Quatermass ii

Robert Holmes is often considered to be Doctor Who's best scriptwriter, partly responsible for shaping the direction the series took throughout much of the 1970s. But his first two scripts for the show, The Krotons and The Space Pirates, are not exactly typical of Holmes's style, and it is only with his third story that he truly arrives on the scene, helped perhaps by the simultaneous arrival of colour for the first time and Jon Pertwee as the brand new Doctor.

I think Robert Holmes must have been a Quatermass fan. While I would hesitate to call Spearhead From Space a "rip-off" of Quatermass ii, it certainly copied some elements - not just those characteristics shared by many 'alien-invasion-by-stealth' plots (as opposed to 'alien-invasion-by-force', the other main type of alien invasion plot that Doctor Who had done multiple times by this point), but in specific aspects such as the hollow meteorites that carry the aliens to Earth in both stories.

The character of Bernard Quatermass seems more of a manny of action in this story than he did in The Quatermass Experiment, not hesitating to personally investigate dangerous situations. I don't know if it seems this way because we only have the first two parts of the original story to judge it by, or if perhaps the recasting of Quatermass prompted a shift in the characterisation, but the end result is that he feels a lot like Jon Pertwee's portrayal of the Doctor during the UNIT years. Maybe it was this that Nigel Kneale objected to, rather than the occasional lifting of story devices?

Speaking of Jon Pertwee's Doctor Who, the most noteworthy guest actor to appear in this is Roger Delgado, playing a journalist in part four. Maybe this is what gave the Master the idea of teaming up with the Nestenes in Terror of the Autons?

"Haven't I seen you somewhere before?"

All comparisons to Doctor Who aside, Quatermass ii is a surprisingly fast-paced six part serial. It shows fewer signs than its predecessor of having been made in the 1950s, with many improvements in the technical competence of the production, and it is difficult to believe that almost all of it was broadcast live. It is also a great story that still stands up well today, with many twists and turns that, while they may have been imitated, have scarcely been bettered. The scenes in part five with Quatermass and the workers sabotaging the alien life support, and the aliens' subsequent retaliation, are particularly strong.

It was also particularly pleasing to be able to watch a famous television series made all the way back in 1955 without having any knowledge of what would happen in it or how it would end, especially in this age of the internets when it seems I can't go a single week after a new Star Wars film comes out without being spoilered on it.

Truth In Television

The Quatermass Experiment

This is probably the oldest television programme I shall ever watch. Broadcast live in 1953, only the first two episodes of the six part series survive, although the same story was made into a film version by Hammer two years later and that does still exist to be watched so I know how it ends from that.

The TV version differs from the film in many of the same ways that the Doctor Who TV stories The Daleks and The Dalek Invasion of Earth differ from their film versions. Most notably, from the two parts that we can see, they differ in where the rocket crashes - in the film it crashes in the countryside, an isolated location, but on TV it crashes in the middle of London city, leading to scenes consciously reminiscent of the Blitz (which was only 10 years past at the time this was made). It seems that a rocket crashed into a crowded city street was easier to create in a TV studio, while a rocket crashed in a wide open but empty field was easier to create on location.

On the subject of Doctor Who, it seems The Quatermass Experiment's writer Nigel Kneale didn't like Doctor Who and thought it stole all his ideas. While it is hard to ignore that some stories from Doctor Who have elements that resemble those of The Quatermass Experiment - the disappearing astronauts in The Ambassadors of Death, the monster from The Seeds of Doom, and The Lazarus Experiment was not even trying to hide its influence when setting its own climax inside a big church - they are only a few out of many different story archetypes done over the years, and I think it would be tough to detect much resemblance between Quatermass and the serials from the early William Hartnell years of the show.

Four years before doggys first went into space, and eight years before mannys followed them, The Quatermass Experiment showed a British space programme being the ones to put the first mannys into space. This optimistic view of the UK's technological reach and associated status in the world would perhaps be the most lasting influence on Doctor Who, in which the Doctor would normally visit Earth by way of England, where the BBC studios were helpfully located.

