Quatermass

The Stone Ranger

Quatermass
aka Quatermass IV
aka The Quatermass Conclusion
Airdate: 24 October - 14 November 1979
Directed by Piers Haggard,
Network Region B Blu Ray
Four Episodes

Warning: The big spoiler is here.

“Huffity, puffity, Ringstone Round,
If you lose your hat it will never be found,
So pull your britches right up to your chin,
And fasten your cloak with a bright new pin,
And when you are ready, then we can begin,
Huffity, puffity, puff, puff!
Huffity, puffity, puff!”
Ringstone Round Nursery Rhyme from Quatermass


It had been 21 years since the last Quatermass serial, Quatermass And The Pit (reviewed by me here) had aired and 12 years since the last Quatermass movie, Quatermass And The Pit (reviewed by me here) had played at the cinema. So longer than all my life when, as an 11 year old, Quatermass was first shown on TV. Of course, I was a great admirer of the Quatermass movies from constant showings on television... the first and third ones always terrified me as a kid and I’m glad to say that this fourth adventure equally scared and haunted me.

Penned once again by the great Nigel Kneale, he’d tried to get ‘Quatermass IV’ produced by the BBC many years before but it fizzled out and I believe he didn’t work for them for a while after that (returning only after a few more decades for a Quatermass radio serial and another TV adaptation of the first Quatermass story). So this amazing writer defected to ITV, it seems to me... taking Quatermass with him. I don’t believe it was an accident that the producer of this show was the great Verity Lambert either.... another visionary of a sort.

This one takes place in what was then the UKs ‘near future’... and so this one is the serial that dates itself the most. A bleak Britain similar to the post-apocalyptic shambles of the Mad Max and other films... where roving gangs attack you on the street while the government breaks down and hides. It is in this environment that an ageing Quatermass, played by the acting legend who was John Mills, comes to London to take part in a TV broadcast, if he can make it to the studio before getting mugged by a roving gang. Fortunately, another guest going to the show, Joe Kapp, played by Simon MacCorkindale, rescues him but, during the broadcast about a new space project, the project is destroyed, sideswiped by an energy beam... by something which Quatermass and the others will have to find a way to defeat as soon as possible.

Has this got something to do with the pseudo-hippy (but definitely not peaceful) cult of youths called planet people? Quatermass is trying to find his granddaughter, who has run off to join them. But they go around following ley lines, chanting, smashing up scientific equipment and, as now starts to happen... and the sideswipe on the space station is a symptom of this... the youths get ‘taken’ at different times at various stone circles around the world. And also places which used to have stone circles at any rate (like Wembley Stadium... which is still standing in this fictional version of the near future). And when I say taken, they are mostly destroyed and not, as the planet people believe, taken to a new planet. Something is harvesting the youth of the human race, spilling the remains into the atmosphere (turning the sky green by episode four), extracting what it needs and then returning, every few thousand years. Quatermass believes the alien intelligence (this is just a machine) left markers on the earth to shoot the ‘collection beams’ to and ancient humans marked them as ‘bad places’ by building stone circles.

Okay, that’s a very stripped down summary but that’s the basic set up and it’s actually, despite having a lot of scenes of people just talking and exploring ideas, absolutely fascinating and, frankly, terrifying. Kneale is, as you would expect, not afraid to kill off regular characters and innocent bystanders (even Joe Kapp’s wife and two young kids get destroyed by the beam) and the whole thing moves along at a pace. John Mills is brilliant playing Quatermass and, watching the performance and the way it’s written now (on something like my fifth viewing after the original broadcast, the repeat broadcast, the VHS tape, the DVD and now the already extinct Blu Ray* from the equally extinct Network video company), I realise that he does, indeed, show that undercurrent of remorseless, ruthless zeal that was captured in some of the earlier portrayals of the character. Yes, he’s a kindly old man but he’s not above ‘using’ the lone survivor of one of the culls for study purposes and he takes each death in his stride... he is first and foremost the scientist who will stop at nothing to understand and, in this case, try to set a trap that, unfortunately for fans of the Quatermass stories, needs to be sprung from inside the trap itself.

