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Professor Quatermass (Reginald Tate) has just launched the first manned
rocket into orbit, & successfully, too, when things start to go
horribly wrong ... For several hours contact with the ship is lost
compeltely, long enough for the responsible politician Blaker (W.Thorp
Deverreux) to panic & try to make a mess of things. then contact is
reestablished, & the rocket comes down a mere 10 miles away from
Quatermass' headquarrters, in some residencial area in Wimbledon ... &
pretty much wrecks the house of one Mr Matthews (Van Boolen), but rather
surprisingly the rocket remains relatively unscathed. Soon, the area of
the crash is populated by the police, all sorts of scientists, reporters
& of course every oddball imaginable. Then Quatermass & his
assistants Judith Caroon (Isabel Dean), John Paterson (Hugh Kelly) &
Peter Marsh (Moray Watson) manage to open the thing ... & have to
realize 2 of the rockets hree crewmembers are gone ... gone without a
trace, & the 3rd one, Victor Caroon (Duncan Lamont) - husband of
Quatermass' assistant Judith - is in a severe state of shock ... With 2
people missing though, this also becomes a case for the police, & much
to the dismay of Quatermass, Scotland Yard inspector Lomax (Ian Colin)
conducts some investigatins of his own, but he can't even begin to
comprehend what Quatermass finds out ... that Victor Caroon is not just
Victor Caroon, but a sort of blend between Caroon & his 2 missing
colleagues, ... Which is unfortunately when the srviving footage from
the tv-series ends (only the first 2 of six episodes have survived,
unfortunately). According to my information the story continues with
Quatermass finding out that his spaceship has been attacked by some alien
lifeform that has already absorbed two of the spaceman & is now in the
process of absorbing the third one - Victor Caroon - as well, before
multiplying by sending spores out into the stratosphere to look for new
victims to absorb all over the world. But before the worst happens, the
creature/Victor can be hunted down & destroyed, & earth is saved
once more. But Quatermass, always the scientist, is already hell-bent on
building his next rocketship ... It's impossible to pass
judgement on a tv-show when two thirds of it are just not available for
review (& according to all acounts, the most exciting bits are in
these 2 thirds), so I will have to reduce myself to just recounting some
important facts about The Quatermss Experiment: Upon its screening
(recorded live, as then was common, the show was a phenomenal success, not
only because it dealt with a (back then) new & exciting topic but also
because it had a dramatic, filmlike structure that was, back in the early
1950's, unheard of in British television - where the shows were still
broadcast live, as mentioned, which of coure does not facilitate filmlike
film-making. So successful was the show that eventually a then
unimportant, minor B-film company, Hammer,
acquired the film-rights for it, & with the finished result, The
Quatermass Xperiment from 1955, they landed their first big success,
in Great Britain (where Quatermass by then was a household name) as well
as in Europe & America (where it was not), & from then on Hammer's
output in general would lean towards the faantastique (& for a time,
was immensely successul doing so).
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