from earth. Remember!
We worked together on this achievement. This is the time, Charles … this will be the achievement. Ludwig Reichenheim, this is no longer the unexpected. When the conditions are known, action can be taken. And Victor… remember now, in the rocket, you head something that you did not recognize… something that was easy to ignore… or to fear..
[Judith and Briscoe play in the flight recording…]
Carroon… your voice! Charles Greene! Reichenheim – now remember!
Charles! Save yourself! You are not to submit! You are fighting this thing – resisting it – now ! It shall not overcome a second time! You – must – be – free!
You will overcome this evil. Without you it cannot exist on earth… it can only know by means of your knowledge… understand through your understanding. It can only exist through your submission.
… you are resisting this thing. Now go further… go further! With all you power and mine joined to yours … you must dissever from it… send it out of earthly existence! You … as men… must die! Greene! Reichenheim! Carroon!
The screeching rises to the limit of audibility… Suddenly the shrill note drops, broadens, loses its shattering concentration. It roars out in a ‘mighty rushing wind’. Quatermass shudders as if in the grip of icy cold. The sound drops lower in pitch…and slowly dies away.
In a documentary about Nigel Kneale, Kim Newman calls this an ’an editorial speech by Quatermass representing humanity …the monster is defeated by an Intellectual argument’ – and he is right it is a plea the humanity of the three astronauts, trapped horribly with the mass of the creature and it’s consciousness – as the Doctor says in ‘Ark in Space’ – more than a vestige of human spirit.
Coda
‘There is a police box down the road there, sir.’
Ah Nigel, never was a truer word written, there was indeed, about 10 years down the road. So what of the relationship of this programme and it’s creator to ‘Doctor Who ‘and other science fiction on TV/Film? Well the serial even has time to comment on this – deliberately distancing itself from it’s childishness of sci-fi at the time and planting it’s flag right in the heart of ‘serious’ drama instead – albeit one with science fiction trappings. Carroon meets a small boy in a scene which I think echoes the Universal version of Frankenstein – he is dressed in a ‘Captain Dallas’ space helmet and gun, who gets him into the Grand Cinema to see ‘Planet of the Dragons’ – in real 3-d. We even get a series of corny scenes from the film. That is straight from Nigel Kneale himself – his thoughts on science fiction in cinema at the time and is again reflected in his later (negative) thoughts on ‘Doctor Who’. Whatever his dislike of show and his annoyance when it ahem .. pays homage i.e. borrows liberally from his work – which you can’t argue with it really does – whole scenes sometimes (Robert Holmes again I’m afraid), it is difficult to argue with the extent to which it influences the programme. I will return to this theme again, not just with Quatermass Experiment (for example ‘Seeds of Doom‘), but also with the other serials – Quatermass II and Quatermass and the Pit – all of which exert equal influence on a number of Doctor Who stories. Here though, this is where it all began and as Doctor Who fans we have a lot to thank it and it’s creator for
A Journal of Impossible Things 