Latest / A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast / Toby Hadoke talks Quatermass!

Transcript

Toby Hadoke talks Quatermass! · A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast

• 0:00
  Welcome back to a hamster with a blump, a knife, an extra slice,
• 0:06
  which I'm actually now calling only hams because I'm witty
• 0:10
  from. All right, I'm here today with
• 0:14
  wonderful Toby Haydock to say hello, Toby.
• 0:17
  Hello, how are you? Absolutely marvellous.
• 0:21
  I'm about. Glad, glad to be amongst the
• 0:22
  hams. I'm about to be educated about
• 0:26
  something that I only have scant knowledge of, but I believe
• 0:29
  you're a little bit of an expert in.
• 0:32
  I, I, well, I, I mean, I've, I would never claim to be such a
• 0:36
  thing, but I've, I've, I've dived in and I'm still very wet.
• 0:40
  So yeah, I, I, I would hope I'm writing a book about this, these
• 0:45
  particular slices of TV and film.
• 0:50
  So I I would hope that I will be able to bring some form form of
• 0:54
  illumination. I so just quickly explain the
• 0:58
  premise. Essentially, existing hamster
• 1:01
  contributors are coming on choosing ATV show that they
• 1:06
  either love or would like to talk about.
• 1:09
  Why don't you let everybody know what we're going to be talking
• 1:12
  about today? Well I've got my hamster and
• 1:15
  I've given it a blunt pen knife and it's been soaring very
• 1:18
  slowly through the closed door of a mysterious hull that has
• 1:24
  been dug up underneath London. And it is open to reveal the
• 1:29
  three Quatermass serials that were broadcast on the BBC in
• 1:35
  19531955 and 1958, slash 59 and then oddly resurrected on ITV
• 1:43
  all on film in 1979. So and the first 3 serials were
• 1:49
  all spun off into films as well. So quite a mass in terms of
• 1:53
  hours, there's not a massive amount, but in terms of
• 1:55
  influence and impact, they are, they are massive there.
• 2:01
  And you know, their their impact reaches through time and
• 2:04
  influences today, which is very appropriate considering the
• 2:07
  subject matter of a particularly the third serial.
• 2:11
  There was a live television film as well, wasn't there in the
• 2:15
  2000s? Well, yes, what they did was
• 2:17
  because unfortunately, Quetamas, the Quetamas experiment, which
• 2:21
  was broadcast live from Alexandra Palace in 1953.
• 2:26
  And, and the way that Tele recording was done in, in those
• 2:29
  days was basically the, the, the, the transmitted images were
• 2:32
  put on transmitted onto a, a big flat screen and a film camera
• 2:36
  was bunged in front of it in, in order to capture it.
• 2:41
  During the capturing of episode 2, a family landed on the camera
• 2:45
  lens and the quality was very poor.
• 2:48
  Anyway, if you think about, you know, just the air space between
• 2:52
  the camera lens and the, the flat screen and the lighting,
• 2:54
  you know, it's a very compromised image.
• 2:56
  And it was decided that the, the quality was no, not particularly
• 3:00
  good. So they didn't, they didn't
• 3:01
  record the, the last four episodes of the great Ms.
• 3:04
  experiment. So they will always be missing.
• 3:07
  And so in the early 2000's the BBC decided to do a, a sort of
• 3:15
  live remount. If you were, it's it's a very
• 3:18
  truncated version, but to, you know, sort of fill the gap in to
• 3:23
  give us a, a full version of the Crater Mass experiment story
• 3:26
  that we otherwise don't have access to, except for in the
• 3:28
  Hammer film version, which has has gone through the mangle
• 3:32
  somewhat in terms of storytelling, casting and
• 3:36
  various other things. Pretty impressive cast, didn't
• 3:39
  it? But it was David Tennant, or
• 3:41
  wasn't it, Mark? It was, it was, it was David
• 3:43
  Tennant, Mark Gatiss. The the the chief policeman is
• 3:46
  Adrian Dunbar before he was the chief policeman to beat all
• 3:49
  chief policeman in dear of armour.
• 3:52
  Jason Fleming, Isla Blair, Andrew Tiernan.
• 3:57
  Yeah, it's a fantastic cast. I mean, you know, Gate Mark
• 4:00
  Gatiss. You know, I suspect if you asked
• 4:03
  him to do anything to do with greater mass, he would say yes.
• 4:06
  And you know, David Tennant was was whirling around, you know,
• 4:09
  he was doing Big Finish. It was known he was a big sci-fi
• 4:12
  fan and he actually did it when he was doing it.
• 4:17
  It was it was the time that he was cast as Doctor Who.
• 4:19
  I think at that point he knew he was Doctor Who, but the world
• 4:23
  didn't. Whilst he was making it.
• 4:26
  Yeah. And I think there's a bit where
• 4:28
  because he's Doctor Gordon Briscoe, and I think there's a
• 4:30
  bit where I think it's Quaitamas greets him and says hello,
• 4:34
  Doctor. And I think he was supposed to
• 4:36
  say hello, Gordon, but Jason Fleming went, I'm going to say,
• 4:39
  I'm going to say hello, Doctor, because this is me knowing that
• 4:42
  you're, you know, you're Doctor Who now.
• 4:45
  So this is this is the sort of unofficial television heralding
• 4:48
  of of David Tennant's Doctor Who.
• 4:51
  And because we're we're not going to cover the this 2005
• 4:54
  film in in any great depth. Did they manage to get through
• 4:57
  this with any Great without any? Fluffs or goofs No, there was a
• 5:03
  there was A and when they repeated it and released it on
• 5:06
  DVD, they, they, they they had AI think they must have filmed
• 5:10
  the afternoon version. You know, the run through
• 5:12
  because the the the mistakes were were not repeated as it
• 5:19
  were. They're they're not on the DVD.
• 5:21
  But no, there was a there was a scene where there's a scene in
• 5:23
  the chemists where somebody left the chemists and there's a shot
• 5:28
  of crater mass played by Jason Fleming and Lomax, played by
• 5:33
  Adrian Dunbar. And there's this big crash where
• 5:36
  clearly something has, you know, hit, hit the floor.
• 5:38
  A load of, you know, glassware from the chemists is smashed on
• 5:43
  the floor. And they just sort of look at
• 5:44
  each other and, and, and there's a scene where Adrian Bauer,
• 5:49
  playing Full of Love, starts doing a speech where he's
• 5:55
  supposed to refer to either Patterson or Quaita Mass.
• 5:58
  And he says the other person's name and it totally throws him.
• 6:02
  And, and he kind of stutters and goes white as a sheet and, and
• 6:07
  then recovers and, and carries on.
• 6:09
  But that, yeah. But that, that was I, I think, I
• 6:14
  think there was a thing in the actor's contracts.
• 6:16
  I have interviewed the producer, director and I've interviewed
• 6:19
  Jason Fleming for the book and, and Mark and David.
• 6:23
  So, so one of them, one of them told me that, you know, I think
• 6:28
  it was in, it was in the contracts that any, any mistakes
• 6:31
  made by the actors in the live broadcast would not be then
• 6:36
  preserved and distributed should there be any, you know, further
• 6:40
  distribution of, of, of the piece.
