Quatermass and the Pit is a British television science-fiction serial transmitted live by BBC Television in December 1958 and January 1959. It was the third and last of the BBC’s Quatermass serials, although the chief character, Professor Bernard Quatersmass, reappeared in a 1979 ITV production. The serial has been cited as having influenced Stephen King and the film director John Carpenter. It featured in the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes compiled by the British Film Institute in 2000.
About Quatermass and the Pit in brief
Quatermass and the Pit is a British television science-fiction serial transmitted live by BBC Television in December 1958 and January 1959. It was the third and last of the BBC’s Quatermass serials, although the chief character, Professor Bernard Quatersmass, reappeared in a 1979 ITV production. The serial has been cited as having influenced Stephen King and the film director John Carpenter. It featured in the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes compiled by the British Film Institute in 2000, which described it as ‘completely gripping’ The serial was written by Nigel Kneale, who wanted to use it as an allegory for the emerging racial tensions that culminated in the Notting Hill race riots of August and September 1958. The British Empire had been in transition since the 1920s, and the pace accelerated in the wake of the Second World War. More and more member states demanded independence, and a series of crises erupted during the 1950s, including the 1952 Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya and the Suez Crisis of 1956. During the same period immigration into Britain from the Indian subcontinent and the Caribbean was on the increase, causing some resentment among elements of the British. As the serial progresses, it becomes obvious that the aliens, probably from Mars, had been abducting pre-humans and modifying them to give them psychic abilities much like their own before returning them to Earth, a genetic legacy responsible for much of the war and racial prejudicestrife in the world.
In the end, the aliens are revealed to have come from a habitable planet five million years ago– Mars, and are responsible for the current racial tensions in the UK and the rest of the world, as well as a host of other extraterrestrial humanities and morphed aliens. The story ends with the discovery of the remains of an insect-like creature in a church in the fictional Hobbs Lane, London, which is later used as a setting for the film The Exterminator, starring Tom Hanks and David Walliams. The series is one of the last to be produced by the BBC, and was the last of its kind to be broadcast on British television before the advent of satellite television in the 1960s and 1970s. It has been described as ‘one of the most influential television programmes of the 20th century’ and has been compared to The Godfather and The Lord of the Rings by the director of The New York Review of Books, Richard Attenborough, among other things. It is the only BBC serial to have been written by a non-BBC writer. The first episode of the series, which was broadcast in December 1957, was called ‘The Quater Mass Experiment’, and the second, ‘Quater Mass II’, was broadcast on December 28, 1957, on BBC1. The third and final episode, ‘Thequater Mass III’, aired on December 30, 1958, was the first of the QuaterMass series on BBC2, and featured the character of Professor Quatersmis.
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