Pop Between Realities, Home In Time for Tea 2 (Quatermass)
Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea is a recurring feature in which things that are not Doctor Who are looked at in terms of their relation to Doctor Who. This time, we look at Nigel Kneale’s classic science fiction serials, the Quatermass series.
If you kidnapped somebody from November 24th, 1963, and asked them about British televised science fiction, it would be self-evident that the most important thing to talk about is Nigel Kneale’s set of three serials in the 1950s, The Quatermass Experiment, Quatermass II, and Quatermass and the Pit. Still influential well into the 1960s due to the adaptations by Hammer Films into The Quatermass Xperiment (1955, The X refers to the film rating they were going for), Quatermass 2 (1957), and, in 1967, their version of Quatermass and the Pit, everybody knows that the Quatermass serials were major influences on Doctor Who, which is why Kneale refused to write for the program, viewing it as just a ripoff of his ideas.
And really, with even a cursory glance at the first three seasons of Doctor Who, you can see just how much the show relied on Quatermass. Just look at all the stories featuring intense paranoia about space, a government that is evil and untrustworthy out of misguided virtue, and broad global terrors of alien invasions that threaten to consume the Earth. It’s a wonder Kneale didn’t sue over the rip-offs, really.
Hopefully you see what I did there. If not, suffice it to say that up to this point, it’s far easier to discuss the ways in which Doctor Who is a decisive break with the Quatermass tradition than it is to discuss the similarities. That won’t always be true, of course – in particular when we hit the Pertwee era and Season 7, the show actually will start to (arguably) act like a Quatermass clone. Even then, Lance Parkin, in an essay reprinted in the first volume of Mad Norwegian Press’s fantastic Time Unincorporated series, makes a fairly compelling argument that the influence of Quatermass on Doctor Who is egregiously overstated.
Let’s look at the actual series. The three 50s Quatermass serials belonged to the classic live transmission school of television – with only a few exceptions of inserted scenes in the later two, all of Quatermass was shot live. The original Quatermass Experiment, in fact, only has its first two episodes in existence not because the BBC wiped the tapes a la Doctor Who, but because there were no tapes in the firstplace – nobody actually tried to record it for posterity. (The first two only exist because of an aborted plan to sell the show to Canada) Watching them now is… an interesting experience. As with most serials, they transplant somewhat poorly to the modern era, or at least, to the modern practice of watching them as a movie that occasionally runs the credits in the middle of the feature.
But one thing that does come across is an amazing sense of tone.…