The late great Nigel Kneale, truly a man that can put the scare young children without flooding the set in false blood.
1953: How Quatermass switched Britons from TV royalty to TV sci-fi
In June 1953 millions of Brits huddled around their newly bought TVs - all two million of them - and watched their new young Queen take the Coronation Oath before God, her bishops and peers amidst the gothic splendour of Westminster Abbey. Just over two months later a similar number clustered around their sets again, to watch …
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Thursday 18th July 2013 21:50 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: "hard for many Britain’s to fill in"
"gotten" was not used in NZ, nor Australia when I was there (NZer).
Actually, even old English did not use it that much and now, when used, it is usually in the wrong grammatical context. Scots courts use "proven"; but that is an archaic usage, damn your eyes. We dropped thee, thy, and most Old English word endings around about the time Norse changed the language irrevocably. Even Shakespeare tended to restrict such endings to particular contexts.
Certain religious immigrant groups to the Americas and Quakers, for instance, in England, consciously adopted archaisms to separate themselves from the rest of us, along with Webster's deliberate and inconsistent spelling changes for the same purpose (come on, how is "color" more representative of how we nearly all pronounce "colour", for example?).
Your trouble is too much USA media and ignorance of your own culture. Shame.
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Thursday 18th July 2013 10:46 GMT keithpeter
Was it colder then?
"All that stomping around in gaberdine coats, occasionally removed to reveal further layers of tweed and rough knitwear..."
Try Google Image search for 'Bill Brandt Street Photographs' or (early 60s) 'Roger Mayne'. Coats, vests, jackets, shirts, jumpers on what are obviously summer days (shadow angle in Mayne's photos especially when there is some sun).
Was it colder then?
I can remember early to mid 60s, and it was always summer and I was always hurtling around in a T-shirt, shorts and plastic sandals (grew up near the sea). I was probably just being a normal 6 to 9 year old.
Yes, I hid behind the setee when the Darleks arrived.
Mine's the Duffel coat going into the cupboard.
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Thursday 18th July 2013 11:50 GMT Magister
Re: Was it colder then?
Remember the winter of 63 / 63?
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_of_1962%E2%80%9363_in_the_United_Kingdom)
They still used to get pea soupers because of the amount of coal being burned to heat houses / offices / factories - not many people had central heating, so they put on extra layers of clothing. But I also think that we were a hardier lot; if you were cold, you ran around to get warm!
Not quite old enough to remember the original Quatermass, but I did watch "Quatermass and the Pit" (despite my mother thinking that it was too scary for me). It got me reading a lot of SF once I was able to get a library card.
Things were definitely a bit shabbier then; there were still large areas of major twons & cities that had been damaged / destroyed by bombing and then had been knocked flat for safety; no money to re-build at that time. We used to play games in the abandoned bomb shelters or pillar boxes that littered the landscape, not quite understanding that our parents had used the same places for real.
But there was a sense of optimism; the war was over, the economy slowly improving, new consumer goods available. Lots of really exciting scientific research in all areas. Perhaps not good times, but certainly better than the previous generations ahd had to tolerate.
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Thursday 18th July 2013 21:56 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Was it colder then?
Ration cards continued until 1956 or later. There were some cold Winters. Single glazing, draughty chimneys, Jack Frost patterns on the inside of windows in the morning, frozen hot water bottles on the bedroom floor if they fell out of the bed. Villages in mid Devon got cut off regularly by snow. My father, a country doctor, used to walk along the hedge tops to reach patients (most of whom did not have cars even in the countryside), carrying his medical case, because the car could not be used in those conditions. A chap teaching in a market town, some ten miles away, sometimes skied to school when the snow was good enough. So perhaps it was a cool decade.
It was fun actually. Try turning down or off the central heating this Winter. See how many clothes you start wearing.
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Friday 19th July 2013 15:04 GMT Blitheringeejit
Re: Was it colder then?
>We used to play games in the abandoned ... pillar boxes
You must have been a *very* small child at the time!
I think pill-boxes were/are a rural thing - I only started to notice them when I moved out of the city, and there are plenty left, particularly at spots where roads cross rivers or canals. They were, after all, built to last.
