Terror from Outer Space

I was 6,500 feet above sea level in the mountains of Inyanga in what was then known as Southern Rhodesia, lying on my back on the grass and looking up at the stars. They were always unbelievably clear and bright up there, and the first rains of the season had rinsed the dust and the smoke of bush fires from the sky. As always the Southern Cross and Orion’s shimmering sword belt dominated the heavens, but tonight I was looking for something else – something no one had ever seen before. Eventually I saw it – a tiny speck of light, smaller than many of the stars, travelling across the midnight sky. It was October 1957, and the Russians had just successfully launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite.

I had always been fascinated by space stories, and before my family left England for Africa I had eagerly followed the weekly adventures of Dan Dare in the Eagle and had been introduced to the wonderful books of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne. By the 1950s it was becoming evident that space travel, however limited, was not just a possibility but a probability. The 1951 celebration known as the Festival of Britain took as its symbol the iconic Skylon, a gleaming 300-foot high pointed pillar, looking like a spaceship about to take off. Writers and novelists turned their attention to stories about space – not then reduced to the sometimes derogatory term ‘science fiction’ – many of them dealing with some form of apocalyptic invasion of Earth. Among the earliest were John Wyndham’s terrifying tales of triffids, chrysalids and the Midwich cuckoos, all of which were later made into films. One story, however, developed in a different way: in June 1953 my parents acquired a television set so that we could watch the coronation of the young Queen Elizabeth, and a month after that the first episode of Nigel Kneale’s classic The Quatermass Experiment was broadcast. You may wonder what place a piece about a television drama has in a literary journal. The answer is simple, even though it sounds incredible today. There were six half-hour episodes but only the final two were recorded: the first four were performed and broadcast live, and the sole surviving record is the book of the scripts revised by Kneale and published by Penguin in 1959. There are of course precedents for this method of storytelling: we read Great Expectations as if it were a carefully constructed novel, perhaps unaware of the fact that it first appeared in thirty-five weekly episodes and that Dickens changed the original ending several times between December 1860 and August 1861. In any case, from Sophocles to Shakespeare to Oscar Wilde, far more people have read a play than have actually watched the performance of what the opening chorus of Romeo and Juliet dismissed as ‘the two-hour traffic of our stage’. As a 12-year-old I found the television series terrifying. My parents wisely told me to go to bed, but that was almost worse because my bedroom was in the attic, up a dark spiral staircase where the wind whistled through the tiles. I distinctly remember standing in the doorway of our firelit oak-beamed living-room, eyes reluctantly glued to the screen, trying to decide which was the lesser of two evils. Watching television was different then. It was of course just in black and white, and as Matthew Sweet, the English journalist and cultural historian, remembers: There was something séance-like about watching. You had to draw the curtains to see it, the television had to warm up, and then something manifested on a screen that was a bit like looking into the porthole of a Martian capsule. An apt simile in this case. Quatermass was a ground-breaking series and engendered many sequels and imitations, but the original was never equalled and is still gripping, even if now we have only the book of the script and a few black-and-white photographs. Two and a half days previously the British Experimental Rocket Group, led by Professor Bernard Quatermass, had launched a rocket with three men aboard from a base in Australia. The two stages of the rocket were supposed to separate: the propulsion unit to be abandoned, and the crew in their section to make two orbits of Earth before returning to base. Nothing has been seen or heard of them or the rocket since take-off. The uncertainty is horrible: as Judith, who works with Quatermass and is married to the pilot Victor Carroon, says, ‘If they were in a plane and it was hopelessly overdue . . . we’d know they were dead. But in that thing . . . they may still be alive.’ Suddenly a message comes through from Australia: their radar has detected an object approaching Earth at high speed and at an angle not far off the original intended orbit. It must be the rocket: they try to contact it by radio but there is no response, so Quatermass decides to try to separate the two stages by remote control. To every one’s delight this is successful, but now they must try to bring the front section down safely. This they manage to do, and it crash-lands just south of London, near Wimbledon Common, ripping open the side of a little house. This was an all-too-familiar theme: when The Quatermass Experiment was broadcast in 1953 the population of southern England could recall only too vividly a time when bombs and rockets brought terror from the skies. Police and fire crews arrive on the scene, and Quatermass and his team have to persuade them to let the rocket cool before they attempt to do anything further. Novelists have many advantages over playwrights: they can introduce and describe the characters they create whereas dramatists have to rely simply on stage directions and their actors’ appearance and words. Take for example the representative of the Ministry that has provided funding for Quatermass’s experiments: Mr Blaker, ‘whose professional pleasantness has worn very thin’, is perhaps somewhat overly concerned with the wording of the press release when three men’s lives are at stake: ‘The nastier the facts, the more it matters how they are presented.’ The press too provides Kneale with material: a report comes into the news desk of the Daily Gazette that a rocket has crashed into a house: ‘How many were killed? . . . Injured? . . . [Mildly disappointed] Nobody?’ The star reporter comes in and offers to go and see what it is all about, in spite of his editor’s advice: I need something to denounce, Jacko. After dieticians and graphologists and the English Flower Show – something that’s somebody’s fault. That’s what this’ll turn out to be – mark my word. Scrape off the nonsense and you’ll find – lives endangered by – something or other crass! T hose who watched the original television series probably missed the irony of the reporter’s name: James Fullalove. Quatermass and the rescue teams have to wait until the rocket has cooled before they can open the hatch. They fear the crew may not have survived, but then they hear a faint tapping which raises their hopes. The press have gathered like vultures, and crowds begin to collect as the news spreads. Finally the hatch is opened and a figure in a space-suit staggers out: it is Victor Carroon, the pilot. Inside the rocket, along with all the control apparatus, are three long padded seats with safety straps, and on the floor lie two crumpled shapes: pressure suits, like that worn by Carroon, but these are empty. In disbelief Quatermass reports: ‘I’ve checked the instruments. This hatch hasn’t been opened . . . till now.’ Later that night, after Carroon has been taken away, the press stories begin to appear. Fullalove’s editor is rather surprised by his objective account, but the reporter replies: I find after all I am not a cynic. I’m troubled when I see an eminently truthful man driven to petty evasions . . . all the space-ship jargon . . . is mankind trying to sound certain of himself because he knows that just on the other side of the air there’s a new wilderness. Pitch dark both day and night, empty and cold Something from that cold, dark emptiness has penetrated the rocket, something beyond the experience or even the imaginings of the scientists. Carroon is bewildered and strange. He appears to have acquired some of the knowledge and attributes of the two missing men: he can now speak German and he displays a specialist’s know ledge of physics. But there is something else about him, an alien and frightening presence: tragically he seems aware of this, and in desperation he attempts to kill himself. Not only his colleagues and the press are concerned, however. The ‘Cold War’ has not yet been labelled, but the Space Race is on: other Powers are very interested, and someone tries to abduct the pilot. The drama intensifies towards its terrifying climax: the alien aspects of what was once Victor Carroon become increasingly dominant and pose an unimaginable threat not only to him but to the very foundations of civilization and to humanity itself. On rereading the book I wondered for a while why Kneale had chosen Westminster Abbey as the setting for the horrifying finale of his tale. I should not have done so: on reflection the reason is obvious. The Abbey is not simply a place of worship, but a national treasure-house of memories and achievements in every sphere of human endeavour. Furthermore, I am sure everybody following the TV series in 1953 had only a month or so previously watched the coronation of their young queen in that very same place. The occupation of such a historically symbolic building by a terrifying alien presence was an assault on centuries of national pride, tradition and accomplishment. Its dramatic termination meant far more than merely the removal of a threat. The lure of the unknown and the accompanying hidden fear are still with us. We refer to ‘astronauts’ and ‘cosmonauts’ although they are still in sight of home, never venturing more than a couple of hundred miles away apart from a tentative tiptoeing on the Moon. Kneale’s ‘new wilderness’ is still out there – threatening, dark, empty and cold. Ten years after Quatermass was broadcast I was back in England, this time as a graduate student, and the long arm of coincidence reached out: in the original series the part of the reporter James Fullalove had been played by Paul Whitsun-Jones, and I saw him on stage transformed into Mr Bumble in the original West End production of Oliver! At the other end of the dramatic scale, every Saturday on television I could watch the actor who had played the cameo role that Kneale had bluntly named ‘Drunk’: Wilfrid Brambell was having great fun being a dirty old man in Steptoe and Son.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 89 © Alastair Glegg 2026