Quatermass and The Pit - Production

Production

The Quatermass Experiment (1953) and Quatermass II (1955) had been critical and popular successes for the BBC, and in early 1957 the corporation decided that they would like a third serial. Nigel Kneale had left the staff of the BBC towards the end of 1956, but on 2 May 1957 was contracted to write the new scripts on a freelance basis. The director assigned to the project was Rudolph Cartier, with whom Kneale particularly enjoyed working; the two men had collaborated on both of the previous Quatermass serials, as well as the literary adaptations Wuthering Heights (1953) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954). Quatermass and the Pit had a larger budget than the previous Quatermass productions, with £17,500 being allocated to the serial. Kneale was keen to write a story that would work as an allegory for the racial tensions that had recently been seen in the United Kingdom, which eventually culminated with the Notting Hill race riots of August and September 1958.

Pre-production work began in September 1958, while Cartier was still working on productions of A Tale of Two Cities and A Midsummer Night's Dream for the BBC. As the two previous Quatermass serials had been scheduled in half-hour slots but, performed live, had often overrun, Cartier requested thirty-five minute slots for the six episodes of Quatermass and the Pit. This was agreed to by the BBC drama department management in November 1958, just prior to the start of production proper on 24 November. The six episodes—"The Halfmen", "The Ghosts", "Imps and Demons", "The Enchanted", "The Wild Hunt" and "Hob"—were broadcast on Monday nights at 8pm from 22 December 1958 to 26 January 1959.

Each episode of Quatermass and the Pit was predominantly performed live from Studio 1 of the BBC's Riverside Studios complex in Hammersmith, London. The episodes were rehearsed from Tuesday to Saturday before broadcast, usually at the Mary Wood Settlement in Tavistock Place, London, with camera rehearsals taking place in studio on the morning and afternoon of transmission. Not every scene was live—a significant amount of material was pre-filmed on 35 mm film and inserted during the performance as required. Most of the pre-filming involved either scenes set on location or those that were too technically complex or expansive to achieve live. The latter were shot at Ealing Studios, which had been acquired by the BBC in 1955, with Cartier working with the experienced cinematographer A. A. Englander. Pre-filming was also used to show the passage of time in the second episode, with the archaeological dig set at Ealing shown to have dug deeper into the ground than the equivalent set at Riverside, enabling a sense of timescale that would not have been possible in an all-live production.

Special effects requirements were handled by the BBC Visual Effects Department, which had been formed by Bernard Wilkie and Jack Kine in 1954. Usually either Kine or Wilkie individually would oversee effects work on a production; due to the number of effects required, both worked on Quatermass and the Pit. The team pre-filmed most of their effects for use during the live broadcasts. They also oversaw practical effects for the Ealing filming and Riverside transmission, and constructed the bodies of the Martian creatures.

The music for the serial was credited to 'Trevor Duncan' a pseudonym used by composer Leonard Treblico, whose music was obtained from stock discs. Quatermass and the Pit also made extensive use of sound effects and electronic music to create an eerie, disturbing atmosphere. These tracks were created especially for the serial by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, overseen by Desmond Briscoe; their work on Quatermass and the Pit was one of the productions for which Briscoe and the Workshop became most renowned. It was the first time that electronic music had been used in a science-fiction television production.

After Quatermass and the Pit, Kneale felt that it was time to rest the character. "I didn't want to go on repeating because Professor Quatermass had already saved the world from ultimate destruction three times, and that seemed to me to be quite enough", he told an interviewer in 1986. By the early 1970s however, Kneale decided there were some new avenues to explore with the character, and the BBC announced plans to produce a fourth Quatermass serial in 1972. This was not in the event made by the BBC, but Kneale's scripts did eventually see production in 1979, as a four-part serial for Thames Television called Quatermass.

Made just prior to the introduction of early videotape machines into general use at the BBC, all six episodes of Quatermass and the Pit were preserved for a possible repeat by being telerecorded onto 35 mm film. Although this effectively worked by pointing a synchronised film camera at a television monitor and filming the output, the process had been refined throughout the 1950s and the recordings made of Quatermass and the Pit were of a high technical quality. The serial was repeated in edited form as two 90-minute episodes—titled "5 Million Years Old" and "Hob"—on 26 December 1959 and 2 January 1960. The third episode, "Imps and Demons", was re-shown on BBC Two on 7 November 1986 as part of the "TV50" season, celebrating fifty years of BBC television.