The 1950s were also a period of adjustment for the BBC, which lost its television monopoly midway through the decade with the dreaded debut of the Independent Television Authority (ITA)—the invasion of commercial TV. Classical works and theatrical adaptations suddenly seemed insufficient to secure the BBC’s popular support. Perhaps not surprisingly, the corporation turned to science fiction: in 1953 the drama department put its development budget behind one writer, Nigel Kneale, who in exchange produced the script for the BBC’s first original, adult work of science fiction, a serial to be produced and directed by Rudolph Cartier and titled The Quatermass Experiment. The summer of that year, its six half-hour episodes aired, and with them began a British tradition of science fiction television that runs in various forms from Quatermass to A Is for Andromeda to Blake’s Seven, and from Doctor Who to Red Dwarf. Kneale himself went on to adapt George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four for Cartier’s controversial 1954 telecast. Later in the decade, Kneale adapted John Osbourne’s Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer for the screen.

Yet Kneale’s first major project was quite possibly his most elegant as well. The story of The Quatermass Experiment is fairly simple: a British scientist, Professor Bernard Quatermass, has launched a rocket and rushes to the site of its crash. There he discovers that only one crew member, Victor Carroon, has returned with the ship. Carroon survived only as a host for an amorphous alien life-form, which is not only painfully mutating Carroon’s body but also preparing to reproduce. Carroon escapes and wreaks havoc on London, until Quatermass finally tracks the now unrecognizably human mass to Westminster Abbey. There Quatermass makes one final appeal to Carroon’s humanity.

Years before, H.G. Wells had inaugurated contemporary science fiction with warnings in War of the Worlds about Britain’s failure to advance from its colonial self-satisfaction. The Quatermass Experiment’s depiction of an Englishman’s transformation into an alienated monster dramatized a new range of gendered fears about Britain’s postwar and postcolonial security. As a result, or perhaps simply because of Kneale and Cartier’s effective combination of science fiction and poignant melodrama, audiences were captivated.

With a larger budget and better effects, Kneale and Cartier continued the professor’s story with Quatermass II (1955), an effectively disturbing story of alien possession and governmental conspiracies prefiguring Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). Perhaps fittingly, Quatermass II provided early counterprogramming to the BBC’s new commercial competition.

That same year, the small, struggling Hammer Films successfully released its film adaptation of The Quatermass Experiment in Britain. The next year the film (retitled The Creeping Unknown) performed un-expectedly well in the lucrative U.S. market, providing the foundation for the company’s subsequent series of Gothic horror films. Hammer released its film adaptation of the second serial (retitled The Enemy Within for the United States) in 1957.

Kneale and Cartier’s third serial in the series, Quatermass and the Pit, combined the poetic horror of the first serial and the paranoia of the second. In it, Quatermass learns that an archaeological discovery made during routine subway expansion means nothing less than humanity itself is not what we have believed it to be. The object discovered in that subway “pit” is an ancient Martian craft, and its contents indicate humans are their genetically engineered offspring. By the conclusion of the serial, London’s inhabitants have been inadvertently triggered into a programmed mode of rioting, and the city lies mostly in ruins. “We’re all Martians!” became Quatermass’s famous cry, and the serial’s ample references to escalating racial and class tensions give his words an ominous power.

It is this grim, elegant ending, filmed by Hammer in 1967 (and released in the United States as Five Million Years to Earth), that Greil Marcus used in his history of punk to describe the emotional experience of a Sex Pistols concert. If nothing else, Marcus’s reference in Lipstick Traces (1989) suggests that Quatermass, like those repressed Martian memories, may return at the most curious moments. Even in less-unexpected contexts than Marcus’s, the name Quatermass may still operate as a certain sort of cultural code word; for example, in his extensive science fiction history Trillion Year Spree (1986), Brian Aldiss uses “the Quatermass school” as if every reader should automatically understands its meaning.

By the late 1970s the BBC was no longer willing to commit itself to the budget necessary for Kneale’s fourth and final Quatermass serial, simply titled Quatermass. Commercial television was ready, however, and in 1979, at the conclusion of a 75-day ITV strike, the four-part Quatermass debuted with John Mills starring as the now elderly professor in his final adventure.

Only the serial’s opening sequence, involving Quatermass deriding a U.S.-USSR “Skylab 2,” displays the force of the earlier series: a moment after Quatermass blurts out his words in a live television interview, the studio monitors are filled with the image of Skylab 2 blowing to pieces. Subsequent episodes are less successfully provocative. Concerning a dystopic future Britain where hippielike youth are being swept up by aliens, the serial’s narrative was recognized as somewhat stale and unconvincing. Yet even in the late 1970s, despite the last serial’s lukewarm reviews, Quatermass remained a source of fan preoccupation reminiscent of the commitment of many to Star Trek.

Unlike the three earlier serials, Quatermass was not adapted for the screen. It was simply edited and repackaged as The Quatermass Conclusion for theatrical and video distribution abroad. Of the earlier serials, only Quatermass and the Pit has had a video release, although most of the first serial and all of the second have been preserved by the British Film Institute.