• 6:43
  So the blushes. The blushes were spared
• 6:46
  subsequently, but I remember live television.
• 6:52
  Is is an art that's lost now, isn't it?
• 6:55
  Well, I mean, the interesting thing is you would think that
• 6:57
  Nigel Neil, who created Quasi Mass, who was still alive when
• 7:00
  they did it, would be thrilled at the idea.
• 7:04
  And I think they thought this. They thought they said, we're
• 7:06
  going to do this and we're going to do it like you did it.
• 7:09
  Amazing. A lot of people look back to
• 7:11
  those days and go, well, the thing about live television was
• 7:13
  you had an immediacy of performance and, you know, that
• 7:15
  gave the actors the energy. And Neil himself kind of said
• 7:17
  that in some interviews. But he just went, he just went,
• 7:21
  no, we did it live because we had to.
• 7:23
  I think you're being idiots. So I think what they thought
• 7:27
  would be something that he would go, oh, how marvelous you're
• 7:29
  doing it like we did. He he he thought, what what a
• 7:33
  silly enterprise. If you don't need to do it live,
• 7:35
  you shouldn't. And it is a compromised
• 7:37
  production in that way. And some of the production
• 7:39
  design, you know, Lomax's office, which is supposed to be
• 7:43
  in Scotland Yard or whatever is a, is, is clearly the boiler
• 7:46
  room of the, the, the sort of military industrial complex that
• 7:49
  they've got as, as the unit base or whatever, you know, where
• 7:53
  they've just put a table next to.
• 7:54
  Yeah, as I say, next to a boiler.
• 7:57
  But I, I, I, it was a worthwhile enterprise.
• 8:00
  Great cast, interesting telling of the story and I'm glad it
• 8:06
  exists. But I'd I'd love to see, I'd
• 8:10
  love to see the originals. I never will.
• 8:14
  No. Well, should we head right back
• 8:16
  to the start then and talk about the Christmas experiments?
• 8:21
  I mean, first of all, I want to ask you, when did you first come
• 8:25
  in touch with quite a Mass? Like what did you first watch?
• 8:29
  Well, I did it a bit backwards, so I was given the VHS, edited,
• 8:33
  truncated. I mean they, you know, they
• 8:35
  locked, they locked off the beginnings and ends of episodes.
• 8:37
  But they did also, with the help of Nigel Neil and Rudolf
• 8:40
  Cartier, chop out very little sequences, actually very
• 8:45
  sympathetically of Quota Mass in the pit, which I'd heard of.
• 8:51
  You know, I saw somebody tweet the other day Quota Mass was
• 8:54
  always spoken of in very hallowed and you know, hallow
• 8:58
  tones. Or maybe it was actually his
• 8:59
  response to your question on Twitter.
• 9:02
  Hallow tones in our house by non science fiction people.
• 9:04
  And it absolutely was with ours as well.
• 9:06
  You know, I was it was always a bit of a joke that I was the
• 9:08
  Doctor Who kid, but my elder brothers had liked doctor as
• 9:10
  well. And we had target books and
• 9:12
  stuff. But Quatamas was spoken about
• 9:15
  with reverence and we had an A-Z of monsters and it had cue for
• 9:18
  Quatamas and it said, you know, this is not a monster, but this
• 9:21
  is a scientist. And it had a picture of the
• 9:23
  Martians from Quatamas and the Pit, which looked amazing.
• 9:26
  And they did look like they were something from a horror film
• 9:28
  rather than science fiction because they're in the sort of
• 9:30
  cobwebby environment that they're in.
• 9:34
  And they're supposed to be ghoulish, but we'll get to that.
• 9:37
  But, but it was the sort of thing where, you know, your mum
• 9:40
  went, Oh yeah, I remember Christmas.
• 9:42
  You know, your mum would go, I don't understand any of this
• 9:44
  science pictures stuff. You know, it was, it was it was
• 9:47
  seen as a cut above it was seen as and it was it would
• 9:50
  occasionally see it listed as the late night film, which I
• 9:53
  would never have been able to stay up and see.
• 9:55
  But it was like, oh, quite a mass.
• 9:56
  You know, it's a great name. So it was it was seen as
• 9:59
  separate from my sort of Doctor Who obsession or whatever it was
• 10:02
  kind of no, no, this is, you know, this is the stuff that was
• 10:05
  on before you were born. And it was, you know, this is
• 10:08
  the real deal. So when Christmas in the Pit
• 10:11
  came out on on VHSI was given it by a friend and I said, what's
• 10:15
  it like? And he said, oh, it's yeah, it's
• 10:16
  really good. And I started watching it and I
• 10:18
  was slightly disappointed because a lot of the actors
• 10:21
  early on hadn't been in Doctor Who.
• 10:23
  And it was quite shocking to me how only, you know, a handful of
• 10:27
  years before this crazy mass of the pitch.
• 10:28
  So what, four or five years before Doctor Who?
• 10:31
  And it's not not everybody in the cast is somebody from Doctor
• 10:33
  Who. I assume there'd be so few
• 10:35
  actors that part of that would be the fun.
• 10:38
  But but gradually I was I was sort of going 0.
• 10:41
  This is actually hang on, this is this is really good.
• 10:43
  And I was waiting for it to be a bit clunky or for it to be a bit
• 10:46
  slow because it it's pre Doctor Who as well.
• 10:49
  So I thought production wise I might have to be extremely
• 10:52
  forgiving of it. And I was astonished at how good
• 10:56
  it was. And then it started being a bit
• 10:59
  spooky and then it started being a bit clever.
• 11:02
  And then the icing on the cake and I'd, I'd heard talk of the
• 11:05
  gravel moving as, as something that was a, you know, a thing
• 11:11
  that had happened had been a television event.
• 11:13
  And my mum walked in when I was watching this thing and she
• 11:17
  went, Oh God, I remember this, this, this is where the gravel
• 11:20
  starts to move. And I was like, now you're
• 11:22
  thinking of doom watch or something.
• 11:23
  There's no way this is. And then the guy falls to the
• 11:27
  ground and the gravel starts to move.
• 11:30
  And I'm like, if my mum and, and I mean amazing that she should
• 11:34
  walk in at that moment. But if my mum, who's not a
• 11:37
  science fiction aficionado or particularly TV literate, to be
• 11:40
  honest, has walked in and gone, I remember this, this is a, and
• 11:46
  she's right. This is a big deal.
• 11:49
  And I, I don't think I'd realize that the gravel moving was a,
• 11:52
  quite a mass thing either. Or if I had, I'd forgotten.
• 11:54
  But it it suddenly all started to sort of coalesce.
• 11:57
  I I had been had you know the sequence in quota mass two.
• 12:02
  I messaged you about it where the, the blood comes up the pipe
• 12:08
  and the pulp. I'd heard that spoken about like
• 12:11
  in hush tones like this horrific off screen death.
• 12:16
  And I was like, oh, in 50s, how bad can this be?
• 12:18
  Well, I watched that this week for the first time and it was
• 12:21
  absolutely chilling. Yeah, and I think that is the
• 12:25
  other Quota Mouse moment. I remember an older friend of
• 12:28
  ours who was, who used to come and visit and do odd jumps
• 12:31
  around the house and stuff like that.
