Derek Johnston Before Quatermass: The Neglected Beginnings of British TV SF Diversity in Speculative Fiction, Loncon 3, 72nd World Science Fiction Convention 18 August 2014 ! I want to start by taking us back through the early history of British television science fiction. I am sure that you are all aware of The Quatermass Experiment, Nigel Kneale's serial from 1953 which was part of the popularisation of television along with the Coronation and the spread of television's availability across the country. You may also know a few of the other programmes that I am about to mention, but I suspect that you will be surprised by the amount of overlooked early science fiction. Once I've taken you back through the outline of this history, showing along the way how the genre appealed to a range of audiences and used a variety of approaches, I will briefly focus on the science fiction adaptations that Nigel Kneale wrote for the BBC before The Quatermass Experiment, to consider how they may have informed his ideas for his own creation. In this way, I hope that this paper will offer a brief corrective to some of the received ideas about how British television science fiction began, and the role of Nigel Kneale and The Quatermass Experiment. ! So we begin with The Quatermass Experiment, then move back to the two adaptations by Kneale which we will return to later: Number Three, about conflict amongst scientists at a nuclear research station, and Mystery Story, about a strange death and an alien presence. Before Kneale began work for the BBC, though, there were a number of other productions which can be considered science fiction, particularly under my broad concept of the genre. ! No Smoking! was an Ealing-esque comedy about the invention of a pill to stop people smoking, and the effects of the end of the tobacco trade on international economics and politics. This was later filmed for the cinema, although not to great success. ! One of the claims about the originality of The Quatermass Experiment is that this partly lay in its form as a serial. However, not only was it not the first serial on British television, but it was not the first science fiction serial on British television. That was Stranger from Space, a serial that ran as part of the children's programme Whirligig. C0-created by Hazel Adair, later one of the creators of Crossroads, Stranger from Space was about a Martian scout who crashes on Earth and befriends a teen who helps him evade the authorities and find a professor who leads an experimental rocket programme which he can then use to get back to Mars. This was the first appearance of an extraterrestrial on British television. Stranger from Space also precedes Quatermass in that it had a second series, in which the Martians, led by Valentine Dyall, plan an invasion of Earth but are foiled by a civil war. Stranger from Space was also novelised. ! The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was presented as part of a celebration of Robert Louis Stephenson and featured Desmond Llewellyn, later Q in the James Bond films, as Hyde, alongside Alan Judd as Jekyll and, further down the cast list, Patrick Macnee. It also used some interesting camera work, sometimes in place of effects, so that the transformation from Jekyll to Hyde which opens the programme takes place in a camera move where one actor steps out and Derek Johnston the other steps in. Similarly, at one point the camera script indicates that the camera takes on a first person viewpoint of one of the characters. This is partly to cover the practicalities of moving actors from one set to another during a live broadcast, but it also demonstrates how the demands of live production led to innovative approaches. More of that coming up. ! J.B.Priestley's Summer Day's Dream had been a stage success, with its depiction of a future pastoral Britain threatened by international industrial combines that will literally rip out the South Downs using an immigrant workforce. The television version thus used various tricks which may have been developed for the stage version, such as the video communication system represented by a person sitting inside the videophone unit, behind a gauze screen. ! But effects were even more important to the 1949 adaptation of The Time Machine, to the extent that the play was promoted in the Radio Times as a " visual experiment" and " an experiment with Wells". The effects were explained in an article from the popular magazine Illustrated, which not only shows their significance to this production, but also the ways that the public were assumed to be interested in the way that television was made. From the photographs here, I want to briefly point out the use of miniatures, of overlaid camera images, including paintings, and of the use of vertical sets, such as where the Time Traveller can be seen climbing a ladder from the surface to the Morlock’s tunnels. Produced as a brief filmed insert, this demonstrates the ways that the producers of the time were seeking to expand the temporal and spatial properties of live studio production. The production also included the time travel sequence, created using a mixture of live studio elements and telecine. All of this for something that would be produced and broadcast live, twice, and then never seen again. ! October 1948 presented an alternative Britain that falls to a home-grown dictator, and the revolution against him, in Take Back Your Freedom. Adapted from a 1935 play by Winifred Holtby and Norman Gunsbury, its warnings about the threat of home-grown fascism emerging from the best of intentions, such as the call for a stronger Britain after the War, link it thematically to texts and productions such as Nineteen Eighty-Four. ! Earlier in 1948, the BBC had presented a version of Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. featuring television star Patrick Troughton as the leader of the robot revolt. Incidentally, Troughton would go on to play the first television Robin Hood, although you may know him best for his later role in The