Quatermass (Thames TV)

I have lately been re-viewing some of the films and TV shows which most unsettled me as a child, and this 1979 four-parter, written by Nigel Kneale, was a stand-out.

Strangely enough, I had either mis-remembered the end or missed the final episode entirely, reminding me of a vaguely-related content consumption phenomenon in the seventies.

There was a swashbuckling French series set in the days of Cardinal Richelieu which was shown on various occasions on Saturday morning telly called The Flashing Blade. The concluding episode seemed to have upsetting elements because — for some reason — the dubbed English version never included the final installment and one was left with the impression that one of the good guys had been struck down and there were various other détails en suspens. Only years later did I see the missing conclusion on DVD.

 

 

Anyway, in the case of Quartermass, if I imagined that a much older, more worldly me, bingeing the whole show over a long journey, would find it quaintly dated and thus less discomforting, I was mistaken. If anything the original effect was not only still present, but even more pronounced.

The set up is fairly straightforward. It’s the end of the 20th century and human society is breaking down. The young have either joined warring urban gangs or an itinerant cult which believes they are all about to be transported to another world. Masses of the latter gather at ancient stone circles and similar sites around the world, where they are seemingly reduced to swirling white dust and granular detritus.

These ultimately impersonal mass casualty events induced from space are fundamentally shocking, especially within a storyline which spares almost none of its main characters, even young children, from unhappy termination. (Back then in Star Trek you knew the guys in the red shirts were slotted for extinction and in Doctor Who at least one of each story’s incidental leads would probably not make it, but Kneale was absolutely relentless here.)

The strangely obsessive and deluded demeanour of the ‘Planet People’ in Quatermass chimed with an earlier experience from my childhood: a visit to Hyde Park during the ‘Summer of Love’ where I found the whole place overrun with hippies either dancing manically or frolicking on the grass which my barely-formed mind found all rather sinister at the time.

The abject state of the yufe requires a solution to be cobbled together by a collection of old timers. And this is where Kneale’s scenario delivers its emotional punch within a decidedly creepy package, for he does something which other marquee British content has always done, though perhaps a little less explicitly: position a vision of a gadget-tastic near future with a deeply nostalgic anchor in the British past. This is what makes the likes of James Bond, Doctor Who, The Avengers etc work. Indeed, these formats basically cease to function properly when the backward-looking part of the product is neglected.

This particular dystopia is situated perhaps a decade on from the date of filming, yet we are constantly shown glimpses of costumes and other iconography from the middle of the twentieth century and the crumbling generation left to confront the threat from deep space are Britain’s ‘wartime generation’. The references to the Holocaust are overt. Thus what you have here is a combination of the predictive power of the genre at its most gloomy, with an eerie kind of reverse speculation.

Maybe the late 1970s was the last great opportunity to pull something like this off. (Rather like The World at War). As we saw last week at the VE Day concert at Horse Guards', only a few stragglers remain from the wartime experience, almost none of whom will have played a defining role. And we have coated the period in so many layers of platitude and positive nostalgia that the fundamental nastiness which Kneale tapped into with his script for this series would probably not operate in the same way today.

And in truth the massed youth movements of the epoch, often characterised by collective hysteria (I lived just a few doors away from where the Osmonds stayed on their London visit in May 1975) are also something of a distant memory.

If there is a villain of the piece, it is an alien machine harvesting our young for some property, possibly their perfume, yet it remains unclear whether this artifact, which has come before in ancient times, remains under the conscious control of other beings.

Down below on Earth, this partial apocalypse is perceived as one that has occurred as a result of a unfathomable foundering of the collective psyche — not a virus, environmental catastrophe, global-level conflict etc. as we tend to come across more commonly today, and this, I would suggest, makes it that much more ominous and perplexing.