Quatermass (TV Serial) - Broadcast and Critical Reception

Broadcast and Critical Reception

ITV intended Quatermass to air in September 1979 as the flagship of its autumn season; advertising posters announced, “Earth's dark ancestral forces awaken to a summons from beyond the stars. The legend returns on ITV – Wednesdays at 9 pm throughout September”. However, industrial action began at ITV on 3 August 1979 and escalated into a full scale blackout from 10 August 1979 leaving the channel – and Quatermass – off the air for eleven weeks. Transmissions were finally restored on Wednesday, 24 October 1979 and the first episode of Quatermass was duly broadcast that night at 9 pm. Episode two was promoted in the TV Times with a full page article by Kneale introducing the new series and looking back on the original nineteen-fifties serials as well as a lifestyle piece with Barbara Kellerman moving house while episode four was promoted with a full page profile of John Mills. Ratings, averaging eleven million viewers over the four week run, were below expectations; the serial failed to crack the Top Twenty programmes in the weeks it was broadcast.

Quatermass met with a generally unenthusiastic critical response. Sean Day-Lewis wrote, “Although Piers Haggard's direction achieves much verisimilitude and the story is certainly enough to command some addiction; I did not feel exactly grabbed; the genre has moved some way since the 1950s and the Professor moves a little slowly for the 1970s”. The reviewer in The Daily Telegraph found Professor Quatermass “far too unheroic and unresourceful to carry much interest” while The Times found the serial to be “a so-so affair”. More positive was the Daily Mail who thought the serial was “not the best of Nigel Kneale but it equalled any of his earliest Quatermass stories”. John Brosnan, writing in Starburst magazine, found the serial to be “a bitter reaction by a member of an older generation to the younger generation whose apparently irrational behaviour makes them appear to belong to a totally different species. Naturally in the traditions of sf, these failings are exaggerated to the nth degree. Thus muggers and juvenile delinquents become armed gangs and the hippy movement with its emphasis on mysticism, becomes the Planet Church. It's very much a story of Age versus Youth and significantly it's the older people who are impervious to the malign alien influence”. This view is echoed by filmmaker John Carpenter who said, “Nigel was very embittered about the way of the world, as was shown, I think, in The Quatermass Conclusion”.

Reflecting on the serial, Nigel Kneale said, “Frankly, I was never happy with the whole idea in the first place. The central idea was too ordinary”. Although Kneale was pleased with the high production values, he was dissatisfied with the casting, believing that John Mills “didn't have the authority for Quatermass”. He was similarly unimpressed with Simon MacCorkindale noting that, “We had him in Beasts playing an idiot and he was very good at that”. Kneale was also disappointed with the Planet People, feeling that they should have been portrayed not as hippies but as angry punks. Producer Ted Childs thinks that “the primary problems with it were (a) it was perhaps too depressing a story for a popular television audience and (b) the punters were used to a fairly high standard of technical presentation from American television... And we just couldn't afford that”. Executive producer Verity Lambert's opinion is that it “didn't have the staying power of the originals, but then that's almost inevitable when you try to bring something back in a slightly different form”.