Quatermass II: The BBC Television Serial Pt 3
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Above: Programme titles, & episode titles.
Music Listings
Mars, the Bringer of War The Planets...Gustav Holst.
Radiation Area...George Arnos.
Space Alarm...George Arnos.
Dead World...George Arnos.
Zero Minus Sixty...Robert Farnon.
Swing-Hoe...Robert Farnon.
I Want to be Happy...Vincent Youmans.
It's Wonderful...George Gershwin.
Embraceable...George Gershwin.
Making of Homunculus Faust...Matyas Sieber.
Dialogue of the Electrons...Jack Beaver .
Molten Metal Heavy Industry...Hubert Clifford.
Disaster and Desolation...Hubert Clifford.
Fireside Serenade...Trevor Duncan.
Escape Velocity The Challenge of Space...Trevor Duncan.
Cosmic Rays The Challenge of Space...Trevor Duncan.
The Vastness of Space The Challenge of Space...Trevor Duncan.
Planet in Flames The Challenge of Space...Trevor Duncan.
Mob Violence, m. 2,3,4, and 5...Trevor Duncan.
Project Transitional Scenes Part 2...Trevor Duncan.
Inhumanity...Trevor Duncan.
Above: Nigel Kneale on set.
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1. When visiting the plant at Winnerden Flats, Quatermass, Ward & Fowler enter the Pressure Control Centre, & witness the process of 'The Food' being made. In the background can be seen a huge studio light as Quatermass grills one of the plants workers.
2. During a Land Rover journey with Captain Dillon & Sgt Grice, a studio worker can be seen walking across the backscreen projection.
3. Actor Reginald Tate was given the role of Professor Quatermass, & was due to rehearse his new role, but sadly died outside his home in Putney, London. UK, before he could take up the role. Tate had played Quatermass in the 1953 serial 'The Quatermass Experiment'. The part was then given to John Robinson, who had difficulty with the more technical aspects of the script.
4.Hilda Fenemore replaced Nelly Griffiths with very little notice. Fenemore took up the role of the Childs Mother in Episode 2: The Mark.
5. SPFX men Jack Kine & Bernard Wilkie play Technicians in Episode 6: The Destroyers, & had to help John Robinson & Hugh Griffith into their heavy looking Spacesuits.
6. Actress Monica Grey was given more than her own lines to read, she in fact had the part of a Technicians as well, this is quite possible as often she answers some of her own characters questions.
7. When the 'Quatermass II' Rocket launches, a rod can be seen lifting the craft from it's launch pad.
8. Nigel Kneale was commissioned by 'The Daily Express' write a *new* Quatermass saga for their daily, when he could think of nothing, they asked him to serialise the recent story 'Quatermass II'. So Kneale mebarked upon a prose version of the serial, only to be cut short as the paper clearly had a short attention span with the story.
9. Hugh Griffith & Monica Grey did a small comedy part with comedian & compare Bob Monkhouse on TV. Their part's heavily spoofing 'Quatermass II'.
Trivia & Goofs
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What I find most amazing about the BBC version of 'Quatermass II', is how they did so much with so little budget, by episode 6 set designers were nearly out of funding completely, & had to create the surface of the Asteroid. The designer achieved this by throwing some items of furniture around, then covering them with tarpaulin sheets. Just one of the money saving schemes invented at the last minute by creative people with very little time or cash - it nearly works as well.
'Quatermass II' is a gem of archive television, the direction by Rudolph Cartier is tight, the story fast paced & in my view is only slightly let down by the final episode (The Destroyers), but then purely only because of the length of the episode itself as there seems to be far too much baggage in there for it's own good. The finale is a very long anti-climax in my view, we have had all the horror & thrills of the serial up to this point, & then the episode 6 kind of fizzles out where it should have gone *BANG*!
I think that the Hammer film gets the balance right, especially in the finale. In my view the serials big mistake is in sending 2 old codgers into space to defeat the enemy. The sequence doesn't spoil the serial on the whole, it just lessens the tension & seriously dates the final episode more than the rest of the show.
