"Quatermass is about residual humanity winning out... Everyone can identify with it"

Professor Bernard Quatermass, to give him his full name, was the dignified epicentre of a series of seismic dramas from fêted writer Nigel Kneale. They began with The Quatermass Experiment in 1953, which followed a first crewed flight into space (this was eight years before the first human orbited Earth) and the rocket’s return, with just one of the three astronauts surviving – and that man, Victor Carroon, metamorphosing into a deadly alien threat.

It spawned highly regarded BBC sequels Quatermass II (1955) and Quatermass and the Pit (1958–59), film adaptations of all three by the Hammer horror studio, and an ITV revival in 1979.

It launched a career for Kneale that also included his adaptation of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954), shocking for the time; satirical drama The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968); and his spine-tingling Christmas ghost story The Stone Tape (1972).

But that initial six-part drama, broadcast live from Alexandra Palace, is examined in forensic, thrilling detail by The Quatermass Experiment: the Making of TV’s First Sci-Fi Classic, which conjures a palpable sense of time and place. And despite that title, the book’s author Toby Hadoke says that Kneale “wasn’t writing cult television, he was writing television for a mass audience.

"What is key is that he tells science-fiction stories using the instruments of horror, so you don't, for example, have conversations with aliens. The aliens are largely unreachable, nebulous, sometimes even dead, but their effects live on, so it's all about their effect on the characters. He postulates science-fiction, otherworldly or ghostly reasons for why we are the way that we are."

Hadoke continues, “He explores the human condition through ‘genre’, which means it’s accessible. You don’t always know that you’re watching science fiction with Nigel Kneale because it takes place in a plausible world with real people. He taps into something that’s within us, so everyone can identify with it. That’s his genius.”

The book – 36 years in the making – has been a labour of love for Hadoke, who began his research in 1989. “I was young and wanted to be an actor, so as much as anything it was an excuse to write to actors. And that’s what I’m pleased to be able to include in the book, to pay back all those lovely people sadly no longer with us, who wrote back to an enthusiastic 15-year-old.”

Hadoke, an actor, writer, stand-up and broadcaster, is clearly much too young to remember the programme’s first transmission, so what was his first contact? “Quatermass was the thing that my mother’s generation had watched and it was occasionally the late-night film that I was too young to stay up for.”

Then a friend gave him the BBC video of Quatermass and the Pit in the 80s. “I was astonished at not just how good it was, story-wise, because Kneale’s imagination is brilliant, but just how good the productions were. This wasn’t Saturday teatime family stuff. They were directed by Rudolph Cartier, who was a top man at the BBC, and they were lavishly budgeted.”

As for that all-important central name – a masterstroke as it transpired – Kneale chose “Bernard” to refer to astronomer Bernard Lovell, then he looked under Q in the London telephone directory for further inspiration. Prior to that, Hadoke reveals, “It was going to be ‘Professor Charleton’. I don’t think we would be whispering, ‘I remember Charleton’ in hushed tones! Quatermass is a brilliant name." So unusual, in fact, that AI seems to have trouble transcribing it, hazarding everything from "Quite a mess" to "Crater Mouse".

Hadoke adds, "Quatermass sounds unusual – the Q sound and the number of syllables – but as with all of Kneale's work it somehow invokes something from the past rather than something futuristic, which makes it atmospheric rather than spangly.

"There's a bit in the book where I trace its etymology… but then, Kneale was very good at pithy things that could make the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. Remember that line in The Stone Tape where they find the Christmas card and the kid writes, 'What I want for Christmas is please go away'? So economical but it's just enough... And there's a line in Quatermass and the Pit where he goes, 'Captain Potter, you'd better warn your men: things may happen.'" Kneale's talent, then, was "to terrify the audience, but with economy”.

As Hadoke's fascinating book explains, there was a change of title to the series, too. "It wasn't originally going to be called The Quatermass Experiment, it was going to be called The Unbegotten and then Bring Something Back. But the fact that the name became central to what we would now call the brand, I think, is vital."

Hadoke’s book traces Kneale’s interest in both horror and storytelling back to his childhood on the Isle of Man, “to its oral tradition of ghost stories, curses and standing stones”. And he shows how The Quatermass Experiment stood out like a sore thumb in a year of optimism: with the Queen crowned, Everest conquered and British Comet jets flying people around the world, Kneale sounded “a sour note”.

The shocking conclusion, with Victor Carroon now a mass of thrashing tendrils, even occurs in Westminster Abbey, the scene of Elizabeth II’s coronation just weeks earlier. As Hadoke explains, however, “The climax of The Quatermass Experiment is not about guns and explosions, it’s about residual humanity winning out, and about rationality winning out over irrationality.

"We have to make progress to go forward but as the opening line of The Quatermass Experiment has it, 'An experiment is an operation designed to discover some unknown truth. It is also a risk.' So is the risk-taker an irresponsible charlatan, or is the risk-taker a brave pioneer? Probably a bit of both. And I think he gives equal weight to that duality."

Viewers who grew up with Doctor Who know the debt it owes to Kneale. Hadoke is an expert on that series too and, pressed on the subject, he is happy to get into the nitty-gritty. "Some Doctor Whos like The Idiot's Lantern by Mark Gatiss are a conscious homage to Quatermass and indeed The Lazarus Experiment, which Gatiss didn't write but he’s in, which has a conclusion very like that of The Quatermass Experiment.

"With season 7 of Doctor Who (in 1970), you could do a shot-by-shot comparison of the similarities of Spearhead from Space to Quatermass 2. And when they were exiling the Doctor to Earth they did look at Quatermass because they knew that that had been successful and they were having to make Doctor Who work without going into space."

But even US series like The X-Files and major Hollywood films like Alien have similar DNA: “Consciously and subconsciously, Kneale's work is never far away from anybody wanting to make good science fiction. So his influence is huge and, I think, a lesson in how to treat [sci-fi] like proper drama.”

Kneale was so intent on realising his vision that he even had a hand in making his monster, sticking garden vegetation onto a glove that he then thrust through a photo of Westminster Abbey for the serial’s climax. Primitive, perhaps, but in hazy black and white, it was remarkably effective. “What I love about that,” Hadoke enthuses, “is that if you’re a writer and it’s your baby, you do go the extra mile!”

The charming details of this moment in the programme's creation were supplied to Hadoke by Judith Kerr, who was Kneale's fiancée at the time and subsequently sold millions of copies of her books about Mog the cat and The Tiger Who Came to Tea.

"I had a lovely long day with Judith where she gave me chapter and verse... they went around plucking bits of bush here and there and decorating this gardening glove but she told me something I hadn't realised – and then I saw some photos that confirm this. Nigel operates the glove in episode 5 but then in episode 6 when the monster got a bit bigger, the fronds of it sticking around the corner of the set were also operated by Nigel and Judith. She went on to be his wife and then to have a career that probably eclipsed his – and he was hugely famous in the 50s and 60s."

The popularity of the BBC’s Quatermass trilogy was reflected in the ratings. Experiment rose from 3.4 million for episode one to 5 million in the last; II from 7.9 to 9 million; and Pit from 7.6 to 11 million. This was significant, prestige drama, which became part of the national conversation. “Kneale and Cartier were at the forefront, they weren't just sort of jobbing BBC people, they were television pioneers.

"What they were doing paved the way for the television that we have now,” concludes Hadoke. “It resonated, and in both directions: it could invoke primal fear but also look forward to the future – and what horrors may lurk there.”

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