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#REDIRECT Spoiler Little is revealed of Quatermass's early life during the course of the films and television series in which he appears. In The Quatermass Experiment, he at one point despairs that he should have stuck to his original career of "mapping the tropics."
By 1953 he is the head of the British Experimental Rocket Group, which has a programme to launch a manned rocket into space from a base in Woomera, South Australia. Although Quatermass succeeds in launching a three-man crew, the rocket vastly overshoots its planned orbit and returns to Earth much later than planned, crash-landing in London.
Only one of the crew, Victor Caroon, remains, and he has been taken over by an alien presence, forcing Quatermass to eventually destroy him and the other two crewmembers who have been absorbed into him. Despite this trauma, Quatermass continues with his space programme, and by Quatermass II ( 1955) is actively planning the establishment of moon bases. In this serial we see his daughter, Paula Quatermass, who works as an assistant at the Rocket Group, but there is no sign of a wife or other children.
At the beginning of the third serial, Quatermass and the Pit in 1958, Quatermass's funding is being cut back and the Rocket Group is being handed over to military control, much to his disgust. Control is to be handed over to Colonel Breen and Quatermass senses that he is being forced out: however, after the events of the serial, Breen is dead, Quatermass has helped to save the world, and London is in chaos.
It is not clear what happens to the Rocket Group immediately after this: the next time Quatermass is seen on screen ( Quatermass, 1979) he has long been retired, living in retreat in the Scottish HighlandsThe Scottish Highlands are considered to be the mountainous regions of Scotland north of the Highland Boundary Fault. The area is generally sparsely populated, with many mountain ranges dominating the region. Regional administrative centres include Invern. He has recently become the guardian of his granddaughter, Hettie, after her parents (presumably Paula Quatermass and her love interest John Dillon from Quatermass II, although this is never explicitly stated either on television or in the novelisation) were killed in road accident in GermanyThe Federal Republic of Germany ( German: Bundesrepublik Deutschland is one of the world's leading industrialized countries, located in the middle of the European Union. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark and the Baltic Sea, to the east. After Hettie runs away from home, he travels to London in search of her, and finds a dystopiaThe term dystopia is often used to describe a fictional society, usually existing in a future time period, in which the condition of life is extremely bad due to deprivation, oppression, or terror. In Post-Modern social criticism the same term is used ton world there. Quatermass and the scientist Joe Kapp establish that an alien force is causing the downturn of society and Quatermass forms a plan to force the intruder away by the detonation of the nuclear device: he presses the button to detonate it himself, and is killed in the blast as the planet is saved.
The character was originally created for the 1953 BBC Television serialThis article is about serials in fiction . You might want, instead: Serial communications for information about computer communication technologies that use a single stream of data; Serialism (music) or Cliffhanger ( plot device). Serial in fiction is a t The Quatermass Experiment. He was played by the experienced film and television actor Reginald Tate, and the character immediately became highly popular amongst a television audience who had not seen adult-orientated science-fiction on their screens before. The serial also benefitted from being transmitted only a short while after the televising of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, which had earned television its first mass audience and encouraged millions of households to purchase sets. The character of Quatermass quickly became one of television's first made-for-the-medium heroes and iconic characters.
Kneale was called up and happy to write a second serial, Quatermass II, in 1955. However, Tate died only shortly before production on the serial was due to begin, and he had to be replaced at short notice by John Robinson. Although the serial was again a success, neither Kneale nor director Rudolph Cartier were particularly happy with Robinson's performance, so for the third serial - Quatermass and the Pit ( 1958- 59) they replaced him with André Morell.
Quatermass and the Pit became an iconic piece of television science-fiction, pioneering many of the hidden alien legacy themes that would go on to inform such programmes as The X-Files many decades later. It was the final Quatermass serial to be broadcast by the BBC, although the character did return one final time over twenty years later in 1979, with a serial simply entitled Quatermass for ITV.
Here he was played by John Mills, and in this final, expensive serial Kneale brought the character's story to an end. An alternative TV movie version, titled The Quatermass Conclusion, was released to overseas markets.
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