I also played on many "bombsites" in my 60s childhood - though on reflection I think most of these were slum-clearances of the 50s and 60s, not actual bomb craters. Manchester wasn't anywhere near as badly peppered as London, or other industrial centres like Coventry.
Mine's the duffle coat with the mittens sewn onto a string running between the sleeves...
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Friday 19th July 2013 15:24 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Was it colder then?
I recently bought the DVD of an early Ealing Comedy, 'The Magnet', nice story starring an 11 year old James Fox, and filmed on location around my home town, and over the water on the Liverpool bomb sites.
And yes, I remember our local sweetshop cutting out the coupons from my ration book.
Ah, nostalgia...
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Monday 22nd July 2013 20:42 GMT Tascam Holiday
Re: Was it colder then?
> I think pill-boxes were/are a rural thing - I only started to notice them when I moved out of the city, and there are plenty left, particularly at spots where roads cross rivers or canals. They were, after all, built to last.
I was playing in pill boxes, gun emplacements and acoustic mirrors while living in Kent in the 1980's. I think many of them are still there around Hythe, Folkestone and Dover. And there were some awesome (though somewhat dangerously dilapidated) martello towers from the Napoleonic era to be explored around there too.
Ah-ha, at least one of the acoustic mirrors is still there: http://goo.gl/maps/XFyMA
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Thursday 18th July 2013 11:21 GMT Ketlan
Brilliant!
Nostalgia - dont'cha love it.
Worth remembering that sugar was rationed until 1957 and farthings we're still very much legal tender (and amazingly, there were sweets that could be bought for a farthing then).
An interesting time and made a lot more interesting by such things as Quatermass and the Goon Show.
Showing my age? Rubbish. :-)
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Thursday 18th July 2013 12:43 GMT Tim Walker
How much the Doctor owes to the Professor...
It's been said plenty of times before, not only how Nigel Kneale coined the three basic plots of British TV sci-fi with the three Quatermass serials (in order: "we go to them", "they come to us" and "they've always been here"), but how much "Doctor Who" openly borrowed from the shows, even to the point of three whole "Who" stories from the Pertwee era, being specific tributes to them.
"The Ambassadors Of Death" (1970) is practically a rewrite of "Experiment" (British astronauts make contact and aliens send replicas of them back to Earth); "Spearhead From Space" (1970) does the same for "Quatermass II" ("meteorites" bring an alien intelligence to Earth, launching a covert invasion); and "Quatermass And The Pit"'s "alien present on Earth for centuries, seen as the Devil" plot was the basis for "The Daemons" (1971).
Not that Kneale was flattered (at least, not that he admitted) - he reputedly hated "Who" and criticised it scathingly as a silly children's show that plundered his work (you judge).
Also: worth mentioning that "Experiment" was remade by the BBC in 2005, and broadcast as a live performance, just as its ancestor had been. Ironically, David Tennant (Dr Briscoe) had just heard a few days before, that he'd landed the role of The Last Time Lord, so during transmission a fellow cast-member changed a line to greet him as "Doctor"!
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Thursday 18th July 2013 13:46 GMT M7S
Re: How much the Doctor owes to the Professor...
There's also a namecheck in "Remembrance of the Daleks" whilst some non-Terrans are giving it large to the local soldiery:
Rachel: 'I wish Bernard was here,'
Allison: 'British rocket group has its own problems,'
A nice touch.
I hope there will be mention of the (Sir) John Mills version sometime. I was lucky enough to see the full length version once.
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Thursday 18th July 2013 13:23 GMT Vulch
A pedantic ex-BBC VT engineer points out...
In 1953 the BBC was still five years away from having any kind of magnetic video recorder. VERA arrived in 1958 and used spools of wire. Most programmes were done live, and a film recording (Cine camera pointing at a monitor with a long persistence phosphor) would only be made if there was a chance of an overseas sale.
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Thursday 18th July 2013 13:34 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: A pedantic ex-BBC VT engineer points out...
But despite that many episodes of Quatermass still exist. Lots of them now reside at archive.org.
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