• 12:32
  And, and, and I remember him recalling, yeah, the the human
• 12:36
  pulp in the pipe. And that was that was another
• 12:38
  thing that seems to have seared itself in the in the sort of
• 12:41
  national consciousness. And, and I and I loved Quota
• 12:45
  Mouse and the pit and I was, I was astonished at how clever it
• 12:48
  was and how sort of almost postmodern it was in the, in
• 12:53
  the, it was about little green men from Mars, but rejected them
• 12:56
  within the narrative, you know, and so it, it, it, it, it was
• 13:00
  already rejecting the cliches and was extremely clever and
• 13:06
  also had an undertone of, you know, anti racism and, you know,
• 13:11
  thoughtful social comment. And I thought how this is this
• 13:14
  is 1958. This is I'm I'm surprised they
• 13:16
  can get the cameras through the the indoors.
• 13:20
  And yet you've got a script that is so dense in ideas, but not
• 13:25
  only ideas of storytelling and again, make it relevant to the
• 13:28
  times in which it is being put on, but also that is so seeing
• 13:34
  as Nigel Neil has always been so grumpy about sci-fi in in
• 13:37
  interviews I've read and stuff like that.
• 13:39
  That is so sci-fi literate that is doing stuff with the the, the
• 13:44
  genre that is so imaginative. Before people were starting to
• 13:48
  sort of get clever with it. They were just establishing the
• 13:51
  rules really. And certainly in terms of TV
• 13:53
  science fiction, but also that then had this other brilliant
• 13:57
  thing of, of, of taking all of the elements of horror that work
• 14:04
  and thinking, well, I'll have them as well.
• 14:06
  He's basically cherry picked all the best bits of these genres,
• 14:09
  fused them together in something that's fiercely intelligent.
• 14:12
  And of course, I hadn't realized at this time because I didn't
• 14:15
  really know anything about 50s television and I'd only really
• 14:18
  watched Doctor Who. And, you know, and a lot of old
• 14:22
  stuff that I'd watched had been disappointing because I'd
• 14:24
  imagined amazing stuff. And it'd been let down by
• 14:26
  production and pace and all the other things that let us down
• 14:29
  when we watched things that we expect to be amazing because
• 14:32
  they're old. And it's turned out to be a bit
• 14:34
  clunky. And I hadn't realized that, you
• 14:35
  know, they are premier for the time television productions.
• 14:39
  Rudolf Cartier, who was the producer director, was the the
• 14:41
  most esteemed director really working at the BBC at that time.
• 14:45
  And he spent money and he got more money.
• 14:48
  And so, you know, they look amazing.
• 14:51
  The sheer scale, the amount of extras, the amount of characters
• 14:57
  that that the ambition of the set pieces is, you know, it puts
• 15:01
  a lot of doctor and I think Doctor Who is very well made for
• 15:04
  its time. But you know, it, it's this is
• 15:07
  this is this is not, you know, something with with half of you
• 15:12
  to a children's audience. This is mainstream drama and and
• 15:17
  sort of approached and produced in that way.
• 15:19
  So I was, I was astonished at how sort of good it was
• 15:23
  production wise as well. Watching Quota Mass Le Pitt
• 15:26
  today for the first time, not long before this call actually.
• 15:31
  I watched the last episode. The two things that really stood
• 15:35
  out to me. One was how stylish it was, like
• 15:38
  how modern it felt. And the second thing, especially
• 15:42
  compared to those first couple of years of Doctor Who, which
• 15:45
  can feel very sort of clunky somehow, somehow Doctor Who
• 15:48
  feels like it's from the 50s. I thought Crater Mass and the
• 15:51
  Pit felt like it was from about two decades in the future.
• 15:55
  But the other thing as well was the pace of it.
• 15:57
  I thought it moved along a hell of a lick and and the amount of
• 16:01
  content in each half an hour episode was really impressive.
• 16:07
  Yeah, it's astonishing actually that that that VHS as well has
• 16:13
  kind of slightly spoilt the full version for me because I, I
• 16:17
  still think the full version is absolutely superb.
• 16:21
  But because it was kind of cut down very sympathetically and
• 16:23
  just trim the ends of scenes or got rid of a few character
• 16:26
  moments that are nice because Neil's a good writer and the
• 16:28
  actors are all nice, but it just tightens it up a little bit.
• 16:32
  So now when I watch the full version, it does slightly lag in
• 16:35
  those places that I'm used to being locked out.
• 16:39
  And, and so, so when I was introduced to it, not only was I
• 16:41
  introduced to this good, very lean, even at full length and
• 16:45
  very pacey, even at full length. I, I was treated to a kind of
• 16:48
  streamlined version of it, which was in in many ways.
• 16:52
  And I, and I do think I mean, I, you know, I don't want and I
• 16:54
  would never, I didn't even buy the doctor with VHS is when they
• 16:57
  had the the opening and closing credits chopped off.
• 17:00
  Those are the ones I watched when I was younger.
• 17:02
  Now when I watch the the DVDs and the Blu rays, I'm like,
• 17:05
  well, what's this? These extra scenes of earnings
• 17:08
  running. What you know what, what you're
• 17:11
  used to. But, but that, but that actual
• 17:14
  VHS version is a really good introduction to it because it's
• 17:17
  very, very sympathetically done. And, and so I what I mean, when
• 17:22
  I, when I was a kid, I watched it over, I, I went through
• 17:25
  periods where I watched it every day and I wrote my own version
• 17:29
  of it. You know, I was going to make a
• 17:30
  version of it. I was always wanting things to
• 17:32
  make and do and be in. And so I, yeah, I typed up a
• 17:35
  whole script of it to do you do this line by line.
• 17:40
  Quite immersing a bit. Yeah.
• 17:42
  I mean, I'd adapted it so that it could be, it could be shot
• 17:46
  with the resources that I thought I had available.
• 17:52
  But it was, yeah, it was still pretty.
• 17:53
  It was still epic. And.
• 17:55
  And I also started writing to some of the actors and people
• 18:00
  involved. And the first person I wrote to
• 18:03
  was Richard Shaw, who plays Sladden, the drill operator who
• 18:06
  gives an absolutely magnificent performance.
• 18:08
  He's best known to listeners of this podcast for his Doctor Who
• 18:11
  appearances, I'm sure, where he is Low boss in the Space Museum
• 18:14
  and Cross in Frontier in space. And he's got a bucket on his
• 18:18
  head in Underworld because such of the vicissitudes of the
• 18:21
  acting profession, but he's magnificent in it.
• 18:24
  And I dropped him a line and he wrote me a lovely letter back.
• 18:26
  And that got me writing to actors, which is something I do
• 18:30
  even to this day. So God bless Richard Shaw.
• 18:34
  And so I wrote to quite a few actors, but only the ones that I
• 18:38
  saw pop up in things because I, I didn't realise at the time
• 18:42
  there would have been ways of getting in touch with probably a
• 18:44
  lot more of the cast than I did. But actually for a, for a, what
• 18:47
  was I for a 15 year old boy, I didn't do badly.
