Movies - Quatermass and the Pit

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	Movies - Quatermass and the Pit

Quatermass and the Pit is a British television science-fiction serial, the third of four in the famous Quatermass series by writer Nigel Kneale. It was originally broadcast by the BBC over the winter of 1958–59.

Generally regarded by critics and fans as the most successful of the Quatermass serials, it was the last one to be produced by the BBC in the 1950s, and the last television outing of the character anywhere for twenty years. In this instalment of the series, the eponymous hero Professor Bernard Quatermass finds himself becoming involved in the discovery of a bizarre object at an archeological dig in Knightsbridge, London. As the serial progresses, Quatermass and his allies find that the contents of the object have a horrific influence over those who come into contact with it, and darker implications for the entire nature of mankind.

In a 2000 poll of industry professionals conducted by the British Film Institute, it was voted at number seventy-five in a list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes of the 20th century, where it was described as: "Completely gripping, under the guise of genre it tackled serious themes of man's hostile nature and the military's perversion of science for its own ends."

Background

After the success of the two previous Quatermass serials — The Quatermass Experiment
(1953) and Quatermass II
(1955) — the BBC were more than willing for Kneale, now a freelance writer and not on the BBC staff, to pen a third instalment in the series. Since Quatermass II Kneale had been working mostly in film, writing the screenplay adaptations of his own television serials The Creature (as The Abominable Snowman) and Quatermass II (as Quatermass 2
), and John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger
. For Quatermass and the Pit, he was reunited with director Rudolph Cartier, who had helmed the previous two Quatermass serials as well as many other Kneale scripts for the BBC. It was to be the final collaboration between the two, who had formed the most successful writer/director partnership in British television of the 1950s.

Quatermass and the Pit built on the already popular status of the Quatermass character and created a story that enthralled much of the television-watching public: for many years it was stated that the final episode famously "emptied the pubs" as enthusiastic viewers rushed home to watch. In the words of the British Film Institute, "the series, like its predecessors, was compulsory viewing" . The review of the first episode in The Times newspaper praised the production: "The expository episode was a brilliant example of Mr Kneale's ability to hold an audience with promises alone; smooth, leisurely, and without any sensational incident, it was imbued in Mr Rudolph Cartier's production with unearthly echoes of horrors to come." The serial helped to popularise the science-fiction genre on television in the UK, and make it a respectable and adult format. The production is also notable for the distinctive electronic wailing noise that accompanies alien phenomena, which was created by the then newly-formed BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

As with the previous two serials and in common with most other television drama of the day, Quatermass and the Pit was transmitted live, from the BBC's Riverside Studios in London. However, it also had a large amount of pre-filming work carried out on external location and, for complex sequences not easily achievable in the confines of a live television studio, at Ealing Studios. For these filmed sequences, Cartier employed the services of the BBC's experienced film cameraman A. A. Englander, who was at the time one of the top film cameramen working in the UK. As usual, the pre-filmed sequences would be played into the live transmission as and where required.

The serial was broadcast over six Monday evenings from December 22 1958 to January 26 1959. Although all six episodes — The Halfmen, The Ghosts, Imps and Demons, The Enchanted, The Wild Hunt and Hob — were written as half-hour instalments, each was given a thirty-five minute timeslot due to the overruns most of the episodes of the previous two Quatermass serials had gone into. All six episodes were scheduled in an 8.00–8.35pm timeslot. The production drew very high viewing figures for the BBC, with the final episode gaining 11 million viewers, one of the highest BBC drama audiences of the decade.

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