Professor Bernard Quatermass is a fictional scientist, originally created by the writer Nigel Kneale for BBC Television. He is a pioneer of the British space programme, heading the British Experimental Rocket Group. He has been described by BBC News Online as Britain’s first television hero, and by The Independent newspaper as a modern ‘Mr Standfast’
About Bernard Quatermass in brief
Professor Bernard Quatermass is a fictional scientist, originally created by the writer Nigel Kneale for BBC Television. He is a pioneer of the British space programme, heading the British Experimental Rocket Group. He continually finds himself confronting sinister alien forces that threaten to destroy humanity. He has been described by BBC News Online as Britain’s first television hero, and by The Independent newspaper as a modern ‘Mr Standfast’ The character also appeared in films, on the radio and in print over a fifty-year period. The character’s unusual surname came from a London telephone directory, while the first name was in honour of the astronomer Bernard Lovell. A remake of the first serial appeared on BBC Four in 2005. The unmade prequel serial Quater Masses in the Third Reich would have shown QuaterMass travelling to Nazi Germany during the 1936 Berlin Olympics and becoming involved with Wernher von Braun and the German rocket programme. In the fourth episode of the serial he mentions that he never reached his twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, tying in with The Quater mass Memoirs’ later assertion of his wife’s early death. The next time he is seen on screen he has long been retired, living in retreat in the Scottish Highlands. He has recently become the guardian of teenaged granddaughter Hettie after her parents were killed in a road accident in Germany. After his granddaughter runs away from home, he travels to London in search of her and a dystopian world where an alien probe is causing the collapse of society.
He forms a plan to drive the world’s youth away by the detonation of a nuclear bomb, and they are killed in the blast as the planet is saved by the bomb’s detonation. By the end of the series he is actively planning the establishment of Moon bases, but there is no sign of a wife or other children. In 1996 it is revealed that the Professor was first involved in rocketry experiments in the 1930s, and that his wife died young. According to TheQuatermass Memoir.s, during World War II Quatersmass conducted top secret work for the British war effort, which he subsequently refused ever to discuss. By 1953 Quatermas is the head of the. British experimental Rocket Group, which has a programme to launch a manned rocket into space from a base in Tarooma, Australia. The rocket vastly overshoots its projected orbit and returns to Earth much later than planned, crash-landing in London. Only one of the crew, Victor Carroon, remains, and he has been taken over by an alien presence, eventually forcing Quatermis to destroy him and the other two crewmembers who have been absorbed into him in a climax set in Westminster Abbey. It is not clear what happens to the Rocket Group immediately after this. In this serial we see his daughter, Paula Quatermass, who works as an assistant at the rocket Group, butthere is no Sign of a Wife or other Children.
You want to know more about Bernard Quatermass?
This page is based on the article Bernard Quatermass published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 04, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
