Plot

1. Ringstone Round

2. Lovely Lightning

3. What Lies Beneath

4. An Endangered Species

In a bleak near-future of gangs ruling the streets, Professor Quatermass is accosted by thugs while on the way to a television studio to offer commentary and analysis for Britain's part in an international satellite broadcast covering a US-Soviet space link-up. He is rescued by Joe Kapp, a young radio-astronomer who is on his way to appear in the same programme. During the transmission, Quatermass is harshly critical of the space mission, and predicts that missions like it are wasteful and probably doomed in some way because they don't produce anything useful. Not long afterwards, malfunctions begin to show up, and the mission fails, with all lives lost, due to unknown causes. Quatermass and Kapp are forced to flee to the latter's remote lab, which is near a stone circle called the Ringstone. A group of young religious zealots marches to the circle, apparently to take it over for some reason of their own...

Quatermass, Kapp and Kapp's wife Clare have witnessed the obliteration of the Planet People at Ringstone Round by a beam of light from the skies . They rescue a poor girl called Isabel who is now deaf and blind, and whom Quatermass and district commissioner Annie Morgan plan to take to London for investigation. Chuck Marshall calls Kapp from the U.S.A. and reveals that Ringstone Round was not the only such incident on Earth...

After being caught up in a gang fight between Badders and Blue Brigade in London, Quatermass is given shelter by a group of old people who live in an old car scrapyard. Kapp returns home to find that the stone circle in the next field has been hit, and that his wife and children are dead. The girl Isabel is destroyed in hospital, and the gangs join the Planet People as thousands head towards Wembley Stadium. Quatermass tries to warn the authorities that the human race is being harvested...

Quatermass is in the underground car park and survives the energy blast at Wembley. Joined by Russian Academician Gurov, Quatermass forms a group of aged experts to recreate the presence of many human beings at the stone circle near Kapp's wrecked observatory. A massive bomb is brought in, and Kapp and Quatermass wait alone to detonate it during a blast and so deliver the final blow...

Info

Quatermass (also known as The Quatermass Conclusion or Quatermass IV) is a British television science-fiction serial, the fourth and final instalment in the famous Quatermass series. Written by Nigel Kneale, it was produced by Euston Films for Thames Television and broadcast on the ITV network in the autumn of 1979.

Professor Bernard Quatermass had been the hero of three science-fiction serials written by Kneale for BBC Television during the 1950s: The Quatermass Experiment (1953), Quatermass II (1955) and Quatermass and the Pit (1958-59). In each of these highly-regarded productions, Quatermass had battled a variety of alien horrors, and the character became a part of the British popular culture of the time.

The success of the serials on television led to Hammer Films buying the rights to make feature film adaptations, and all three of them were re-made for the cinema. After the release of the Hammer version of Quatermass and the Pit in 1967 Kneale, who had written the screenplay for the film himself, proposed to Hammer an idea for a fourth Quatermass film, written directly for the screen. Although they were interested and Kneale wrote up a detailed storyline for the project, the idea went little further before being abandoned, possibly due to the lack of box office success for Quatermass and the Pit.

In the early 1970s, Kneale was once more working regularly in television writing for the BBC, and he took this fourth Quatermass story idea to Ronnie Marsh, who was at that time the BBC's Head of Drama Serials. Marsh was interested, and commissioned Kneale to write the scripts for the serial, which now held the provisional title of Quatermass IV. However, again for a variety of reasons, the project eventually stalled and in 1973 was cancelled by the BBC.

Later in the decade, Kneale was working in commercial television, and it was here that the fourth Quatermass serial finally found an outlet. Even though Kneale had been a BBC staff writer when he had created the character in 1953, it was he individually and not the Corporation who held copyright in Quatermass, so Kneale was free to take him wherever he chose. The serial was picked up by Thames Television to be produced by their subsidiary company Euston Films, taking the Professor across to the BBC's rival, the ITV network, for the first time.

Quatermass, as the serial was finally titled, had far higher production values then any of the previous television serials and even than Hammer's feature film versions. Produced on what was then a very generous budget of £1 million, the serial was made on glossy 35mm film. This was a great contrast to the previous three serials, which although including some pre-filmed inserts, had for the most part been broadcast live, as was standard in the 1950s.

