These and more than these

I’ve been rewatching Quatermass and the Pit for the last week, which is apparently something I do every few years and then never write anything about. It’s a black and white BBC serial from 1958, to our eyes science fiction horror though a massive leap beyond genre in its own time, and I love it very much. I honestly think it’s perfect. There isn’t anything I’d change except put more women in it and even so at least it does have one brave 1950s lady scientist academic trying her best. Could be worse if not by much.

So the Quatermass in the title is a person – named by writer Nigel Kneale with what he called the weirdest name in the phonebook; he’s Professor Bernard Quatermass, a restrained, charming British academic in charge of something called the British Experimental Rocket Group. By the time we meet him in the Pit, there aren’t so many rockets; Quatermass the pacifist is in the middle of being told the military are taking over his research; that his planned moonbase is going to be used as a place to build up armament. No one mentions Sputnik or the USSR, but no one has to. This was absolutely on-the-minute current when it was made. Quatermass is furiously angry and kind of heartbroken; then he discovers an old friend of his has a very similar problem, and decides to be a dick to his new employer while he solves it.

There really aren’t a lot of rockets in this story! Matthew Roney, Quatermass’s old friend, is a paleontologist, who has discovered an ancient site of prehistoric hominids in… Knightsbridge. (There’s been construction, ok.) But deep down in the pit there’s also an unexploded bomb (!) left over from 1944, so the military have taken over. Quatermass plays silly buggers with the army folk until they leave Roney alone, and then hangs around to see what happens next. That’s the set-up. And I love it, largely because Quatermass is incredibly charismatic (he was played by five different actors, but this one is my favourite) and also just… you can see here how the series was an influence on every SF, horror or fantasy thing to ever be on television. It’s so fucking interesting and intelligent.

But then. Everything that happens next is creepy in the best way. ( creep creep creep - rather than cut tag the most horrifying bit of the serial, I have simply not included it so this is cut for length not horrors )

I wanted to finish off this extremely long post about a seventy-year-old piece of television by posting a snippet of it, but I actually couldn’t find anything. Perhaps even better: this was the noise the Martians made inside people’s heads, courtesy of the Radiophonic Workshop. And Hob’s Lane, where the Pit was dug, is in my icon.