• 18:50
  I got about in the end, I got about 30 or 40 letters from
• 18:54
  people who made who made the crazy mass serials in the 50s in
• 18:58
  the late 80s, early 90s. So although I think oh why
• 19:01
  didn't I chance my arm with XY and ZI still did OK.
• 19:06
  I'm assuming they knew they were onto a good thing.
• 19:08
  We've played to Matt because I was having a good look at the
• 19:10
  ratings of all three serials, and I know that the first one,
• 19:14
  it was sort of hovering around 3:00 to 5:00.
• 19:16
  Is that just because there were less TV sets then?
• 19:20
  Yeah, there were, yeah. And then the second one sort of
• 19:23
  started well and climbed, and then the quota mass and the pier
• 19:28
  started somewhere around 7 million and ended with like 11
• 19:31
  or something like that. So it shot up.
• 19:33
  And the one thing that really stood out to me watching Quota
• 19:37
  Mass 2 followed by Quota Mass and The Pier was how much TV was
• 19:42
  coming along in a decade already.
• 19:45
  Like how much it was advancing. Well, yes, This is why that's,
• 19:48
  this is the shame of doing it backwards because you said you
• 19:50
  haven't, you haven't seen the first of the crater mass
• 19:53
  experiment. And I mean it.
• 19:57
  It's a stark illustration of how quickly television competence,
• 20:03
  technology understanding changes in a very short space and time.
• 20:09
  The 1st 2 episodes of the crater mass experiment are quite tough.
• 20:13
  They're they're shot on massive Emitron.
• 20:16
  Clunky cameras with a terrible image and captured in that way
• 20:20
  that I described earlier. They're really ambitious, but a
• 20:24
  lot of the scenes are very clunky.
• 20:28
  There's barely any filming. There's not in those first two
• 20:31
  episodes, but they barely did any for the later episodes
• 20:34
  either. You know, it's pretty much
• 20:37
  entirely live, I think with, you know, with three cameras in
• 20:40
  those hot Alexandra Palace studios and and any sequences
• 20:45
  with any sort of quick movement are are really clunky or hard to
• 20:50
  do come quota Mass 2, they're filming on location.
• 20:54
  It's still half live, but they're that, you know, they've
• 20:57
  got extended location sequences. That first episode of Quota Mass
• 21:01
  2 that surprised me how much location where there was in that
• 21:04
  first episode. Amazing, isn't they really they
• 21:06
  they very much yes. The the the money's clearly
• 21:10
  spent early on as anybody who's got to the end of grace Mass
• 21:12
  too, we'll discover and then crater mass in the pit.
• 21:16
  They you know, the the the it's a synthesis of, you know, some
• 21:19
  some extremely good filming. Some of it's on location but
• 21:22
  most of it's at most of it's at Ealing in the in the tank for
• 21:27
  the pit itself. But also all the live studio
• 21:30
  stuff is extremely well done. Well, that was lit.
• 21:33
  The sort of the sort of that studio, the the, you know, the
• 21:36
  pit studio, the way that was lit and shot.
• 21:39
  I kept saying is that location or is that studio?
• 21:42
  I know it's amazing. At times I really couldn't tell.
• 21:46
  It's amazing, isn't it? Yeah, it's, it's terrifically
• 21:48
  done. And that.
• 21:50
  Yeah. And they flip between the two
• 21:52
  and and and then they, I mean, they have very good set
• 21:54
  designers. The set designer of Crazy Mass 2
• 21:56
  was Steven Taylor, who was hugely highly regarded set
• 22:01
  designer and then Clifford Hats who designed Pitt became the
• 22:05
  head of design group and an OBE and all sorts of things.
• 22:09
  He was a he was an extremely talented designer and, and, and
• 22:13
  the film cameraman Shelda Yeager on greater Mass 2 and a a
• 22:16
  Englander who did a lot of Doctor Who's on greater Mass and
• 22:19
  the Pitts. So, you know, they were, they
• 22:21
  were working with the premier talents available to them and
• 22:24
  they had money and, and Nigel Neil, I mean, it must have been
• 22:29
  just a really fertile creative time.
• 22:32
  Neil and Cartier collaborated very well together.
• 22:35
  I mean, Neil pops up in Cuetamas in the bit about 7 times.
• 22:39
  You can spot him. I spot him somewhere else every
• 22:41
  time I watch it. He's.
• 22:43
  Been doing the voice overs in Cuetamas too.
• 22:49
  He does and he does one of the episodes of Pitt because the
• 22:52
  guy, the other guy's on holiday, I think.
• 22:54
  And then in two he has a week off and somebody else.
• 22:56
  But yes, he yeah, he does that his is that because because he's
• 22:59
  the same voice as the telescreen in 1984 and he has that slightly
• 23:03
  sort of droopy Manx lilt that he has.
• 23:07
  So yes, that is that is Nigel Neil doing doing the the recap,
• 23:10
  the filmed recap. Can I make a small confession?
• 23:13
  I think I actually prefer, you know, nowadays we have
• 23:16
  previously on Doctor Who, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, whatever,
• 23:19
  and we get a montage of nips in quick succession.
• 23:23
  I think I prefer this, this narrated version, you know.
• 23:26
  So that's lovely sort of Saturday morning serial feel
• 23:30
  about it, doesn't it? Yes, yes, the discovery of
• 23:33
  Fossil 8 bones in Knightsbridge. Yes, it's investigated by
• 23:39
  Professor Quiddimas and his new colleague Colonel Breen.
• 23:42
  I mean, I could do some of them word for word.
• 23:43
  I. Feel like we're casting the
• 23:44
  audio version of Quasmath right now, you know?
• 23:49
  I, I and actually there's a, there's a key point to that
• 23:52
  because that was an innovation of Rudolf Cartier.
• 23:56
  He wanted to do these and he had to really lobby the BBC in order
• 24:01
  to get them to do the film recordings in as good quality as
• 24:05
  possible so that when he came to edit those sequences together,
• 24:10
  they weren't 3rd or 4th generation.
• 24:12
  And Creative Mass 2 looks like it's been etched in dog shit,
• 24:16
  unfortunately, because it's, it's, it's such a bad, it's,
• 24:20
  it's, it's so bad technically. And Cartier wasn't happy about
• 24:23
  that. But I tried to, I tried to head
• 24:26
  that off at the pass and didn't succeed.
• 24:29
  So then when we come to Pitt, he's obviously, you know, not,
• 24:34
  not over the moon, but because Quasi Mas 2 was also made to be
• 24:37
  repeated. It was shown on the Saturday, I
• 24:40
  think, and then shown on the the Monday afterwards.
• 24:42
  It was, you know, shown three days afterwards.
