At the risk of offending a lot of geeks, British sci-fi TV is a pretty easy thing to be an expert in. If you’re in your 30s or 40s, your parents probably remember when the subgenre started existing. We’ve covered the high points of the genre on this very website, from the the 70s to the 80s to the 90s, and into the 21^st century.

A mainstream press that found it laughable, and a TV industry that loves nothing more than cancelling these shows just as they’re getting good, means that even within the few short decades British sci-fi TV has been around, there isn’t that much of it to get through.

It makes the gaps all the more painful. There are the Doctor Who episodes we can fill in with “animated reconstructions” and Target novelisations. Then there is The Quatermass Experiment. Where there are Doctor Who episodes whose recordings might be forever lost, most of The Quatermass Experiment was never recorded in the first place.

It was created by Nigel Kneale, a well-regarded TV writer who was also the basis of the dad in his wife Judith Kerr’s children’s classic, The Tiger Who Came to Tea. The Quatermass Experiment was a six-part drama series filmed and broadcast live in 1953 for a budget of under £4,000. By the time the first episode was being broadcast (again, live) the script for the final episodes had not yet been written. An attempt was made to telerecord the first two episodes with an eye to selling them to Canada, but the results were so poor the project was abandoned.

And yet, even today, if you scratch almost any British sci-fi TV show, you will find Quatermass beneath the paint.

The Quatermass Experience

The two surviving episodes of The Quatermass Experiment make strange viewing today. This was a TV serial broadcast when Yuri Gagarin’s first crewed spaceflight was still science fiction. It’s a simple story – a three-man rocket is the first to be launched into orbit. Mission control loses track of it. When it returns, there is only one man on board, and he has come back changed.

The live broadcast nature of the series means it is practically a stage play – the most dramatic set piece is the house in Croydon the space rocket lands on – a sight that would have still seemed familiar to an audience less than a decade out from the Blitz. The story is told through conversations – between policemen pondering the case of the missing astronauts, between scientists pondering the scientific anomalies of the mission, and between journalists speculating about the veil of secrecy over the returned space mission.

There are no special effects, but more than that, it feels like there is no language of sci-fi here, no familiar visual tropes to draw on, despite a few characters reflecting that the story seems like science fiction. The opening credits describe The Quatermass Experiment as “a thriller”, and that is how it comes across. In 1953, even the idea of Britain launching a manned space mission didn’t seem that ridiculous. That wouldn’t be the case until 1971, when Britain cancelled its space programme almost immediately after its first successful rocket launch – Black Arrow, which like later Quatermass’s rocket, was launched from Australia.

The most surprising part of the story is Bernard Quatermass himself, however (played by Reginald Tate). For a character whose place in the sci-fi pantheon is obscured, he’s extremely low-key. He is certainly no Doctor Who, no Sherlock Holmes, no eccentric genius. He’s a professional scientist who gets frustrated with bureaucracy and political agendas but is otherwise methodical and measured in everything he does.

The Quatermass Xperiment, the 1955 Hammer Horror movie adaptation that survives today, is a very different beast. This is a 50s monster movie. The rocket crashes in a mighty explosion, and seen from a distance looks straight off the covers of the pulps. Quatermass himself is played by Brian Donlevy as a much more abrasive, egotistical, American version of the character, throwing his weight around for the sheer joy of it.

As that movie was in cinemas, Quatermass II was already showing on the BBC, which suddenly had to compete for viewers with the 1955 launch of ITV. This series saw Quatermass investigating strange meteor showers that led him to uncover an alien invasion. It too quickly received a Hammer Horror adaptation.

The original Quatermass trilogy, both the series and the Hammer Horror films, concluded with Quatermass and the Pit, when a construction site uncovers ancient remains that prove to be evidence that Martians attempted to genetically modify the human race in prehistory. The series ends with a warning directly to camera, “Every war crisis, witch hunt, race riot, and purge… is a reminder and a warning. We are the Martians. If we cannot control the [Martian] inheritance within us, this will be their second dead planet.”

That would be the last Quatermass on screen until 1979, when Kneale concluded the series on ITV with a story about youth counterculture and alien mind control that ended with Quatermass and his daughter nuking themselves to save the planet.

Quatermass Who?

Despite being groundbreaking TV, and a popular movie series still known today, Quatermass has still fallen into the shadow of its later successor, Doctor Who.

