Quatermass [TV] (1979)
Directed by Piers Haggard

Film Review

When The Quatermass Experiment was broadcast by the BBC in 1953 it was a landmark event in television history.  A chilling blend of science-fiction, drama and horror, it attracted a massive audience for its time (up to five million), with almost everyone who owned a television set tuning in.  The serial's success ensured there would be a sequel - Quatermass II (1955) - and then another - Quatermass and the Pit (1958).  Plans to make a fourth serial fell by the wayside when the programme's writer Nigel Kneale began working as a freelancer in the late 1950s.  Following the success of The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968) and The Stone Tape (1972), Kneale was invited by the BBC to pen a fourth adventure for rocket scientist Bernard Quatermass, but the project was aborted shortly after production got underway in the spring of 1973.

Despite attempts by Kneale to sell Quatermass IV to ITV, it lay dormant until 1979, when Verity Lambert, recently appointed Chief Executive at Euston Films, a subsidiary of Thames Television, adopted it as her pet project.  Lambert had a history of bringing innovative, groundbreaking and frankly weird shows to the small screen, including Doctor Who, Adam Adamant Lives! and The Newcomers; she had great faith in the project and sanctioned a substantial budget (for the time) of £1.25 million. Unfortunately, by the time Quatermass IV - now titled simply Quatermass - went into production much of its relevance to a contemporary audience was lost.  The main inspiration for the story had been the hippie movement of the 1960s and power cuts of the early 1970s.  With its stark portrayal of urban decay and social breakdown the story still retained a frightening resonance and offered an all-to-believable glimpse of the near future for a disenchanted British audience that had just lived through the 'Winter of Discontent'.

Despite the substantial budget, Kneale was highly dissatisfied with the production, almost from the start. He resented having to make two versions of it, one to be broadcast as a four-part serial in the UK, the other to be edited into a feature film for the American market.  The television version suffers from uneven pacing and some obvious padding; the first episode crawls along at a snail's pace, the middle episodes are repetitive and rambling, and the ending feels somewhat hurried and unconvincing.  The special effects are also disappointing - the model shots of the spacecraft in Episode 1 are laughably amateurish and the use of a yellow-green filter in Episode 4 to depict a sky filled with 'alien vomit' gives an ugly, washed out look to all of the exterior scenes.

Another cause of contention was the cast, in particular John Mills' suitability for the central role.  As a decrepit, barely coherent Quatermass, Mills lacks the authority of the paternalistic scientist of the original BBC episodes and seems to stumble through the narrative with no real idea of what he is doing or where he is going.  Simon MacCorkindale is even less convincing as a career astronomer and spends most of his time looking like something out of a children's TV drama - there is no subtlety or depth to his performance and it soon becomes wearisome.  Margaret Tyzack is one of the few experienced actors to leave a positive impression, although she is abruptly killed off just when her character comes into her own.

Quatermass is a flawed but surprising compelling piece of sci-fi drama (a rarity for its time on British television).  Far less impressive than the three serials that preceded it (only two of which now exist in their entirety) it does at least convey the intense pessimism and inter-generational divide that was endemic in Britain in the late 1970s.  It may not be Nigel Kneale's most significant contribution to television but the story it tells is disturbingly plausible and the gritty action sequences (an area in which Euston Films excelled) are impressive, even by today's standards.  The series attracted a respectable audience of eleven million when it was broadcast in the UK on Wednesday evenings across four weeks (24th October to 14th November 1979) and had school playgrounds across the land buzzing with the sound of an unfamiliar nursery rhyme: "Huffity, puffity, Ringstone Round, If you lose your hat it will never be found..."  As exits go, Quatermass could have done a lot worse.

Film Synopsis

Professor Bernard Quatermass has for some time being living in retirement in Scotland.  When his granddaughter Hettie goes missing he travels down to London to look for her.  By this time, England is in a seemingly irreversible state of decay.  Armed gangs terrorise the streets of the broken down cities, power is rationed and the masses are pacified with pornographic television.  Once in London, Quatermass meets up with a young astronomer, Joe Kapp, and is invited onto a television programme which is providing live coverage of a joint Soviet-American space mission.  As the spacecraft from the two superpowers attempt to lock they suffer a critical systems malfunction and are destroyed by some unknown force.  To investigate what went wrong, Kapp takes Quatermass to his home in the country where he operates a radio telescope.  Here, they encounter a strange group of young hippies who call themselves Planet People and believe they will soon be transported to another world.  The professor follows the hippies to a nearby Neolithic stone circle which is suddenly enveloped by a powerful light.  All that remains of the youngsters within the circle is a white residue.  Quatermass is aghast to learn that the same occurrence happened at about the same time at sites all over the world.  He makes a horrifying deduction: some alien entity has come to planet Earth with the intention of harvesting the human race...