And yet, even today, if you scratch almost any British sci-fi TV show, you will find Quatermass beneath the paint.
The Quatermass Experience
The two surviving episodes of The Quatermass Experiment make strange viewing today. This was a TV serial broadcast when Yuri Gagarin’s first crewed spaceflight was still science fiction. It’s a simple story – a three-man rocket is the first to be launched into orbit. Mission control loses track of it. When it returns, there is only one man on board, and he has come back changed.
The live broadcast nature of the series means it is practically a stage play – the most dramatic set piece is the house in Croydon the space rocket lands on – a sight that would have still seemed familiar to an audience less than a decade out from the Blitz. The story is told through conversations – between policemen pondering the case of the missing astronauts, between scientists pondering the scientific anomalies of the mission, and between journalists speculating about the veil of secrecy over the returned space mission.
There are no special effects, but more than that, it feels like there is no language of sci-fi here, no familiar visual tropes to draw on, despite a few characters reflecting that the story seems like science fiction. The opening credits describe The Quatermass Experiment as “a thriller”, and that is how it comes across. In 1953, even the idea of Britain launching a manned space mission didn’t seem that ridiculous. That wouldn’t be the case until 1971, when Britain cancelled its space programme almost immediately after its first successful rocket launch – Black Arrow, which like later Quatermass’s rocket, was launched from Australia.
The most surprising part of the story is Bernard Quatermass himself, however (played by Reginald Tate). For a character whose place in the sci-fi pantheon is obscured, he’s extremely low-key. He is certainly no Doctor Who, no Sherlock Holmes, no eccentric genius. He’s a professional scientist who gets frustrated with bureaucracy and political agendas but is otherwise methodical and measured in everything he does.
The Quatermass Xperiment, the 1955 Hammer Horror movie adaptation that survives today, is a very different beast. This is a 50s monster movie. The rocket crashes in a mighty explosion, and seen from a distance looks straight off the covers of the pulps. Quatermass himself is played by Brian Donlevy as a much more abrasive, egotistical, American version of the character, throwing his weight around for the sheer joy of it.