The technical limitations of the time this dates from are obvious and inescapable, and the absence of parts three to six is tragic in a way, but this is nevertheless a fascinating look back to the dawn of television science fiction.

The Guardians

The Guardians is a LWT TV series from 1971 with an interesting premise. In the near future of the 1980s, England (and, as it turns out if you pay attention to a single line of dialogue in episode seven, the rest of the United Kingdom) has been taken over by a private army called "The Guardians" to stop it falling to the Communists. Democratic elections, free speech and trade unions have been banned, and a puppet government has been installed with the Guardians acting as their secret police force, a sort of cross between the Nazi SS and the Nazi Gestapo.

I have to assume that all this makes Ed Straker's job of defending the 1980s from alien invasion even more difficult.

Over the course of the first few episodes we find out about this world and are introduced to the main characters, all of whom know at least one other main character but none of whom meet all of the others even by the end of the series. We get to see the perspectives of both the government and the resistance movement "Quarmby", the former through the eyes of the Puppet Prime Minister Sir Timothy Hobson (Cyril "White Guardian" Luckham - do you think that was deliberate?) and his Puppetmaster Cabinet Secretary Norman (Derek "Largo from Shadow" Smith).

The resistance are at first represented by Secret Communist Tom Weston (John Collin) until he supposedly gets killed off in part two - although in part six it turns out he's not actually dead - after which the focus turns to Eccentric Psychiatrist

Dr Benedict (David "not as good a Watson as Edward Hardwicke" Burke), who is secretly recruiting his promising patients for Quarmby.

The series stays strong through its middle episodes largely thanks to the contributions from several dependable character actors making one-off guest appearances. These include Dinsdale "Matthew Earp" Landen as a Mad Scientist - if the Guardians are Nazis then he is their Mengele, with as little regard for mannys as for his animal test subjects.

Richard Vernon plays the former head of SIS (called upon for advice when the Guardians prove unable to cope with the growing menace of Quarmby), a very similar character to C from The Sandbaggers, whom he would not play until seven years later.

Anthony "Oliver Lacon" Bate is not quite as good as either of those two when he appears as a Surprisingly Middle Class Communist, but he still has some good moments. As does Peter "Kenneth Bligh" Barkworth, playing a Carefully Calculating Assassin whose plan gets undone by chance.

Probably the best guest actor is Graham "Lord Nimon, it is I, Soldeed!" Crowden as The Dirtiest Man in the World. Although seemingly beginning as a comic relief character, a tramp used as a disposable pawn by both Quarmby and the Guardians, he turns out to be quite a bit cleverer than either side realise and ends up outwitting them both.

Not all uses of comedy characters work so well, sadly. What should have been a turning point for the character of Dr Benedict - the first time he is called upon to have to kill to protect his Quarmby identity - is utterly undermined by the manny he kills being a bumbling, sub-Clouseau incompetent private detective, who only uncovered his resistance activities by mistaik.

Despite having some excellent individual episodes, the series as a whole suffers by not having one strong central character, and from the decision to present neither Guardians nor Rebels as sympathetic. While it is understandable that they did not want to make terrorists likable given real world contemporary events (though this did not of course stop Blakes 7, which had the advantage of being set in a far future Federation not a near future Britain, or Secret Army, which had the much more black-and-white setting of WW2 Belgium under the Actual Nazis), this has the effect of lessening the horrors of the Guardians' police state - we hear about some of their atrocities but we cannot, due to the nature of light entertainment television drama, see them.

Sadly, the concluding episodes cannot do justice to the setting that had been created and built up over the preceding installments. Narrowing the focus in on the main characters as their own individual stories reach their respective crisis points, the series loses sight of what made it so interesting to begin with - the world, the alternative reality it had created. Also, I have a sneaking suspicion that it may have run out of money because the final two parts are set almost entirely in studio sets we had already seen, and feature hardly any actors beyond the regular cast.

Fall Out At Fifty

It is 50 years ago today since Fall Out, the final episode of The Prisoner, was first broadcast on TV.