It’s a remarkable serial, certainly not the best of the serials but neither is it the worst (and they’re all pretty darn good anyway). I remember the subtle, camera glimpses which didn’t dwell (possibly so the props wouldn’t lose their effect under scrutiny) of the half melted bodies of those that got caught in the alien beam and got ‘left behind’ (aka not totally destroyed). And there’s the flashy set piece where the surviving, half demented girl levitates from her hospital bed before promptly exploding. It’s all good stuff and, like Quatermass And The Pit, which mixed science fiction with old local legends, a definite entry into the folk horror genre... one of the best, I would say.

It also has a very eerie score which never saw the light of day on a commercial release, mores the pity, by Nic Rowley and Mark Wilkinson... a simple synthesiser score but one that really gets under the skin with its strange, haunting qualities. Also, if you want to see pop star Toyah as a planet person, machine gunned down by her own leader, then this is the show for you.

And of course there’s that great ending, the beam comes to the simulated bait of millions of youths (Quatermass and his team of geriatric scientists have come up with a synthesised signature of youth) and Quatermass is reunited with his granddaughter for a few seconds, but has a heart attack... so she helps him thump the button which explodes a nuclear bomb as the beam starts its work, taking them both with it. Not killing whatever alien intelligence has been harvesting the planet of the youth of society (who are drawn to the long buried marker points) but giving it a warning sting... the best he could hope for. So, yeah, that’s the end of Professor Bernard Quatermass, sacrificing himself for humanity (some might say it’s a play for redemption) in a nuclear bomb blast.

But not the end of the character completely...  a radio show bridging the first three serials and this one (starring Andrew Kier, from the movie version o the third serial) was later produced and also there was a live reboot of The Quatermass Experiment (Quatermass is the only TV incarnation of the character which wasn’t broadcast live, as it happens).

And that’s me done. I didn’t watch the cut down and added to international movie release version of this, this time around... The Quatermass Conclusion... but the bridging scenes shot at the same time do give that version a different flavour and, it’s worth watching at least once (but three and a bit hours of serial will always win out over an hour and a half truncation with this viewer, for sure).  Quatermass is a truly great serial and it’s just a shame Kneale didn’t write any further TV adventures of this character in his lifetime. But I’ll always, regularly revisit the ones we got because, well they’re just brilliant and their influence echoes down through the history of science fiction and horror to this day.

*Don’t worry, there’s a new Blu Ray edition of this from another company (with identical content, I think) coming out two weeks after the publication of this post.

Doctor Who - An Unearthly Child

Who Un Earth?

Doctor Who - An Unearthly Child
Airdate: 23rd November -
14th December 1963
BBC 1 - Region 1 DVD
Four Episodes

I hadn’t seen the very first Doctor Who serial since it was repeated, when younger viewers such as myself could finally see these older episodes, as part of a five story collection of 18th Anniversary shows called The Five Faces Of Doctor Who (which kinda cheated since the only footage we’d seen as yet of The Fifth Doctor thus far, repeated as part of this season, was the last 20 or so seconds of Tom Baker’s last story). I remember at the time being extremely intrigued by the opening episode of this one but, finding the following three parts somewhat underwhelming. However, I thought I’d revisit the serial again, this time as a DVD, which is a third, bonus disc included in the US Blu Ray edition of An Adventure In Space And Time (which I reviewed here).

Now, I remember the first episode being extraordinarily well written and suspenseful and, sure enough it is. It tells the story of two teachers and ‘about to be companions’ of The Doctor, who are discussing a mysterious and ‘ahead of her time’ student, Susan Foreman. They want to get a handle on her strangeness and, eventually follow her home, to an old junkyard where they end up meeting Susan’s grandfather, The Doctor (after about ten minutes into the first 25 minute installment), get into an argument with him, get alarmed about the inside of the TARDIS being bigger than the outside and, eventually, by the end of the first episode, being pitched back to the days of the cavemen. The following three episodes, while definitely fulfilling the brief to educate kids, shows them embroiled in a power struggle between two violent and ‘would be’ leaders of a tribe, held captive until they can show one or the other how to make fire. Yeah, episodes 2-4 are still pretty much silly shenanigans but, it’s really not as badly written as I remember.

