What's got into the young? Exploring Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass (1979)

There are only a small number of podcasts I listen to with any regularity. Andy Stimpson’s Breakfast in the Ruins is one of them. Billed as a ‘Michael Moorcock flavoured podcast,’ true to its name the show regularly explores the work and influence of its namesake. But Andy also has a great interest in exploring many of the now forgotten cultural byways of his and, as it just so happens, my youth: New English Library paperbacks, pulp fiction, Sven Hassel, sword and sorcery books, and obscure science fiction novels, films and television, to name but a few.

I first talked to Andy when he interviewed me on his podcast about the 2021 book I co-edited, Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction 1950-1985. We clicked and I have appeared as a guest on his show a couple of time since. Very recently, I appeared on an episode that has just come out on Nigel Kneale’s three-part 1979 ITV television series, Quatermass.

I watched Quatermass on VHS back in the very early 1990s. I was living in a chaotic, rather drug and alcohol addled shared house in the then still pretty rough as guts Melbourne suburb of Collingwood. A fitting setting to watch such a downbeat piece of SF television.

Despite no doubt being three sheets to the wind, as was often the case back then, it stayed with me. The depiction of a crumbling Britain, the youth cult known as the Planet People and their ever present chant of “lay, lay, lay”. The creepy nursery rhyme that Kneale made up for the show. I was especially taken with the idea of an unseen alien presence harvesting the protein of the earth’s disillusioned young, as they gather at old sacred stone sites, via a giant beam fired from somewhere in the deep of space. And, of course, Professor Bernard Quatermass (played by John Mills), this dishevelled old guy in a shit brown suit, ‘the father of Britain’s rocket program’, now fallen on hard times.

So, I was keen to revisit the show to see what I made of it in 2024.

The 1979 televisions series – among the slim directorial output of Piers Haggard, best known for the 191 cult British folk horror, Blood on Satan’s Claw – was on sold in countries such as American as a film called The Quatermass Conclusion. It was the final in a series of four films featuring the Quatermass character, and corresponding television series: The Quatermass Experiment (1955) and Quatermass II: The Enemy from Space (1957), both direct by Val Guest, and Roy Ward Baker’s Quatermass and the Pit (1967).

I watched all three as well as revisiting the three-part series for the episode of the Breakfast in the Ruins podcast.

It's interesting, watching all of them in order, seeing the common themes that emerge: the abuse of government secrecy; Cold War anxiety transposed onto various alien beings; the critical view that Kneale took of the counterculture; the contention, running through a lot of his work, that sites like sacred megaliths and haunted buildings can retain the memories and powers of those who existed long ago in the spaces they now occupy

It is also fascinating to see the shift in Quatermass’s persona. He is played by American actor Brian Donlevy in the first two films, and comes across as an abrasive, sexist, technologically deterministic, driven scientist. The character mellowed somewhat by the time he appeared in Quatermass and the Pit, where he is played by Andrew Kier. As befits the times, Quatermass has a more even handed approach to science, is prepared to countenance the fact that it co-exists with the realm of the supernatural that he does not understand but can’t completely disregard. And, of course, by 1979, Mills plays him as a broken old man, disillusioned with science, utterly scornful of the political class and its games, uninterested in anything but finding his granddaughter, Hettie, who we soon find out has run of the with the Planet People.

Quatermass is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. But as a fusion of hack science fiction and dystopian folk horror, it’s highly disturbing and tackles a lot of interesting territory. In particular, there is the question of what came first: the societal breakdown that sees the earth’s young want to escape our dying planet and unwittingly walk into the clutches of the all powerful alien harvesters, or does the energy from the heat and chaos of our faltering world trigger or lure the unseen alien presence back to feed again? The only thing I can think of that comes close to Quatermass’s take on the end of our world is Alfonso Cuaron’s The Children of Men in 2006.

Anyway, you can listen here to Andy and I talk about Quatermass. We also off on various other digressions, including Kneale’s novelisation of the series and our love of the 1978 mercenary film, The Wild Geese, made by Euston Films, the same production company that did Quatermass.

John Schlesinger's Darling and the films of swinging London

My latest Blu-ray contribution is a booklet essay for the Umbrella Entertainment re-release of John Schlesinger's stylish and dark 1965 film, Darling. This examine how it relates to the cycle of swinging London films of the 1960s and early 1970s. Among the films namechecked in my essay are Hard Day’s Night (1964), Primitive London and The Pleasure Girls and John Boorman’s Catch Us If You Can (1965), Georgy Girl, Blow Up and Alfie (1966), and Secrets of a Windmill Girl and Smashing Time (1967),

I think that Darling is quite a groundbreaking film for many reasons, so it was great to be able to contribute to this release, along with a whole lot of other talented people. Should you care to pre-order the film, you can do so here.