Quatermass Conclusion

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I first saw this TV series as young child and it scared the hell out of me. Having recently watched it again 38 years later I was amazed at how good it still is. The TV acting is stilted in places but it's budget was used to good effect to produce a world steeped in chaos and slipping towards an abyss. I certainly think the 2006 film 'Children of Men' was inspired in part by this mini-series. When the spacecraft are torn apart by unseen forces, and Quatermass’ curmudgeonly comments in the TV studios about the state of society are mistaken for a real threat, the Professor is whisked away to safety by astronomer Joe Kapp ( Simon MacCorkindale), who takes him to his observatory in the countryside – the rural world inevitably shown as more civilised than the cities. Here, the main youth threat comes from hippy cult The Planet People, who wander the hillsides believing that they will be taken off to another planet by a travelling spaceship. Now, this might have been a sensible idea in 1970 – and you might argue that it predicts cults like Heaven’s Gate later – but in 1979, the idea of wandering tribes of hippies was, frankly, laughable. It immediately dated the story, and this, ultimately, lay at the feet of Kneale, who could have updated his storyline from a decade earlier but instead seems to have left it fairly intact, possibly because the enmity that drove it to begin with was as strong as ever. And so we have a show that is written by an old man who hates young people, complaining about a youth movement that had long since ceased to be a thing. The opening sequence of the film version without titles or sound, which happens to be almost identical to how it plays out at the start of the first episode, which also has no text overlays for this sequence but does have sound.

BBC FOUR to produce a live broadcast of the sci-fi classic, The Quatermass Experiment". BBC Press Office. 3 March 2005 . Retrieved 27 January 2007. On 9 September, 2023, a live script-reading production of Quatermass , was staged at Alexandra Palace in London, with Mark Gatiss playing the role of Quatermass Brosnan, John (1991). The Primal Screen. A History of Science Fiction Film. London: Orbit. ISBN 978-0-356-20222-8.

Who writes this stuff?

Twenty years after Quatermass And The Pit aired on the BBC, Nigel Kneale's creation Professor Bernard Quatermass returned to television screen (albeit on BBC's competition ITV) yet again. This time he was an old man living in a world that was in a state of anarchy and collapse. Into that world comes a strange force from beyond the Earth that takes the good professor out of retirement and facing a threat bigger than anything he has ever faced before. The resulting story is the fourth and final adventure for the Professor. Quatermass was originally conceived as a BBC production, but after the corporation lost faith in the project because of spiralling costs, work was halted. The scripts were acquired by Euston Films and Kneale, who was commissioned to rewrite the scripts into two versions: a four-part television serial and The Quatermass Conclusion, a 100-minute film, intended for international theatrical release. Originally comprising six half-hour episodes, it was the first science fiction production to be written especially for a British adult television audience. [1] The serial was the first of four Quatermass productions to be screened on British television between 1953 and 1979. It was transmitted live from the BBC's original television studios at Alexandra Palace in north London, one of the final productions before BBC television drama moved to west London. Screen, Andrew (2003). Production Notes (Quatermass DVD Special Feature). London: Clearvision Video. QBOXDVD01. In January 2015, BBC Radio 2 broadcast an interview with Hammer Films CEO Simon Oaks, which included news of the development of a new Quatermass series for television.