So much for the plot. The actors and script are all superb (in the first episode), however. We have Carole Ann Ford as Susan, playing her as a teenager (although she was in her twenties when she took this role) and in a much different but striking way to the much younger version of her presented in the two movie adaptations. There’s also Jacqueline Hill as history teacher Barbara Wright, who is mostly the scream and act like a damsel person in this first serial but I seem to remember she got much better things to do in later stories.

Then there’s William Russell as science teacher Ian Chesterton, who I always kind of liked and he’s the ‘young man’ member of the cast, presumably to be the one to do any fighting or heavy lifting as required in each story. He later returned to the role as a cameo in Jodie Whittaker’s last story, The Power Of The Doctor (reviewed here by me) in 2022, marking it as the longest gap for a returning actor playing a character in TV history, I believe.

And, of course, we have William Hartnell, who was finally persuaded to join the show and, after a very short while, rather took to it. It’s a very different version of The Doctor than most kids would perhaps accept easily today and, the same can be said of the show as a whole. The nice thing about Hartnell’s portrayal of the role was that he was stubborn, tetchy, antagonistic and, in the early days, you never knew if he was a hero or a villain so much. For instance, in this story, when a caveman has been badly mauled by a beast and his companions, who have all been trying to escape from the victim, stay to help said caveman recover form his wounds... Ian catches The Doctor about to bash the wounded caveman’s head in with a rock because he’s slowing down their retreat back to the TARDIS.

And when I say it’s a very different show... well, for instance, when the caveman is mauled (off screen) by some kind of animal, his torso is absolutely covered in blood. Pretty sure they wouldn’t get away with that in that time slot these days.

There are a few interesting things about the show so let me just quickly point out the obvious ones but, before I do that, I noticed a big continuity problem this time around which I’d never thought of before and so I’ll maybe point that out here (I’m sure I’m not the first to do so). When Barbara lends Susan a book on the history of the French Revolution, once left on her own she begins to read it and mutters to herself... “That’s not right!” Well, all well and good but, bearing in mind she doesn’t actually visit the French Revolution until a 1964 story, later in the same series, one has to wonder how the heck she would know the history books have got it wrong.

The show starts out with the chilling title sequence and Ron Grainer’s catchy theme tune, rendered all the more unearthly, to match the first episode premise, by the uncredited arrangement by the late, great Delia Derbyshire. It must have put fear into the hearts of children everywhere whenever it started each week and it’s still, pretty much, the most effective arrangement of the theme tune (various modern arrangements don’t stand a chance against it).

In the last part of the final episode of the first serial (each series was put together by a number of Doctor Who serials), the episode bleeds into the next story, where the needle on the TARDIS Geiger counter slips into the danger zone, unnoticed by the crew. This is, of course, because they have just landed on the planet Skaro and are about to come face to face with The Doctor’s most famous and popular villains, The Daleks.

Now, about that. Sidney Newman, the show’s producer, tasked Verity Lambert with bringing a science fiction programme which would educate children and families... his big edict was “no bug eyed monsters”. If Lambert hadn’t rebelled against that idea and ran with The Daleks as the follow up story, I believe Doctor Who would not have survived it’s first season. They had some ratings issues for sure. In addition to some of Britain being hit by a power cut the night the first episode aired, it was also the day after the assassination of President John F Kennedy, with news programmes and national trauma (to an extent) overshadowing proceedings. The BBC took the opportunity to repeat the episode again before the second one aired, which picked them up a fair few more viewers but, honestly, the rating were not what they would have liked (although, compared to ratings today for a TV show, the viewer numbers would seem a smash success). Doctor Who was, though, a smash success... but only because Lambert went ahead and ran with a science fiction story featuring the mechanistic, exo-skeletoned Daleks. She realised the gambit had paid off over the next few days when kids in playgrounds and on buses were stretching their arms out and yelling “Exterminate”. Plans were quickly put in place for the Daleks to return the following year and there was also some development considered for a spin-off Dalek television series... which didn’t quite happen but, with various bits of strange news coming out of new co-owners Disney just recently, this still might occur.