• 24:45
  So it was made to be repeated. So he wanted the repeats to be
• 24:48
  as good quality as possible. And in fact, the versions that
• 24:53
  we have aren't the versions that went out first because, yeah,
• 24:59
  because although they went out live, if there was a scene where
• 25:03
  there was a mistake, they would stay behind at the end of the
• 25:06
  recording and do that scene again and then drop that scene
• 25:11
  in for the repeat. So there is so a bit like
• 25:15
  actually what we were saying about the the, the 2000, you
• 25:18
  know, the early 2000 version. So, So what viewers saw on the
• 25:23
  1st broadcast of Quasi Mass 2, they saw some scenes that we
• 25:27
  will, we will not see. I mean, it's the same scene, but
• 25:32
  we've got a better version of that scene because it was
• 25:34
  rescued. So there will have been fluffs
• 25:36
  or mistakes that that we don't know how bad they were, but we
• 25:40
  know which actors stay bad. And in fact, I've, I won't go
• 25:44
  into them, but I found a really nerky thing about a single shot
• 25:48
  that is different on one of the recaps than it was on than it is
• 25:53
  in the episode. And the effort that they've gone
• 25:56
  to to reshoot. And I've looked at which actors
• 25:58
  stay behind and everything and worked out that there's one shot
• 26:02
  that is different on the recap than it was on the episode that
• 26:05
  was broadcast in order that Cartier had a better version of
• 26:08
  that shot that he couldn't replace in the episode.
• 26:12
  But he puts in to the recap. So he's got his eye on, you
• 26:15
  know, every single shot of even of the kind of previously on.
• 26:19
  But that means that when he gets to pit, which was repeated as an
• 26:23
  omnibus in in 1960, he insists on the film being put back in
• 26:32
  rather than being a generation down.
• 26:34
  And because of that, we've got the negatives.
• 26:36
  It's pale, isn't it? Because.
• 26:38
  Of that the the the Blu-ray looks magnificent, but that was
• 26:42
  because Cartier was shit hot on the technical side of things and
• 26:48
  you know, and anticipated that the loss of a couple of
• 26:51
  generations would just make his shots not look as good when
• 26:54
  people weren't really giving a monkeys about that sort of
• 26:57
  thing. Particularly, you know what,
• 27:00
  what is the repeat of my work going to look like?
• 27:03
  What is the previously on montage going to look like if it
• 27:06
  loses a generation or two? But he was on that.
• 27:10
  You know this. Is as good as it could be this.
• 27:11
  Is the level of detail, yeah, they're going into.
• 27:15
  Another thing as well that really stood out to me between
• 27:18
  Two and Pitt was like the style of the acting in Two.
• 27:23
  There's an awful lot of straight to camera, which I noticed had
• 27:27
  completely gone come the time of Pitt, and there was a sort of a
• 27:30
  level of naturalism in the acting.
• 27:32
  I don't, I don't know. Pitt.
• 27:36
  No. Pitt does feel a bit more
• 27:37
  modern. I, I funnily enough, I think 2
• 27:44
  has a slight blip with the, the casting.
• 27:46
  I don't think the central trio are, are anything like as strong
• 27:50
  as the central trios in, in, in the 1st and the and the 3rd.
• 27:54
  And there's various compromises that have gone on there.
• 28:00
  And, and two seems to have been an unhappy experience for
• 28:05
  everybody. And, and so when I first got it
• 28:09
  sometime later, I was expecting it to be a bit of a dog.
• 28:12
  And I was shocked at how much I really enjoyed it, particularly
• 28:16
  the first, the first 4 episodes where it's, you know, you know,
• 28:21
  anticipates The X-Files in, it's in, it's kind of paranoid
• 28:25
  everything's going on and. Undergoing in the government and
• 28:28
  there's. Some classic sci-fi stuff in
• 28:31
  there that you know, again, ahead of it's time before it's
• 28:34
  time laying those foundations. And I think I think 2 is great,
• 28:37
  but it does it, it it yeah, it, it, it, it, it does have some
• 28:43
  flaws in some key areas. It's hard to judge experiment,
• 28:46
  but I think the acting generally seems to be very good.
• 28:51
  And, and again, it seems to be made-up of sort of younger sort
• 28:57
  of televisiony type actors in which which seems, which, which
• 29:03
  makes it quite fresh, even though it's very early days in,
• 29:06
  in, in 53. And Reginald Tate, who plays
• 29:08
  creative mass in in the creative mass experiment was, was, you
• 29:11
  know, one of the early actors to do, to do very, very well on, on
• 29:14
  television. He was signed up for six,
• 29:18
  wasn't. He, he was signed up for two.
• 29:20
  Well, yeah, He, he, he died a month, six weeks before
• 29:25
  production started. But he'd agreed to do it.
• 29:28
  Yes. There is a myth, therefore, and
• 29:31
  I, I have to stop contributing to Facebook pages and forums
• 29:34
  where people say with great confidence, yes.
• 29:36
  And of course, John Robinson doesn't know his lines because
• 29:38
  he was cast at the last minute. He was cast in time to do the
• 29:41
  filming, which was a month before they went into studio for
• 29:44
  episode 1. This is a guy who did Rep
• 29:46
  theatre. If he's two and two together to
• 29:50
  make a fanciful 5, there are, you know, there's unsureness of
• 29:53
  lines all over the place, and not just from John Robinson
• 29:55
  because that's what television was like at that time.
• 29:58
  But this kind of we've, we've made a story of these bits of
• 30:02
  information that we've, we've picked up to, to, to come to a
• 30:06
  conclusion that isn't actually factually, in fact, I think, and
• 30:10
  I haven't got my bits of paper with me.
• 30:11
  The John Robinson is actually contracted to appear in quota
• 30:15
  Mass 2 earlier than Reginald tape was contracted to appear in
• 30:19
  the quota mass experiment. So you know, there's yeah.
• 30:22
  And certainly tape was never contracted for quota mass
• 30:26
  experiment. So it's not like he was doing it
• 30:28
  and Robinson came in at the last minute at all.
• 30:32
  He he died before production started.
• 30:35
  I did. Think he was in crazy mass too.
• 30:38
  He started off a little bit uncertain.
• 30:40
  He seemed a bit uncertain in that first episode, but as it
• 30:44
  went along I thought he gained a lot of confidence.
• 30:46
  I thought he was fine in the role.
• 30:48
  I, I always say it feels like he's playing crazy mass with
• 30:51
  indigestion. I think, well, he always looks
• 30:57
  like he's, he's got a, he's, he's got a slightly rotten tummy
• 31:02
  and he and he's a bit and he's, and he's slightly distracted by
• 31:06
  some sort of physical ailment. Ask him.
• 31:09
  Quite sinister things going on, you know.
• 31:11
  I, I actually, I actually like him.
• 31:13
  I think he has a dourness about him that that suits the subject
• 31:16
  matter. He wasn't particularly happy
• 31:20
  doing it. I know that, but also from
• 31:24
  actors that I spoke to was that he himself was quite a quite a
• 31:29
  melancholic fellow. But certainly Nigel, Nigel Neal
• 31:33
  didn't seem to like what he was doing.
• 31:35
  And my, my understanding is that if Nigel Neal didn't like what
• 31:38
  you're doing, you kind of knew about it and, and it, and, and
• 31:44
  he didn't enjoy the, the technical nature of the lines.
• 31:47
  Again, if you're, if you're a classical theatre actor and
• 31:49
  you're suddenly having to talk about gimbal systems and nuclear
• 31:52
  motors and stuff in, in, you know, in a genre that is being
• 31:55
  invented before your very eyes, I think it, it was quite a big
• 31:58
  ask. I, yeah, I, I do like him, but I
• 32:01
  cannot imagine him doing quite a mass in the pit.