I got my first sight of 'Quatermass II' in 1991, when BBC2 did a day long special of programmes & films that were made at the then recently closed 'Lime Grove Studios'. BBC2 showed in edited form epsisode 3 (The Food). It wasn't until 2000 that I got to see the whole serial at the NFT on London's Southbank. What a serial I thought, not as smoothly filmed as maybe 'Quatermass and the Pit', but still an exciting serial in it's own right. There is a lot of horror in 'Quatermass II', far more than in the previous serial 'The Quatermass Experiment', or it's follow up 'Quatermass and the Pit', which relies far more on myths & religious images than it does horror to shake it's audience.
It wasn't until I purchased the 2005 DVD 'The Quatermass Collection' that I really truly began to admire 'Quatermass II' properly, as it is very hard to enjoy something you have only seen once through. I always find that a few viewings help move things along if you are going to appreciate something a lot more. I now consider all the Quatermass serials (Barring the final 1979 Thames TV serial 'Quatermass') as an equal. 'Quatermass II' certainly deserves to be treated with more respect than it is shown, & is in every way equal to both of it's BBC namesakes.
Personnal Review
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Above The Radio Times article from October 1955. Below I have typed up the article for anyone who finds it a struggle to read.
A man-carrying rocket is fired into space, as a limited experiment, to reach a height of 15 000 miles. Something goes wrong. When the rocket is eventually brought back to earth by remote control, only one of the crew is found alive. Unable to give any account of his experience, he starts to undergo a rapid and terrible transformation. It becomes apparent that he is now the helpless carrier of an unknown lifeform. As it encounters other earthly orders - vegetable, fungoid, animal - a monstrous amalgam is formed, with the faculty of infinite reproduction. It is destroyed just in time to prevent catastrophe to the world.
This was the theme of The Quatermass Experiment, the television serial which I wrote and Rudolph Cartier produced just over two years ago. Part of the impression it made was perhaps due simply to being the first of its kind - in this country at least. But when reviewers used phrases like horrific fantasy, one was tempted to wonder: just how fantastic.
Since the date of that production, and particularly during the past few months, exploration beyond the earth's atmosphere has become an imminent fact. Artificial satellites are in preparation at this very irioment. America, Britain and Russia have announced plans - the latter even of employing a man-carrying rocket. A dividing line has gone: stories of the future have become stories of the present.
Too horrific? -the very nature of the official research now begun -speculative, cautious - emphasises our ignorance of what may be encountered beyond the air. Fifly years ago scientific materialism was ready to declare: 'There is nothing! A dead void.' Could life exist elsewhere in the solar system? 'Impossible!' These confident answers have lost their validity along with the theories on which they were based. Something more is known of the nature of life and energy. Today's scientist, asked the same questions, limits himself to a careful: 'We do not know.'
Man is on the edge of a new wilderness, darker than any unknown continent in an old-time traveller's tale. His kind has conquered desert and tundra, but here he is unfitted by nature to penetrate. He may face subtle destruction by the very emptiness - or encounter energies and forces beyond his power to calculate, and ills that no flesh is heir to.
One thing is certain. Even the preparations for such exploration will be infinitely long and arduous. There will be a ecord of disappointments, failures, at times the same loss of faith in a particular enterprise that Columbus met. It is such a spell as this - of technical doldrums - that forms the background to Quatermass II.
The time is some years after the first disaster. Professor Bernard Quatermass has continued his work. Prototypes of a second, more powerfial nuclear-powered rocket have been built (the Mark II of the title), to form the basis of an ambitious long-term 'Moon Project.' Then, in the early stages of testing; comes a crushing setback. His research is at a standstill, perhaps at an end. As he tries to come to terms with the situation, there is a curious interruption.
The new serial, then, has no direct connection with its predecessor. (In fact I have been at some pains to make the distinction clear, as a film version of the 'Experiment' is to be generally released almost simultaneously with this production, and confusion could arise.) None of the earlier characters has been held over, apart from Quatermass himself. This part is being played by John Robinson, following the tragic death of Reginald Tate, its originator, a few weeks ago. With new production facilities and effects, Rudolph Cartier and I are trying for something different in atmosphere and story. We hope it works.
Nigel Kneale Talks About Quatermass II (Radio Times, 21st October 1955)
A BBC Television Production
Stephen Reed. 2008.
