Quatermass and The Pit - Reception and Influence

Reception and Influence

According to the BBC's research figures, Quatermass and the Pit gained an audience of 7.6 million people for its opening episode, jumping to 9.1 million for the second and increasing sequentially each week, with the exception of episode four, until it concluded with a viewing figure of 11 million for episode six, just under 30% of the potential audience. The overall average figure for the serial was 9.75 million; this was the best figure the BBC had obtained since the programme Opportunity Murder in 1956, the corporation not having managed to beat the rival ITV network in the ratings since the other channel had launched in 1955. However, the trade paper Variety reported that according to the Nielsen Company's ratings data, the final episode of Quatermass and the Pit had lost out to the quiz show Keep it in the Family on ITV, being viewed in 2,560,000 households as opposed to 2,996,000 for the commercial channel's programme, and failing to feature in the week's top ten shows. The same paper did also state that on the night of episode six's broadcast, British cinemas reported their worst evening's takings in "a long, long time."

The Times newspaper reported the day after the final episode that members of Hereford City Council had "rejected last night a proposal that they should suspend standing orders to adjourn so that members could watch the final instalment of Quatermass and the Pit, the BBC television serial." BBC radio and television journalist John Humphrys recalled being frightened by the serial as a child in a feature on television memories published by The Guardian in 2006. Recalling the frightening qualities of the Quatermass serials in 1981, journalist Geoffrey Wansell wrote that "when the third series, Quatermass and the Pit was shown, three of my school friends insisted on leaving the room whenever it started."

The Times's television reviewer praised the opening episode the day after its transmission. Pointing out that "Professor Bernard Quatermass ... like all science fiction heroes, has to keep running hard if he is not to be overtaken by the world of fact," the anonymous reviewer went on to state how much he had enjoyed the episode.

This expository episode was an excellent example of Mr. Kneale's ability to hold an audience with promises alone; smooth, leisurely, and without any sensational incident, it was imbued in Mr. Rudolph Cartier's production with unearthly echoes of horrors to come. Sharing them for the next six weeks with Mr. Andre Morell and Mr. Cec Linder is an unnerving prospect.

Criticism of the serial was also expressed. Although Kneale would go on to use the Martian "Wild Hunt" as a deliberate allegory for the recent Notting Hill race riots, some Black British leaders were upset with the depiction of racial tensions in the first episode. "Leaders of coloured minorities here to-day criticized the BBC for allowing a report that 'race riots are continuing in Birmingham,' to be included in a fictional news bulletin during the first instalment of the new Quatermass television play last night," reported The Times's Birmingham correspondent. The report quoted Dr. W. C. Pilgrim of the city's West Indian community as saying, "I do not agree with this sort of thing, fiction or not. No trouble of this kind has happened in Birmingham, where our problems do not find expression in violence." The BBC replied to the criticisms with the assurance that:

This was a completely imaginary news bulletin in a fictional programme set in the indeterminate future that contained such items as a rocket landing on the moon. It was all Jules Verne sort of stuff. No slur on Birmingham was implied and no reference to past events nor prophecy of the future was intended.

These themes and subtexts were highlighted by the British Film Institute's review of the serial, when it was included in their "TV 100" list in 2000, in 75th position—20th out of the dramas featured. "In a story which mined mythology and folklore ... under the guise of genre it tackled serious themes of man's hostile nature and the military's perversion of science for its own ends." The theme of military takeover of peaceful scientific research was also praised and compared to the contemporary outlook by Patrick Stoddart, writing for The Sunday Times in 1988.

Last week I watched a BBC drama in which a scientist fought against smirking government ministers and power-crazed army officers to stop his peaceful rocket research group being turned into a Star Wars vehicle to put missiles on the moon. They won. If you are wondering how you missed the ritual complaints which now follow every programme like this from offstage right, it is because the play was Quatermass and the Pit, which the BBC has just released on video. It was made in 1957, when the Macmillan government presumably believed that defence policy was a reasonable thing for the BBC to debate, even in drama. You seriously wonder how much internal angst would be generated if the BBC was offered the same plot now.

The serial has also been an influence on other television science-fiction productions. Mark Gatiss wrote in The Guardian in 2006 that "What sci-fi piece of the past 50 years doesn't owe Kneale a huge debt? ... The "ancient invasion" of Quatermass and the Pit cast a huge shadow ... its brilliant blending of superstition, witchcraft and ghosts into the story of a five-million-year-old Martian invasion is copper-bottomed genius." Gatiss was a scriptwriter for Doctor Who, a programme that had been particularly strongly influenced by the Quatermass serials throughout its history. Derrick Sherwin, the producer of Doctor Who in 1969, acknowledged Quatermass and the Pit as an influence on changing the format of the programme.

What the producers had been trying to do—and what ultimately they achieved in Quatermass and the Pit—was to get some reality into it. So I said that this was the solution: that what we had to do with Doctor Who was to forget wobbly jellies in outer space and create some reason for bringing the stories down to Earth.

More specifically, the 1971 & 1977 Doctor Who serials The Dæmons and Image of the Fendahl contain many very similar elements and themes to Quatermass and the Pit. Comparing The Pit to The Daemons, many people have noted the similarities between this story's plot and that of the 1958 BBC serial and 1967 Hammer film. Both involve the unearthing of an extraterrestrial spaceship, an alien race that has interfered with human evolution and is the basis for legends of devils, demons and witchcraft, and places with "devilish" names - Devil's End in The Daemons, and Hob's Lane in Pit. Similar themes also appear in Image of the Fendahl which deals with beings, the Fendahl of the title, that after the destruction of their homeworld came to Earth and influenced the evolution of humans to possess psychic powers. When its "skull", marked with a pentagram, is discovered in an archaeological dig, it proceeds to take over the descendants of the engineered humans in an effort to colonise the Earth.

The writer and critic Kim Newman, speaking about Kneale's career in a 2003 television documentary, cited Quatermass and the Pit as perfecting "the notion of the science-fictional detective story". Newman also discussed the programme as an influence on the horror fiction writer Stephen King, claiming that King had "more or less rewritten Quatermass and the Pit in The Tommyknockers".