Box of Delights… ! But the first television science fiction was in 1938, when the BBC staged a half-hour adaptation of … Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. As with the 1948 version, this was produced by Jan Bussell, who was also a puppeteer who would later provide and operate Muffin the Mule. Bussell disdained the use of filmed inserts, instead preferring to explore the possibilities of the new medium of television and looking for a distinctly television style. So he would cut, or rather fade because that was all that was available at the time, between shots as required dramatically, rather than to establish characters’ relative positions within a defined space. And he used a superimposition technique to multiply the apparent number of robots on screen. Derek Johnston ! So television from its very early days used science fiction as a way of experimenting with the form and possibilities of television drama. Before Nigel Kneale joined the BBC, it had already used a number of different approaches to science fiction, different sub-genres and moods, aimed at different audiences, including not just adaptations but also original material. This means that Kneale was operating within an established, if not particularly common, genre. So what about those adaptations that Kneale was responsible for before Quatermass. ! Both productions can be seen as either contributing to Kneale’s ideas for the Quatermass stories, or at least demonstrating that these ideas could work on television. Number Three presented scientists arguing the ethics of their experiments into nuclear power, which could also be used to create a more powerful bomb. Similarly, Quatermass was specifically presented as a conscientious, but driven scientist whose work in rocketry also has military applications, as emphasised in Quatermass II. Where Kneale developed his ideas with Rudolph Cartier, the producer of the BBC Quatermass serials, so that they would be fairly fast-paced and tense, Number Three conveys the importance of its ideas through talk, although a character does end up dying and there is an attempted act of sabotage. However, as we have seen, just because Kneale was able to enhance the dramatic presentation of this theme when it came to his own character and narrative, he was not the first person to overcome the problems of presenting science fiction ideas by using pace and visual ambition to complement what could be rather staid and talky deliberations. Number Three also used Peter Cushing, who would go on to star in Kneale and Cartier’s adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four the following year. ! Mystery Story adapted an American play in an American setting. The mystery of the title was the death of a scientist, which it is later revealed is caused by the focussing of psychic energy by the mass gathering at a football game, with all of the emotion of the crowd acting as a lens so that a psychic attack meant to hurt him killed him. This can be seen as rather similar to the use of the psychic power of crowds in Quatermass and the Pit and in the final serial, Quatermass. ! Mystery Story was also deemed too horrific for children, although the BBC failed to put out what they called a 'horror message' beforehand, while Kneale would continue to produce material that the BBC would either issue warnings about or which would receive horrified, often delightedly horrified, responses. Most notable in that respect is, of course, Nineteen EightyFour, which led to questions in Parliament about the suitability of horror material, and which led one viewer to write to the BBC to express their opinion that it was only suitable for 'sadists and readers of horror comics'. All of this can be seen as part of Kneale's approach to the medium of television as one which should be prepared to take risks, to actually engage the audience emotionally, even if it did so through the use of horror. The BBC took an opposing view, with BBC Controller of Television Programme Cecil McGivern saying of Mystery Story 'Shots of the charred figure were horrible and were most likely to shock and disgust sensitive and/or young viewers. [...] In no circumstances must we shock, revolt, or disgust our audience, or any section Derek Johnston of it.'1 At the same time, you can see that the Radio Times sought to frame Mystery Story in terms of the 'scientific romance', and the letters referring to the play in a later issue of the Radio Times were headed with the term 'Science Fiction', the first time that the phrase was used to describe a production in the Radio Times. ! So Kneale was there at the start of productions being labelled as 'science fiction', and it is notable that Rudolph Cartier in producing The Quatermass Experiment would refer to it as 'science fiction', while the title sequence and promotional material referred to it as 'a thriller'. But Kneale did not originate British television science fiction, nor the mixing of horror and science fiction on British television. Instead, he was building on a series of productions that had already experimented with a number of areas of narrative, of audience, of approach and technique, and could be considered to already be an ordinary, if infrequent, part of the television landscape. The Quatermass Experiment is only part of the story of the development of British TV science fiction, and one that comes in part way through; I would argue it is not even in the first phase of the development of TV science fiction, but rather that it comes in at the start of a third phase, begun by Kneale in adapting Mystery Story and Number Three, where the genre which had once challenged technical possibilities and considered serious ideas, but which had been tamed to not disturb the middlebrow audience, once again worked to expand the possibilities of television in theme and expression. That is what I believe Kneale should be remembered for: a true achievement, a revival, not an inaccurate tale of an origin. ! Thank you. 1 McGivern, Cecil, Memo to M.D.Tel., 18 August 1952, BBC WAC