Love it or hate it, I doubt The Prisoner would be as memorable if it had not ended the way it did in Fall Out. Tying everything up by revealing the identity of Number One and the allegiance of the Village (the way Script Editor George Markstein had originally intended to) might have been neater in its way, but the almost infuriating intangibility of Fall Out's ending forces you to think about and interpret the series for yourself in a way that getting a neat sense of closure would not.

Fall Out is remarkable in other ways too, seeing, as it does, our hero Number Six resort to violent revolution in order to eventually overthrow and escape from the Village. And we know as we watch him that he is right to do so, having seen along with him in the preceding weeks how every other method of resistance has not been enough. We have seen the eventual fate of individuals like Number Six, such as Dutton from Dance of the Dead, and Number Six got a taste of what lies in store for him in Living in Harmony when he was shot by the Judge/Number Two. The Village cannot be reformed from within since, as we saw in Free For All, it only pretends to democratic elections and a free press. And Many Happy Returns showed that Number Six can never truly escape its reach so long as it exists. The only remaining response is to fight back, "'til death do us part" as Number Two so aptly put it in Once Upon A Time.

What is it that puts him over the edge here? It looks like the tipping point comes when his speech is drowned out by the shouting of the Village Assembly members. After that moment Number Six says nothing at all for the rest of the episode, his only dialogue coming from a playback of the line

"I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered."

from all the way back in Arrival. It seems he has decided that, if he cannot make himself heard, then actions speak louder than mews.

The sight of Number Six wielding a machine gun is pretty shocking (with All You Need is Love playing over it for an extra level of irony) considering how rarely he has used a gun in the series until this point (and, if you're one of those who believes Number Six is John Drake, even longer when counting the Danger Man series on top), but let's remember that he was driven to it in Living in Harmony as well. "Each man has his breaking point," said Number Two in Hammer Into Anvil. Now Number Six joins Roj Blake and Luke Skywalker as a heroic rebel.

The machine gun is only part of it - Number Six also fires the Village's rocket, although precisely how it being launched helps him and the others escape, and how much damage it does to the Village and to Rover (the Village's ultimate form of defence against escape... that we've seen) is one of the most unclear elements of this most opaque finale. One interpretation is that the launch, which causes a mass evacuation, destroys the Village entirely, and the rebels themselves escape in their truck only in the nick of time.

Rockets would have been on the minds of many viewers in 1968, as that was still in the middle of the space race between the USA and the USSR, with the Americans achieving the first mannyd orbit of the moon by the end of the year.

Fall Out was prescient regarding other events of 1968, with mass demonstrations and riots in American and European cities making the governments fear that revolution could have been imminent, even forcing the President of France to call an election to halt the violence. And the Soviet Union ruthlessly crushed attempts at democratic reform in Czechoslovakia using troops and tanks - the so-called "Brezhnev Doctrine."

The mere existence of Fall Out reminds us that morally justified violent revolution is a possibility, if our own societies ever fall into the sort of despotism seen in the Village... or the Soviet Union. If the powers-that-be are prepared to be violent against those they are ruling over, then they would be very happy if they thought those they were oppressing had ruled out the option of rising against them.

The democracies of the UK and USA have taken their knocks in recent years, with electoral systems (such as the UK's "first past the post") producing questionably legitimate governments, to say nothing of polarising referendums, but I would not advocate taking up arms in order to bring them down yet. Not when they seem to be in the middle of doing such a good job of that themselves, lol. And, of course, the USSR was not brought down by violent revolution in the end. Merely the threat, the possibility of an uprising turned out to be enough to force changes.

The British media, meanwhile, more and more comes to resemble the Village's Tally Ho - with newspapers that openly smear politicians they don't agree with and call judges "Enemies of the People" when they make a decision they don't like. Attempts to reform them are resisted under the cry of "freedom of the press" despite the fact that they exist to push the agendas of their shadowy billionaire owners - who resemble, if anything, the robed and masked members of the Assembly who seem to control the Village from behind the scenes and to whom even Number Two is answerable. They have the loudest voices, and when they shout they can prevent anyone else from being heard.

When put like that, what is it that we poor, lone cats can do versus those who wield such power? Maybe not much, but we can start by asking pertinent questions, and who knows where it will go from there?

Try not to break too many saucers along the way.