• 32:05
  I cannot imagine him having the the the chops to pull off those
• 32:10
  some of those scenes that Andre Morrell pulls off.
• 32:12
  I mean, it is obviously we're very used to with Doctor Who,
• 32:15
  the, you know, change of the lead man.
• 32:17
  So we're very used to seeing different actors in the same
• 32:20
  role. But that's, you know,
• 32:21
  essentially it's supposed to be the same guy, isn't it, in all
• 32:24
  three so. Yeah, yeah.
• 32:26
  I mean, quite a mass on television is never played by
• 32:28
  the same person, which is, which is extraordinary.
• 32:32
  It's great that, you know, we always say about Doctor Who, oh,
• 32:34
  aren't they brilliant and inventive?
• 32:35
  They they invented a way of changing the lead man so that
• 32:38
  this society and greater mass just goes oh, well, we'll just
• 32:42
  have a different bloke. No, nobody even goes.
• 32:45
  Have have you have you been in an accident or you, you look
• 32:48
  different? Have you had a haircut?
• 32:50
  They just and they do it with them.
• 32:52
  They do it with the character of full of love as well.
• 32:55
  Who's in in the greater mass Experiment played by Paul
• 32:58
  Whitson Jones, but in greater mass of the Pit, played by Brian
• 33:01
  Wirth. And but interestingly, they did,
• 33:04
  they did sign Paul Whitson Jones up to be in quasi mass and the
• 33:09
  pit. And then there was what there's
• 33:10
  one filming date that clashes with what he was already doing.
• 33:14
  And and so he drops off and and Brian worth does it instead.
• 33:17
  So that would have been really weird to have gone well.
• 33:19
  We, you know, we don't, you know, the thing about quasi mass
• 33:22
  is there are there aren't any characters that that bleed
• 33:25
  through from 1:00 from 1 serial to another apart from crater
• 33:29
  mass and then this guy full of love.
• 33:32
  But crater mass is always played by somebody different, full of
• 33:34
  love is played by the same person.
• 33:36
  That would have been really odd, especially when also there were
• 33:39
  other actors who appear in two or three of them playing
• 33:43
  different characters. So, so you you get some actors
• 33:47
  who are in more than one crater mass playing different
• 33:50
  characters and then you have the constant character who's always
• 33:54
  played by different actors. So, but of course there was two
• 33:57
  or three years in between each one.
• 33:59
  So the audience weren't going to pick up on that.
• 34:01
  And nobody thought anybody would watch them all together or
• 34:04
  catalogue them or collate them or compare them, you know?
• 34:09
  Well, I'm going to ask you to boil this down very simply for
• 34:11
  people listening, because I'm going to assume there are some
• 34:13
  people out there that haven't dipped their toes into this
• 34:17
  because it is such vintage TV. Yeah.
• 34:22
  So for the benefit of those people, would you just explain
• 34:26
  what Bernard Quatermass is all about, the British Rocket Group?
• 34:29
  Like what is the premise of this series of adventures?
• 34:34
  Professor Bernard Quatermass is the head of the British
• 34:36
  Experimental Rocket Group and in the very first serial, The
• 34:40
  Quatermass Experiment, he has sent the first manned rocket
• 34:43
  into space. And he goes on to have a further
• 34:47
  2 adventures. And basically in each of them he
• 34:49
  tells one of the three sort of template science fiction stories
• 34:53
  that we have available to you on most of the stuff that we love.
• 34:57
  So in the first one the idea is a rocket ship, as they call it
• 35:04
  rather delightfully. A rocket ship goes into space to
• 35:07
  do a sort of parabola of the earth with three men inside,
• 35:11
  Charles Greene, Ludwig Reichenheim and Victor Caroon
• 35:15
  and it and they lose contact with the ship, the ship, and
• 35:20
  then they regain contact with the ship and bring it into land
• 35:23
  and it crashes into London. And everyone thinks, oh, the
• 35:25
  blitzer started again. Because the thing about Cueto
• 35:27
  Mass is it's very tied in with the time that it is made.
• 35:30
  And, and, and you know, there's a writer here wanting to reflect
• 35:34
  what is going on. So rockets falling from the sky
• 35:36
  onto London and taking out half of a building.
• 35:39
  You know, that that is very resonant with the audience at
• 35:41
  the time. What Neil does brilliantly is he
• 35:44
  makes it an old lady's building and there's this cute old lady
• 35:47
  with her cat going. Oh my.
• 35:48
  Henry's been scared by whatever this is.
• 35:50
  And so there's always these sort of comedy characters in, as in
• 35:53
  as well, he likes old. Ladies and these things, doesn't
• 35:56
  he are? There he does like.
• 35:58
  He does like old ladies, but it's but, but that's partially
• 36:01
  from the, the, the Isle of Man where he's from, where a lot of
• 36:05
  local stories were passed on by gossipy people over over gates
• 36:08
  and over fences. So there's a lot of that sort of
• 36:11
  oral tradition of storytelling from, you know, eccentric older
• 36:15
  people that is part of his sort of DNA.
• 36:18
  And the rocket comes back. It hasn't been opened on its
• 36:23
  journey into space. They open it up and there's only
• 36:27
  one astronaut left. The other two astronaut suits
• 36:30
  are in there still linked, so they haven't got out of them.
• 36:34
  What has happened to the astronauts and that the
• 36:38
  astronaut that has come back is is is is is damaged is doesn't
• 36:44
  say much, is a shadow of his former self and seems to have
• 36:48
  undergone some sort of changes. And then, you know, when they
• 36:52
  start talking to him to try and get stuff out of him, he,
• 36:55
  there's a brilliant scene where he starts talking in German.
• 36:58
  But Viktor Karoon doesn't speak German.
• 37:00
  No, but one of his, one of his cohort, one of his Co astronauts
• 37:06
  was German. And the fingerprints they take
• 37:09
  from him have characteristics of the other two men.
• 37:11
  And what they realize is that maybe the three men did come
• 37:16
  back and and and it and it ends with a climax where this alien
• 37:23
  manifestation takes place in Westminster Abbey, which had
• 37:26
  been the scene of the Queen's coronation, you know, six weeks
• 37:30
  before. So again, very much of the
• 37:33
  present and and also postmodern in as well in in that the the
• 37:39
  the viewers at home watch the reveal of the alien menace take
• 37:44
  place be revealed by a documentary crew shooting in
• 37:47
  Westminster Abbey who project those images into people's
• 37:51
  homes. And of course, the drama
• 37:53
  projects those images into people's homes.
• 37:55
  So he's already very Tele literate, very, very clever.
• 37:58
  And there's all sorts of other references to, you know, the the
• 38:01
  rocket ship, what you know, there's journalists saying, is
• 38:03
  it murder? And then they go, well, that
• 38:05
  would be like throwing somebody off Mount Everest.
• 38:07
  There's, there's lots of references to the pioneering
• 38:10
  stuff that is going on today, May 1953.
