Scifi classic Quatermass and the Pit airs live Dec. 22, 1958
The BBC aired the first episode in Nigel Kneale’s science fiction masterpiece, Quatermass and the Pit, live on December 22, 1958.
“I can compare the sensation the last Sex Pistols performance produced only to Five Million Years to Earth, a film made in England in 1967 under the title Quatermass and the Pit.”
‘Five Million Years to Earth’ (1967) (from ‘Lipstick Traces’) | GreilMarcus.net
In 2003, Isle of Mann released “The Manx Bookshelf”: Book Covers series. Manx writer Kneale’s Quatermass and the Pit was one of the titles. His brother artist Bryan Kneale, created the cover for the original 1960 Penguin Book.
Designed by Fusion Design
Isle of Man published another Kneale set, The Kneale Archives, in 2023, on the 100th anniversary of his birth. 6 stamps were released including one for the Quatermass series. The bug like alien in the image is from the original tv series.
Design this time by EJC Design.
Its difficult to underestimate the effect Kneale’s story telling had on future science fiction tales. He combined social issues, modern paranoia about “invaders” and war into his trilogy, culminating with Quatermass and the Pit, the most successful of the trio.
Out of Kneale’s many contributions to British screen culture, it is arguably his creation of the Quatermass television serials for the BBC in the 1950s that has left the most profound mark. Directed by the legendary Rudolph Cartier, the first of the serials, The Quatermass Experiment (1953), was also the first original adult science-fiction drama that the BBC had produced for television. The serials centred on the intrepid scientist Professor Bernard Quatermass – whose name was inspired by a surname discovered by chance in the telephone book and the astronomer Bernard Lovell – as he faces down a range of unusual extraterrestrial threats.
Quatermass: The sci-fi series that terrified a generation
Kneale’s made for the BBC trilogy, started with The Quatermass Experiment (1953), then Quatermass II (1955) and finally Quatermass and the Pit (1958-9). Movie adaptions were done for the first two by Hammer Studios – The Quatermass Xperiment/The Creeping Unknown (1955) and Quatermass 2/The Enemy from Space (1957). In 2005 the BBC aired a live production of Quatermass 2, with an excellent, tense scripting.
It wasn’t until 1967 that Hammer Studios got around to filming Quatermass and the Pit, although Knealy wrote the script in 1961. It was released in the US under the name Five Million Years to Earth. But the tv series, by far was the superior production. Spread over 6 episodes, both characters and suspense was able to build slowly and steadily until the final climactic scene. If you get the chance, watch all of them.