Movies - Bernard Quatermass

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	Movies - Bernard Quatermass

Professor Bernard Quatermass is a fictional character, created by the writer Nigel Kneale originally for BBC Television, who appeared in three influential BBC science fiction serials of the 1950s, and made his swansong in a final serial for Thames Television in 1979. A re-make of the first serial appeared on BBC Four in 2005. The character has also appeared in films, on the radio and in print over a fifty-year period. Kneale picked the character's unusual surname from a London telephone directory when stuck for an interesting name for the leading character in the script he was writing. Quatermass is an intelligent and highly moral British scientist, who continually finds himself confronting sinister alien forces that threaten to destroy humanity. In the initial three serials, he is a pioneer of the British space programme, heading up the British Experimental Rocket Group.

Character

Little is revealed of Quatermass's early life during the course of the films and television series in which he appears. In The Quatermass Experiment
, he at one point despairs that he should have stuck to his original career of "mapping the tropics."

By 1953 he is the head of the British Experimental Rocket Group, which has a programme to launch a manned rocket into space from a base in Woomera, South Australia. Although Quatermass succeeds in launching a three-man crew, the rocket vastly overshoots its planned orbit and returns to Earth much later than planned, crash-landing in London.

Only one of the crew, Victor Carroon, remains, and he has been taken over by an alien presence, eventually forcing Quatermass to destroy him and the other two crewmembers who have been absorbed into him in a climax set in Westminster Abbey. Despite this trauma, Quatermass continues with his space programme, and by Quatermass II
(1955) is actively planning the establishment of Moon bases. In this serial we see his daughter, Paula Quatermass, who works as an assistant at the Rocket Group, but there is no sign of a wife or other children. In the fourth episode of the serial he mentions that he never reached his twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, suggesting that his wife may have died some time beforehand.

At the beginning of the third serial, Quatermass and the Pit
in 1958, Quatermass's funding is being cut back and the Rocket Group is being handed over to military control, much to his disgust. Control is to be handed over to Colonel Breen and Quatermass senses that he is being forced out: however, after the events of the serial, Breen is dead, Quatermass has helped to save the world, and London is in chaos.

It is not clear what happens to the Rocket Group immediately after this: the next time Quatermass is seen on screen (Quatermass, 1979) he has long been retired, living in retreat in the Scottish Highlands. He has recently become the guardian of his granddaughter, Hettie, after her parents (presumably Paula Quatermass and her love interest John Dillon from Quatermass II, although this is never explicitly stated either on television or in the novelisation) were killed in a road accident in Germany. After Hettie runs away from home, he travels to London in search of her, and finds a dystopian world there. Quatermass and the scientist Joe Kapp establish that an alien force is causing the downturn of society and Quatermass forms a plan to force the intruder away by the detonation of a nuclear device: he presses the button to detonate it himself, and is killed in the blast as the planet is saved.

Television

The character was originally created for the 1953 BBC Television serial The Quatermass Experiment
. He was played by the experienced film and television actor Reginald Tate, and the character immediately became highly popular amongst a television audience who had not seen adult-orientated science-fiction on their screens before. The serial also benefitted from being transmitted only a short while after the televising of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, which had earned television its first mass audience and encouraged millions of households to purchase sets. The character of Quatermass quickly became one of television's first made-for-the-medium heroes and iconic characters.

Kneale was called up and happy to write a second serial, Quatermass II
, in 1955. However, Tate died only shortly before production on the serial was due to begin, and he had to be replaced at short notice by John Robinson. Although the serial was again a success, neither Kneale nor director Rudolph Cartier were particularly happy with Robinson's performance, so for the third serial - Quatermass and the Pit
(1958-59) they replaced him with André Morell.

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