The serial was broadcast on Wednesday nights in four one-hour episodes, from October 24 to November 14, 1979. Each episode was described on-screen and in listings as a 'Chapter'. Chapters one and four (Ringstone Round and An Endangered Species) were scheduled in a 9.00-10.00pm timeslot; two and three (Lovely Lightning and What Lies Beneath) slightly later in a 9.10-10.10pm slot. The first episode received particular attention as it was the centrepiece of ITV's first evening back on air following a strike which had blacked the network out for over seventy days. The strike had delayed the broadcast of the serial, which had been ready for some time and had been meant to be shown much earlier.

For sale and possible theatrical release abroad, an alternative 105-minute movie edit of the serial was prepared, which went under its own title, The Quatermass Conclusion. This greatly annoyed Kneale, as he did not like having to write a story that would need to work in two forms of such massively different length.

The serial was repeated on ITV as a two-part compilation version in the spring of 1984. Chapters one and two were edited together as Chapter One: Ringstone Round, and chapters three and four simply as Chapter Two with no subtitle. These two compilations were broadcast on successive Wednesday nights, May 9 and May 16, 1984, both in 10.30pm-12.25am timeslots.

In 2002 the production was released as a DVD box set in the UK, which included both the original four-part serial version and The Quatermass Conclusion movie edit.

The role of Professor Bernard Quatermass was, as with all the previous television serials featuring him, taken by a new actor. In this case, it was the highly distinguished British film actor John Mills, making what was at the time only his second ever television series, following 1974's The Zoo Gang. He would, however, later go on to take other occasional television roles, such as Dr. Watson opposite Peter Cushing's Sherlock Holmes in the 1984 Channel 4 one-off The Masks of Death.

Joe Kapp was played by Simon MacCorkindale, and various other familiar British television faces of the era appeared, including Brian Croucher and Kevin Stoney, who became two of the very few actors ever to have appeared in all three of the most important British television science-fiction programmes: Doctor Who, Blake's 7 and Quatermass. One of the Planet People was played by popular actress and singer Toyah Willcox.

Nigel Kneale went on to continue his television career well into his seventies, working on various ITV series until the late 1990s. In the early 1980s he created his own sitcom, Kinvig, although this was not a particular success. Other work, such as an adaptation of Susan Hill's novel The Woman in Black and episodes of series such as Kavanagh QC and Sharpe proved more successful.

Quatermass was directed by Piers Haggard, who the previous year had helmed Dennis Potter's landmark drama serial Pennies From Heaven for the BBC. It was produced by Ted Childs, and the Executive Producer for Euston Films was Verity Lambert, an immensely experienced television producer who had begun her career as the first producer of the BBC's science-fiction classic Doctor Who in 1963. It was in that position that she had been invited to appear as a guest on the BBC 2 discussion programme Late Night Line-Up in 1965, to discuss television science-fiction. One of her fellow guests that night had been Nigel Kneale, who had let her know on air in no uncertain terms what he felt about the poor quality of her programme, although it seems they were able to work amicably enough on Quatermass fourteen years later.

For the first time, a novelisation of a Quatermass story was produced, written by Kneale himself, who had been an award-winning prose writer in the 1940s before turning to scriptwriting. Published by Arrow Books to coincide with the transmission of the serial, the novelisation contains several additional scenes and plot deviations, with Kneale telling the story more in the manner he would have liked to have told it but for the necessities of the television production.

Although Quatermass had been killed off at the end of the serial, the character did return one last time on BBC radio in 1996. This was in a serial entitled The Quatermass Memoirs, a drama-documentary which mixed the telling of the real-life story of the Quatermass serials with the fictional strand of Quatermass writing his memoirs in the Scottish Highlands, set at a time slightly before this final televised story. Broadcast on BBC Radio 3, the role of Quatermass was voiced by Andrew Keir, who had previously played the part in Hammer's 1967 film version of Quatermass and the Pit.

In 2005 the character returned to BBC Television as digital station BBC Four recreated the original 1953 serial The Quatermass Experiment in a live broadcast. The re-staging starred Jason Flemyng as Quatermass.