But Quatermass’s fingerprints are all over the series throughout its run. Doctor Who stories such as the Second Doctor’s “The Web of Fear” (which introduced UNIT), the Third Doctor’s “The Ambassadors of Death” and even the Tenth Doctor’s “The Lazarus Experiment” all share plot elements and ideas with Bernard Quatermass’s adventures. The homages even verge on crossover, with The Quatermass Experiment’s fictional British space agency, the British Experimental Rocket Group, and someone who works there called “Bernard”, being mentioned in the Seventh Doctor story Remembrance of the Daleks. The agency itself appears in person in “The Christmas Invasion”. In “The Planet of the Dead” we even learn that “Bernards” are a unit of measurement used by scientists at, um, UNIT.

In fact, the first time anyone refers to David Tennant as “Doctor” in a science fiction show isn’t Doctor Who – it was in the live broadcast remake of The Quatermass Experiment in 2005.

But the Quatermass/Doctor Who connection goes deeper than that. If we look at the very earliest pitch documents for the Doctor Who, there is no mysterious time traveller, but a team of scientific troubleshooters in the near future. In short – the person who wrote it had definitely seen the Quatermass serials.

But Doctor Who’s enduring love of Nigel Kneale’s work was destined to be unrequited. Kneale was reportedly no fan of the show, refused to write for it, and was equally scathing of other British TV sci-fi fare. Despite creating Quatermass, as well as the science-fiction ghost story The Stone Tape, and the reality-TV predicting satire, The Year of the Sex Olympics, Kneale was vocal in his contempt for sci-fi and its fans, a contempt which found its outlet in the sci-fi sitcom Kinvig.

“This is all intended to be a joke, a send up of the whole awful science fiction thing,” he says in this interview from 2007. “I never really saw myself as writing science fiction anyway.”

Beyond Quatermass

Kneale is far from the first or last “serious” writer to be taken with stories of aliens and speculative futures while trying to distance himself from the “sci-fi” label, but whatever his feelings about it, the echoes of his work are still rebounding around the genre today.

If you take Doctor Who off British telly, every writer and producer in the country seems to immediately start trying to invent it, but Quatermass is still visible underneath that. The original Doctor Who pitch of a team of scientific troubleshooters, itself a direct take from Quatermass, is one that we have seen over and over again.

Doomwatch, which Kneale also reportedly despised, was one of the earliest in 1970. It was a series that attempted to keep its scientific trappings within the bounds of plausibility, such as environmental threats, rogue viruses and subliminal advertising (with the occasional hyper-intelligent carnivorous rat for good measure). Bugs was one of the 90s many attempts to reinvent Doctor Who, but its premise of a team of troubleshooting hackers feels like Quatermass’s British Rocket Group for a generation that had just learned what a modem was.

As writer on the series, Colin Brake tells Den of Geek, “While not a direct influence I have no doubt that Quatermass was lurking in our collective subconscious as we developed ideas for Bugs stories, especially for myself, Stephen Gallagher and Alex Stewart who were, and still are, huge fans of the original Prof.”

The short-lived The Eleventh Hour, starring Patrick Stewart, was possibly the closest to a full-on Quatermass reboot we’ve had yet, with Stewart’s Dr Hood acting as a scientific consultant for the Home Office investigating various ripped-from-the-headlines sci-fi stories.

The 2000s also saw super-science-team procedurals in the form of Ultraviolet (scientists versus vampires), Primeval (scientists versus dinosaurs), and of course, the genre coming full circle with Torchwood, a Doctor Who spin-off with a premise alarmingly close to Doctor Who’s original pitch (admittedly, with a whole lot more sex, swearing and queer representation than originally envisaged).

Even now, the first spin-off of Russell T Davies’s re-rebooted incarnation of Doctor Who is The War Between the Land and the Sea, a miniseries that will see a hot-shot scientific team (UNIT again) fighting against the sea devils, a threat that might appear alien, but has actually been on Earth since primordial history.

At the same time, weirdly, the real-life space programme feels much closer to where it was in Quatermass’s day, with billionaires inventing flying into low Earth orbit again.

Nigel Kneale’s dislike of science fiction can be frustrating for, well, frankly, anyone visiting a website with a name like this one. Kneale set the blueprint for British TV sci-fi for generations to come (and we have only touched upon the spread of his influence here, which stretches from mega franchises like Alien to lesser-known but brilliant more recent films such as Sputnik (which might as well be called “Quatermass in the USSR”).

But Kneale’s refusal to acknowledge and take part in the tropes of the science fiction genre gives the original Quatermass serials an undeniably authentic feel, less in-keeping with monster movies and alien invasion flicks than a series of political thrillers about institutions dealing with phenomena they are simply ill-equipped to handle. As much as the codified tropes are fun to play, modern science fiction could stand to learn from writing that was not yet bound by them.

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