• 38:13
  And, and you know, it's parallels and it's resonances
• 38:17
  with, with the case of the, the returning the returning ship and
• 38:21
  quite, quite a mass spends the whole thing feeling terribly
• 38:23
  responsible for it. He is, he is very much a
• 38:25
  burdened man. It's it's about the sort of, you
• 38:29
  know, the, the, that brave new world out there, but the price
• 38:33
  that we pay for our curiosity, for our scientific achievements,
• 38:37
  the price to be paid for, you know, crossing the final
• 38:42
  frontier, if you like. And Quatamas succeeds by
• 38:47
  appealing to the humanity still residual with inside the alien
• 38:54
  menace that his friends have become.
• 38:55
  And he lives to fight another day in Quatamas, too, where
• 39:00
  Nigel Neal is responding to the fact that lots of government
• 39:02
  buildings are going up. They're a bit mysterious where
• 39:05
  experimentations and things are going on.
• 39:07
  And we're supposed we're told, you know, don't ask too many
• 39:10
  questions because that worked in the war when we didn't ask
• 39:12
  questions. Secrets didn't get out.
• 39:14
  And then Neil's going out. But hang on, we're not at war
• 39:16
  now. Why are we keeping secrets from
• 39:17
  the population? And he goes, well, what could be
• 39:20
  going on in some of these secret government buildings?
• 39:22
  And Crater Mass has is his next experiment for the for the
• 39:26
  rocket group. He has he has found a way to
• 39:29
  build bases on the moon in order to house us there to enable us
• 39:33
  to survive and propagate our species in an alien environment.
• 39:38
  But the been meteorites fall in which the government have been
• 39:41
  hushing up. So he looks into that and he
• 39:43
  sees where some have fallen and he goes and he goes over the
• 39:47
  brow of the hill and looks into the valley below.
• 39:50
  And there is a mysterious government building that looks
• 39:53
  exactly the same as his design for a thing to help us thrive in
• 39:58
  an alien environment. So what's living there?
• 40:01
  So, you know, the and the great irony is that Quota Mass has
• 40:04
  designed the very means used to try and subjugate us for this,
• 40:11
  unlike the first one, where the invasion is kind of taking place
• 40:14
  as we see it. What Quota Mass discovers is
• 40:16
  that this invasion is a year in the making.
• 40:19
  You know there that the and it's very sort of paranoid.
• 40:23
  You know, going up to government level, there's a gestalt alien
• 40:26
  entity that has inveigled its way into government and has
• 40:29
  also, you know, very politically persuaded, you know, local
• 40:34
  workers to build this housing for this alien species just by
• 40:39
  offering them, you know, good labour terms and cheap housing.
• 40:43
  So there's all sorts of. Again, it's all.
• 40:45
  Very. It's a wonderful sequence in a
• 40:46
  pub, you know, in a pub during is it a wedding anniversary?
• 40:52
  Of. Course, if I'm leaping into
• 40:54
  Rusty Davis's Doctor Who here, we're heading straight into the
• 40:56
  domestic in the middle of this massive story.
• 40:59
  Absolutely. But it and it, but it's a, it's
• 41:01
  A, and it's vital in establishing that, you know, not
• 41:04
  everyone needs to be a sort of scratching the back of their
• 41:07
  ears and going, yes, human, you know, these are ordinary people
• 41:10
  who are offered a few ordinary things to, to turn a blind eye,
• 41:13
  you know, So that, yeah, that's the that's the invasion that is
• 41:17
  sort of established itself. And then crater mass in the pit
• 41:21
  is again, it, it, it, it, it comes from something very
• 41:25
  current in that things were, you know, unexploded bombs were
• 41:28
  being dug up in, in, in the rebuilding of London after the
• 41:31
  Blitz, which was still going on in 1958.
• 41:34
  And Nigel else thought, well, what if something was dug up and
• 41:36
  it wasn't a bomb? So they, there's this
• 41:38
  archaeological dig where they find fossil 8 bones 5,000,000
• 41:42
  years old. But they also come across this
• 41:44
  object which is deemed to be an unexploded bomb, except crater
• 41:49
  mass points out, hang on, it's underneath these fossil 8 bones
• 41:52
  that are 5,000,000 years old and, and, and, and this and,
• 41:58
  and, and it's, it's in an area where there are hauntings.
• 42:01
  So there's elements of black magic and, and sort of ghost
• 42:06
  stories. So he has his cake and eats it
• 42:08
  in that sense. And, and, and, and, and, and
• 42:10
  it's a revelation that actually this, this is an invasion that
• 42:13
  has been and gone, but that has resonance to us and to our,
• 42:18
  there's, there's even a news, you know, a bridging scene,
• 42:21
  which is a, a, a radio that talks about, you know, the
• 42:24
  nuclear arms stalemate and race riots in Birmingham and all of
• 42:28
  that sort of thing. And it all ties in with this
• 42:30
  very, very clever idea that a species long ago in in order to
• 42:37
  to survive on its dying world, instilled its faculties and race
• 42:42
  memories into us and averted our evolution and, and created sort
• 42:49
  of a drive, the drive for racial purity that still, you know,
• 42:54
  still creates, causes, causes terror and social societal
• 42:59
  breakdown and difference and all of those sorts of things.
• 43:02
  And, you know, war, it's all about war.
• 43:05
  Mars is the is the bringer of war, which is actually the theme
• 43:09
  music to the 1st 2. So it's again again, a very
• 43:12
  dense, rich thing using a great sci-fi idea to open up all sorts
• 43:17
  of other different ideas. So, you know, 33 very different
• 43:22
  templates for sort of basic science fiction storytelling
• 43:26
  that that go off in unexpected and intelligent directions.
• 43:30
  Well, essentially you've got with the first one, the aliens
• 43:33
  are coming, with the second one, the aliens are here, and in the
• 43:37
  third one, the aliens have been and gone.
• 43:40
  Yeah, it's a really, really interesting approach each time.
• 43:43
  Joe, you've just listed a plot to so many Doctor Who stories
• 43:47
  there, especially in Seizure season 7.
• 43:51
  Well, so yeah, I mean the opening of Quasi Mouse 2 and the
• 43:54
  opening of Spearhead from space. So all my tend.
• 43:56
  To the the meteorites coming down.
• 43:59
  Yeah. The dish, Yeah.
• 44:01
  And and yeah, the sort of race memory stuff in Doctor and the
• 44:04
  Silurians is very, you know, very much part of Quasi Mouse
• 44:07
  and the Pit and also the idea of of alien creatures here before
• 44:11
  us. The ambassadors of death has a
• 44:14
  lot of that conspiracy theory stuff, but also the you know,
• 44:17
  the deadly astronauts and all of all of that kind of thing.
• 44:20
  Yeah, yeah, I mean the the the demons is very yeah, the demons
• 44:25
  are very creative. Yeah.
• 44:27
  The skull that I watched image of the Fendale the.
• 44:29
  Other day the. The skull with the pentacle on
• 44:32
  it is is direct from quota mass in the pit really.
• 44:37
  But but sort of within those stories, those ideas have
• 44:40
  reached out into lots of different shows, haven't they?
• 44:43
  It is amazing influencer. Is it the sort of the ultimate
• 44:47
  influencer in terms of sort of. Stuff well, I think so in terms
• 44:51
  of I mean, and he was influenced by stuff himself.