And that’s me pretty much done on the opening story. A lot of the mythos surrounding the character of The Doctor is established in these first few episodes... more than you might think. Names and places are not revealed as yet but various pieces of lore built on and expanded over the years have certainly been thought about due to the open ended nature of some of the things said. If you’re a fan of the show and you’ve never seen it before, Doctor Who - An Unearthly Child, is well worth a look... especially the first episode, which sets things in motion. It’s not all that dated and surprisingly well written... maybe give it a go sometime.

An Adventure In Space And Time

Cinema Verity

An Adventure In Space And Time
UK Airdate: 21st November 2013
BBC 2

Last night I saw one of the best put together pieces of contemporary television I’d seen in a long time. Written by Mark Gatiss and directed by Terry McDonough, An Adventure In Space And Time is a dramatic retelling of the story behind the first three years of Doctor Who and has been made as part of the fifty year anniversary of the show. It’s not, to be fair, all that detailed a look at the process and events that went down, for sure, but it doesn’t have to be and, anyway, it isn’t the intent. It’s a docu-drama with the emphasis on drama and, therefore, a certain amount of dramatic license has been allowed and utilised throughout the running time. This, however, is one of it’s strengths and allows the writer to weave a spell and create an atmosphere something closer to the heart of the matter... a place where mere facts can’t always explore so... well... so truthfully.

There’s one iffy moment near the end that, right since I’d heard they were making this show, I was wondering whether they’d be bold enough to try and was almost hoping that they would. Well they did but I don’t think the moment I have in mind really quite worked as well as it could but... oh, I’ll get to that later. You might want to shy away from the last few paragraphs here if you haven’t yet seen this and want to have a surprise moment still be a surprise.

Now, as I said, it’s not trying to cover everything but what this show does, and does very well, is take some of the triumphant moments from the first three years of Doctor Who and use them as story highlights to reveal the physical events and the beating hearts that birthed the series. It doesn’t harm things, either, when the casting is so good. David Bradley, Hogwarts caretaker from the Harry Potter films, amongst other roles, plays the actor William Hartnell absolutely pitch perfect and the cast he is with all deliver and, miraculously, many of the actors utilised here look very much like the people they’re playing. This helps but, honestly, they are all so fine in their roles that you almost wouldn’t mind if they looked nothing like the people in question (although it obviously assists very well in maintaining the illusion) as they all tackled the roles, or at least the popular perception of who those people were, with absolute charm and vitality. Jessica Raine channelling the strength of character of the show’s “first female producer at the BBC” Verity Lambert, for example, is absolutely compelling and creates a very strong positive role model for aspiring young people everywhere.

The way the story is introduced with a few scenes from the end of the time period under scrutiny is absolutely brilliant too. Starting off with a scene with Hartnell (sorry... Bradley) in a car, gazing at a police box after he’s just been, pretty much, fired from the role of The Doctor, due to various reasons, the narrative jumps forward a little in time to the shooting of his last story, The Tenth Planet, which introduced the Cybermen to the world, is all pretty good... and then the show jumps back via the TARDIS control panel readout to 1963, which is revisited and used as a device to click off each year as it occurs in the drama. I always kinda half like, half disagree with Mark Gatiss’’ writing (which isn’t a bad emotional response to be left with by someone actually... just means he’s a legitimate artist) but I have to say he’s been slowly growing on me over the last few years and, out of the few bits I’ve seen by him, this stands out as his best work to date... at least in my book.