The real star of any of the Quatermass productions of course is the script by Nigel Kneale. The script for this fourth Quatermass story was originally written several years for the BBC but was unmade until the late 1970s. It might be important to remember that was going in Britain at the time it was written: a miners' strike that put Britain on a three day work week, rolling power cuts, public unrest and a sense that society might be on the brink of collapse. All that feeds into the script by Kneale along with both the rise of hippies, a revived interest in megalithic stone circles along with some of the themes he had explored throughout the scripts of his career (ancient forces terrorizing the present from Quatermass And The Pit and The Stone Tape for example). The result is perhaps the most intriguing of the four Quatermass stories. While all that might make this story seem dated it might be worth keeping in mind the rise of belief in an apocalypse in 2012, the popularity of end time prophecy and the rapture or increasing concerns about the economy. Somehow this Quatermass story seems more relevant than ever.This final mini-series involving Quatermass was on my "to see" list for a while – and not just because some Scottish guy would be pleased, but mostly because I had enjoyed all the other films and TV serials I had seen involving this character and I wanted to see more. I think it is only fair to say up-front that this 4-part miniseries was not all that I expected it to be given the caliber of the Brand and of writer Kneale. To start with the good aspects, the series has a very satisfying bleak outlook and content that it mostly sustains and justifies. It isn't a horror but the loss of life and the unflinching depiction of it is really well done and somewhat surprising. The problem comes when we move beyond the atmosphere though and start talking about plots and characters because here is where we start getting into "it should have been better than this" territory. a b c Roberts, Steve (January 2005). "Quatermass". Doctor Who Restoration Team. Archived from the original on 6 August 2007 . Retrieved 27 January 2007. Despite its success and influence, only two episodes have survived, the other four having never even been recorded on their live broadcast. As well as spawning various remakes and sequels, The Quatermass Experiment inspired much of the television science fiction that succeeded it, particularly in the United Kingdom, where it influenced successful series such as Doctor Who and Sapphire and Steel. [2] It also influenced successful Hollywood films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Alien. [3] Plot [ edit ] The serial was written by BBC television drama writer Nigel Kneale, who had been an actor and an award-winning fiction writer before joining the BBC. [1] The BBC's Head of Television Drama, Michael Barry, had committed most of his original script budget for the year to employing Kneale. [13] An interest in science, particularly the idea of 'science going bad', [ citation needed] led Kneale to write The Quatermass Experiment. The project originated when a gap formed in the BBC's schedules for a six-week serial to run on Saturday nights during the summer of 1953, and Kneale's idea was to fill it with "a mystifying, rather than horrific" storyline. [ citation needed]

Well not really, no. The big difference between the Hammer films and this one is that the Hammer films were rewritten and newly filmed versions of the original stories, whereas Kneale wrote with the idea of the TV version being cut down into a movie. Despite Kneale writing the script with that in mind, The Quatermass Conclusion feels like a hodgepodge. Whole plot points and characters are removed such as why Quatermass went with Kapp after the live TV broadcast at the start of the film, the elderly people Quatermass meets in the third part of the TV story (who become important to the finale) and the dramatic revelation of what the alien menace actually is (reduced to Quatermass talking over a few shots taken from throughout the middle two parts of the story) to name a few examples. Parts two and three and the more heavily edited of the four parts but there are large cuts across the board which I'm sure will confuse anyone who hasn't seen the original TV version. Also present is the story layering. Its not just society falling to pieces, not just a man looking for a relative, not just a conflict between the old and new guard, but also a diabolical alien plot to harvest humanity! Carpenter uses exactly these type of layering techniques in building the stories for his best films. This is especially true in a film like Prince of Darkness that has the character interaction, larger forces at work, and the ultimate struggle to overcome a calamity. Joe Kapp was played by Simon MacCorkindale, who had previously appeared in "Baby", one of the episodes of Nigel Kneale's Beasts series. [20] MacCorkindale was delighted with the part of Joe Kapp, finding it a break from the typecast romantic roles he was used to playing. [4] Following Quatermass, MacCorkindale appeared in The Riddle of the Sands (1979), and subsequently moved to the United States where, after playing a few guest roles on television, he secured a part in Jaws 3 (1983) and the lead in the short-lived series Manimal (1983). He was then a series regular in Falcon Crest (1984–86), Counterstrike (1990–93) and Poltergeist: The Legacy (1999). He then returned to the United Kingdom, where he played the character of Harry Harper in Casualty between 2002 and 2008. MacCorkindale died in 2010. [20]

Optional and clearly presented English subtitles for the deaf and hearing impaired are also available.