Production
The serial was written by BBC television drama writer Nigel Kneale, who had been an actor and an award-winning fiction writer before joining the BBC. The BBC's Head of Television Drama, Michael Barry, had committed most of his original script budget for the year to employing Kneale. An interest in science, particularly the idea of 'science going bad', led Kneale to write The Quatermass Experiment. The project originated when a gap formed in the BBC's schedules for a six-week serial to run on Saturday nights over the summer of 1953, and Kneale's idea was to fill it with "a mystifying, rather than horrific" storyline.
Rudolph Cartier, one of the BBC's most highly regarded directors, directed the serial. He and Kneale had collaborated on the play Arrow to the Heart, and worked closely on the initial storyline to make it suit the television production methods of the time. Kneale claimed to have picked his leading character's unusual last name at random from a London telephone directory. He chose the character's first name, Bernard, in honour of astronomer Bernard Lovell. The working titles for the production were The Unbegotten and Bring Something Back...!, the latter a line of dialogue in the second episode. Kneale had not finished scripting the final two episodes of the serial before the first episode was transmitted. The production had an overall budget of £4000. The theme music used was "Mars, Bringer of War" from Gustav Holst's The Planets.
Each episode was rehearsed from Monday to Friday at the Student Movement House on Gower Street in London, with camera rehearsals taking place all day on Saturday before transmission. The episodes were then transmitted live—with a few pre-filmed 35mm film inserts shot before and during the rehearsal period—from Studio A of the BBC's original television studios at Alexandra Palace in London. It was one of the last major dramas to be broadcast from the Palace, as the majority of television production was soon to transfer to Lime Grove Studios, and it was made using the BBC's oldest television cameras, the Emitrons, installed with the opening of the Alexandra Palace studios in 1936. These cameras gave a poor-quality picture, with areas of black and white shading across portions of the image.
The Quatermass Experiment was transmitted weekly on Saturday night from 18 July to 22 August 1953. Episode one ("Contact Has Been Established") was scheduled from 8.15 to 8.45 p.m.; episode two ("Persons Reported Missing"), 8.25–8.55 p.m.; episodes three and four ("Very Special Knowledge" and "Believed to be Suffering"), 8.45–9.15 p.m.; and the final two episodes ("An Unidentified Species" and "State of Emergency") from 9.00 to 9.30 p.m. Due to the live performances, each episode overran its slot slightly, from two minutes (episode four) to six (episode six). The long overrun of the final episode was caused by a temporary break in transmission to replace a failing microphone. Kneale later claimed that the BBC's transmission controllers had threatened to take them off the air during one significant overrun, to which Cartier replied, "Just let them try!" Some BBC documentation suggests that at least one transmitter region did cut short the broadcast of the final episode.
The BBC intended that each episode be telerecorded onto 35mm film, a relatively new process that allowed for the preservation of live television broadcasts. Sale of the serial had been provisionally agreed with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and Cartier wanted the material available to use in trailers and recaps. Only poor-quality copies of the first two episodes were recorded before the idea was abandoned, although the first of these was later shown in Canada. During the telerecording of the second episode, an insect landed on the screen being filmed, and can be seen on the image for several minutes. It is highly unlikely that material from the third to sixth episodes of the serial will ever be recovered to the BBC's archives. The two existing episodes are the oldest surviving examples of a multi-episodic British drama production, and some of the earliest existing examples of British television drama at all, with only a few earlier one-off plays surviving.
In November 1953, it was suggested that the existing two episodes could be combined and followed with a condensed live production of the latter part of the story for a special Christmas omnibus repeat of the serial. This idea was abandoned. Although Cartier and star Reginald Tate were keen to make an all-film omnibus version for television, this also did not come to fruition. In 1963, one of the existing episodes was selected as a representative of early British programming for the Festival of World Television held at the National Film Theatre in London.
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