Aged 11, Quatermass gave me the willies. Now it's even scarier

Telegraph

7 hours ago

There's been much attention paid lately to the original Quatermass sci-fi horror series, which went out in the 1950s in black and white on the BBC. And rightly so – they're still scary enough to give you the sweats. But for my two cents, it's the colour 1979 revival by ITV (available to stream on ITVX Premium) that should give us the screaming abdabs today.
This big budget mini-series starring John Mills was, along with the first TV screening of Chinatown, a highlight of ITV's re-opening night, after a long strike blacked out the channel for the whole summer. (Other highlights were Crossroads and George & Mildred, so you can't say ITV weren't bringing us the full spread of brow, high to low.)
But reviews and ratings were stinking. This was the age of Star Wars in the cinema, and Blake's 7 and Buck Rogers on TV – swashbuckling stuff. Quatermass, which depicts a broken-down dystopian near-future in harrowing, Threads -like detail, was badly out of step. Close Encounters has a similar documentary feel, but its benevolent musical aliens and flattering vision of humanity are the Pollyanna to Quatermass's Greta Thunberg.
Like its predecessors, the series was written by Nigel Kneale, a man whose talent was for thinking, 'What's the worst that could happen?' and then trebling it. (He was married to Judith Kerr, creator of Mog and The Tiger Who Came To Tea – never were opposites more attracted.)
The reviews slated Quatermass for being a slow downer, and for featuring hippies as a main plot element, which in the age of punk rock made it seem dated. (In fact, Kneale had written the script years before, but the gestation process of television had kept it incubating for a decade.) But Kneale was 46 years too early; this Quatermass is the dystopia for our time.
The Britain of Quatermass is beset by blackouts, fraying infrastructure, and the rise of private security in place of a defunct police force. OAP Professor Quatermass himself has retired to the country, and doesn't realise how catastrophically far things have fallen until he enters London at the start. The cities are torn apart by gang warfare – he is brutally mugged in the opening moments, which sets the tone for the whole thing.
Television itself is represented by the Tituppy Bumpity Show, a pornographic entertainment for kids complete with furries, dildos and rainbow-bright cut-outs which looks exactly – and I do mean exactly – like an LGBTQ+ event in schools, or one of Channel 4's self-satisfied excursions into 'inclusivity'. And there's a generation gap – well, more of a canyon.
We meet a youth cult-cum-protest movement called the Planet People, whose members look exactly – and I do mean exactly – like our own Just Stop Oil/Antifa/Queers for Palestine marchers, though slimmer and cleaner. (Amusingly, both Corrie's Brian Tilsley and Toyah Willcox can be seen among this throng.)
The wilful ignorance and smugness of the Planet People – 'Stop trying to know things!' one of them shouts at our hero – are very reminiscent of the recent Glastonbury crowds chanting ' Death, death to the IDF '; though regrettably our real-life modern Planet People aren't scooped up in huge bursts of 'lovely lightning' to be gobbled up at a space buffet.
For the drama unfolds to reveal that all the decay and dissolution is not accidental or pointless, as in real life, but the work of an alien intelligence that's harvesting delicious young human meat. The Planet People are following an implanted instinct – they literally are a herd – and the human race is so much pâté de foie gras, nom nom nom. Our civilised periods are just fattening-up exercises, human dignity merely our rations of fodder. The earth is a battery farm.
Horror is about tapping into primal human fears, but Kneale was unique. Because he not only does that, but he tells you that's what he's doing, as he is doing it.
Quatermass is obviously dated in other ways. We have an old man as the hero, and a white, middle-class old man at that. It's age, experience, Western science and culture – mixed with Jewish ingenuity – that are the only hope of saving the day. Imagine trying to get that past TV execs today – a show with a leading man aged 71 would be unthinkable.
As in all Kneale's work, though, female characters are up front. Brenda Fricker, Barbara Kellerman and Margaret Tyzack all play competent, intelligent professionals. Unlike modern TV, this feels perfectly unforced – they're just there. Quatermass, like a lot of 1970s drama, (think of Upstairs Downstairs, I, Claudius, Rock Follies) has an outspokenness, and casually assumes its viewers are intelligent and paying close attention.
The production values of these shows are often rotten by our standards (though not in this case – it looks amazing, bar a plasticky stone circle), but they confront very uncomfortable subjects – race, sex, violence – in ways that ours stick flimsy plasters over.
Watching when I was aged just 11, Quatermass gave me the willies. The aliens, not so much; it was the bleak future of Britain that shook my infant soul. In the intervening years, I sometimes thought back and chuckled complacently at Nigel Kneale – well, he got that wrong, I worried for nothing. But looking around us in 2025, I'm not so sure. Come, lovely lightning, and drop on us!