The show also magically captures the spirit of the sixties, or more accurately, captures that distanced, nostalgic feel that passes as a kind of postmodern shorthand these days for the sixties, and this is injected lovingly into every frame and used to bring out the story in the most wonderous ways. Throughout the running time there are various geeky references and in-jokes and I’m certainly not buying into everything here as gospel, but it’s enjoyable stuff. There also seems to be an undercurrent of things which are put there, not for the likes of me, and which are kinda half hidden beneath the surface of the thing... which I could just about detect but which I can’t quite put a finger on because I don’t know the people in question. I was kinda half picking up  on a repression of certain hints of alternate sexual chemistry with some of the characters, for example... never once spelt out in any fashion but certainly simmering somewhere down there in the subtext. I suspect this is done for the sake of subtlety and to touch upon certain issues for the sake of accuracy without bringing it up as any kind of judgement in itself... which is great. Kind of like extras for the people in question who happen to be watching this show.

Some of the recreations of the clips from the episodes are right on the money too and it looks like the people both in front of, and behind, the camera made every effort to make them so... much more than, say, the crew of the film Hollywoodland did when they were inaccurately reproducing episodes of the George Reeves, 1950 TV show The Adventures Of Superman, for example. And I loved the little nods to the shows past with such villains as the Cybermen, The Daleks, The Menoptra (from The Web Planet story) and Marco Polo from... um... yeah I think you get the idea. I'm just thankful they didn't show the Zarbi.

I also found myself very taken with an anachronistic piece of dialogue which was just perfect but which looks forward to the show’s future while referring back to the past of the audience... when Hartnell finds himself “let go” from the show, he uses exactly the same “I don’t want to go” bits of dialogue that David Tennant spoke just before regenerating in his last story. Which is a bit of an amazing temporal anomaly if you think about it but, you know, that’s what Doctor Who does best after all and... who cares? There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

Another main “moment” that happened in this whimsical vein, and read no further if you don’t want to spoil the surprise, is something which I thought would be a cool idea for the people behind this to do when they first announced it... I just didn’t think they would be brave enough to do so. Well I was wrong, they did it. Matt Smith is in here, playing himself, playing The Doctor. Or at least the ghost of him from the future, who appears in Hartnell’s mind as he contemplates his last moments on the show. It’s a nice, but cheesy moment, which didn’t quite work for me but Gatiss and the producers were brave to give it a shot and, well, since I also thought it would be a good idea back before they started making this thing, I can’t be too critical of somebody having this idea and running with it. I’m not sure it quite fits and it certainly dates it and anchors future viewings of the show to a 2013 time frame, but it’s quite fun and certainly within the spirit of the show. So I’ll shut up whining about that now and whine about a couple of other things instead.

These things being a few missed opportunities in terms of things covered which I feel might have been good to include and which I suspect were excluded due to factors like running time. The creation of Ron Grainer’s title theme tune, for example. He is credited visually with this but Delia Derbyshire, who was instrumental to the sound of that theme, was kind of short changed here, I felt. Also, a little epilogue with Hartnell’s participation in the ten year anniversary show The Three Doctors might have been nice but it would have maybe have changed the tone the writer wanted from the ending. What I would have liked to have seen, though, since the show was extremely informative to me and showed me a few things I didn’t know (yeah, I know, been watching the show for nearly the whole 45 years of my life and still managed to be informed by this... marvellous) is what Hartnell’s reaction and thoughts at the time were to Peter Cushing playing the big screen version of The Doctor (or actually a character called Doctor Who in the movies, if memory serves me right). It would have been interesting to see how this impacted on him, considering the timing of those movies.

At the end of the day, though, this programme was damn near perfect and, as I emphasised at the start of this review, one of the finest pieces of drama put out on television in years (and easily better than the majority of the episodes from the actual show itself, over the last few years). If you are a lifelong fan of the show, or even if you’re just curious about the early days and Hartnell’s involvement in the show and the gumption of Verity Lambert to get it made, then this one off special is indeed an essential piece of viewing. If the 50th anniversary episode shown on Saturday 23rd November 2013 is even half as good as this one, then we’re in for a good time on that one too.