Quatermass at last: a day with Nigel Kneale’s sci-fi in Derby

To my shame, despite being a massive science fiction nerd, I had never seen a single second of any of the various Quatermass television serials or films. That changed earlier this month, when I spent a day at the Quatermass event at the QUAD in Derby, run by Steve Hatcher of the local Doctor Who fan group the Whoovers.

[Steve Hatcher (R) with Adam Marsh, cinema Programmer at Derby QUAD (L)]

I was also there partly for work, gathering material for a future First Edition newsletter for the Guardian about missing television episodes and the people who hunt them down, including the folk at Film is fabulous. I’d interviewed the lovely actor, writer and stand-up comedian Toby Hadoke in advance, and he was one of the Quatermass experts around on the day.

The Quatermass Experiment (1953), Rudolph Cartier – Way more sophisticated than I expected for a live television broadcast in the early 1950s. There were some stagey comic moments, especially the passers-by who first encounter the crashed rocket, but there was a superb central performance by Reginald Tate. I really enjoyed it, making it all the more frustrating that the final four episodes were never even recorded and are undoubtedly lost forever. Boooooo!

The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), Val Guest – Even if Brian Donlevy’s brash, aggressively American Quatermass feels like a completely different character to the thoughtful British scientist I’d just spent an hour with, this is a great film, with real menace and tension running through it.

Quatermass II (1957), Val Guest – My favourite of the things I watched on the day, full of Cold War paranoia, unsettling body horror, and a deeply anti-authoritarian streak that still feels angry, strange and surprisingly modern. Donlevy is still rather brusque, but this time his anger is channelled against a conspiracy, rather than him just coming across as a bit of a prick.

Quatermass and the Pit (1967), Roy Ward Baker – I didn’t quite make it to the end of this. I’d had a few jars, and the over-excitement of watching Leeds’ last-minute 3–3 comeback against Liverpool down the pub in between movies took its toll. Surprisingly, I didn’t warm to Andrew Keir as Quatermass as much as I’d ended up enjoying Donlevy’s performance, but this was really gloriously and brightly designed, and I will catch the final 20 minutes on streaming at some point.

The screenings were interspersed with talks and conversations. Andy Murray, who wrote a biography of the Quatermass creator – Into the Unknown: The Fantastic Life of Nigel Kneale – said in his introduction to the final movie that “this is only a ten minute talk so I can’t list all the episodes of Doctor Who influenced by Quatermass”, which is a totally fair point. So many touchstones. I had started making that list, of course: Ambassadors of Death, Inferno, The Seeds of Doom, Stones of Blood, Image of the Fendahl, Web of Fear, the list is, indeed, almost endless.

[Toby Hadoke (R) and Brontë Schiltz at the Quatermass event in Derby]

Earlier in the day there was a panel when Toby was in conversation with Brontë Schiltz, an academic who studies the Televisual Gothic – a job description so good I wish I’d thought of it first.

They talked about how Nigel Kneale and the director of the television Quatermass series, Rudolph Cartier, were actively trying to expand what television could be, pushing it beyond the idea of simply putting stage plays in front of a camera.

Toby also read an extract from his new book about the series, including an almost second-by-second breakdown of a technical fault that affected the final episode of the first TV serial. It was a perfect illustration of just how nerdy – and how painstaking – this whole enterprise has been for him.

He said he has been working on Quatermass archive material for decades, tracking down cast and crew in the pre-internet era, following leads from an agent address book found at a boot fair, and piecing together fragments of television history that everyone else had written off as lost.

Naturally, I bought the book, which Toby very kindly signed for me.

And naturally, I went home wondering why it had taken me this long to finally watch all of this. Rushes off to buy all the deluxe Blu-ray sets at great expense.