• 44:53
  You know, the the idea that aliens had been here and and
• 44:56
  steered mankind wasn't unique to Nigel Neil, but I think the way
• 44:59
  that he he sort of put it into sort of popular grown up drama,
• 45:04
  I think was and certainly into the British television landscape
• 45:07
  was hugely pioneering. And you know, and and you know,
• 45:12
  he was very aware he didn't like American sci-fi B movie type
• 45:17
  productions. And in fact, one of the very
• 45:19
  first scenes that he wrote for Queso Mas, which is, you know,
• 45:22
  in one of the later episodes of the quota mouse experiment is is
• 45:26
  is when the the mutating astronaut befriends a kid in a
• 45:30
  kind of Frankenstein E kind of way.
• 45:32
  And, and they go to the movies and they watch a terrible sci-fi
• 45:35
  film called Planet of the Dragons, which is full of awful
• 45:38
  cliches. And it's it's Neil going, this
• 45:40
  is not what we're doing. You know, he was, he was never
• 45:43
  reversed to having a swipe at something.
• 45:46
  And and it's telling that this scene, which isn't, you know,
• 45:47
  it's really padding. It doesn't add to the plot much
• 45:50
  at all. They just need to keep the, the
• 45:52
  mutating astronaut away from Quatermass.
• 45:54
  And so they they team him up with this kid and you know, he
• 45:57
  hides out in a cinema, but you know, the cinema film that he's
• 46:01
  written and was and was shot on film and, and, and and double
• 46:04
  printed. So because it's a, a 3D film,
• 46:08
  you know, is, is awful. And, and then in Quatamas, the
• 46:11
  Quatamas and the pit he has, there's a great scene where
• 46:14
  Quatamas has a discussion with his friend Doctor Roni and
• 46:18
  they're talking about little green men from Mars of, of, of
• 46:20
  science fiction. And Roni has the great line.
• 46:23
  He says, you know, because, you know, he's he says it's a funny
• 46:27
  word, practically worn out before anything turned up to
• 46:29
  claim it. Martian, you know, and that's
• 46:32
  great. It's go.
• 46:32
  Yeah, we are. We are doing little green men
• 46:34
  from Mars, but we're making them an absolutely palpable threat.
• 46:38
  And we're making them, you know, scientific.
• 46:40
  The science is rigorous in, in terms of, you know, they are
• 46:45
  insectoid. So because they're insectoid,
• 46:48
  they have this in various species.
• 46:50
  They have a cleansing of the hives, which is a, which is a
• 46:53
  natural evolutionary instinct to keep your, to keep your insect
• 46:58
  race as it were, all uniform because that helps with your
• 47:01
  species, which is great if you're insects.
• 47:03
  If you imprint that into mankind, you suddenly become
• 47:06
  Aryan, you become racists. So it explains, it even explains
• 47:10
  the sort of racial, the drive for racial purity that the
• 47:14
  Martians having a scientific way that makes sense in the insect
• 47:18
  world. But then he also draws the
• 47:21
  parallel with the wild hunt of witches and demons in black
• 47:24
  magic. But then he also makes both of
• 47:27
  those things, He ties both of those things together and throws
• 47:30
  them forward to us and goes, well, that's what race riots
• 47:33
  are. That's what that's what civil
• 47:35
  unrest is when it's based on difference and tribalism and all
• 47:39
  of that sort of thing. So he's, he's making it work on,
• 47:41
  you know, it's. So layered, isn't it?
• 47:43
  Yeah, so clever. OK, I'm going to ask you.
• 47:47
  I'm going to ask you an extremely unfair question now,
• 47:49
  because I know actors are your thing.
• 47:56
  If you had to highlight an actor from each of these serials as
• 48:01
  and it doesn't have to be 1 of the leads, it can be someone in
• 48:03
  a bit part. If you want as as doing
• 48:06
  something particularly impressive, who would you choose
• 48:11
  one from? Each serial or just one?
• 48:12
  From the whole one from each serial.
• 48:14
  One from each, I think. For the first line, I think I
• 48:20
  would have to nominate Reginald Tate to play as Professor
• 48:22
  Cuatamas. Television was in its infancy
• 48:26
  and he gives such a naturalistic an energetic and direct
• 48:30
  performance. And I actually, I had the
• 48:33
  pleasure of seeing it on the big screen recently last year in in
• 48:37
  Crouch End, and it was even better on that.
• 48:40
  It's got got the subtlety with which this guy is is doing this
• 48:44
  when a lot of television acting was very stagey, really sort of
• 48:48
  leads the charge in making this production modern and direct and
• 48:53
  and urgent. And I think he's really, really
• 48:56
  good in Quasimas 2. I my favorite moment.
• 49:01
  And and this is not because I'm biased, because in part of my
• 49:04
  love for Quasimas, you know, maybe be a bit mean towards
• 49:06
  Doctor Who and go, oh, Doctor Who.
• 49:08
  Yeah, but you're not Quasimas. Quasimas is, you know, my, my
• 49:11
  heart is with Doctor Who, but my head is with Quasimas.
• 49:14
  But Roger Delgado has a scene in the Quatermast 2 where his
• 49:20
  character, who is a journalist, phones through the story about
• 49:24
  what is going on and it is magnificent.
• 49:27
  The writing is brilliant, It's got some fantastic lines.
• 49:32
  No, it's not synthetic food. It's the recreation of a world
• 49:35
  800 million miles away. Oh.
• 49:38
  Gorgeous, but that thing could have been like pony could be.
• 49:43
  So I no Laurie to do this sort of thing on podcast.
• 49:47
  Man, he was devastatingly handsome.
• 49:50
  Roger Delgado in the 50s. He's a beautiful man.
• 49:52
  He's a beautiful man, those dark eyes of his.
• 49:57
  But he's terrific in that scene. And then when the music kicks in
• 50:00
  as well, you know, when he when he, what does he say?
• 50:03
  This country and perhaps many others have been under the
• 50:06
  influence of something from outside the earth.
• 50:08
  And the music comes in and, ah, it's good.
• 50:11
  He's brilliant. Roger.
• 50:12
  Roger Delgado is superb. And I think I think is probably
• 50:18
  the best performance in quota mas 2.
• 50:20
  And then in quota mas and the pit I have to give it, it's it's
• 50:23
  the quota mas. And the pit I don't think has a
• 50:25
  generally uniformly excellent cast.
• 50:27
  But I have to give it to Richard Shaw who plays Sladden, the
• 50:30
  drill operator, who could so easily have been one of those
• 50:32
  annoying, hey, mate, I'm a bit of annoying working class
• 50:35
  character because there is a lot of that.
• 50:38
  And actually in the early plans, the drill operator was a cheeky
• 50:42
  Irishman called Paddy O Flynn. And I think it would have been
• 50:45
  awful because because often, you know, a nationality that was
• 50:51
  then a shorthand for a personality.
• 50:54
  And Richard Shaw, who again, was one of those actors who never
• 50:58
  he, he didn't do any stage acting really.
• 51:00
  He, he, he, you know, he was an early actor who, you know,
• 51:03
  earned his living entirely through television and film.
• 51:07
  And the the scenes that he does where he is under the influence
• 51:11
  of the Martian inheritance, there's, there's some physical
• 51:13
  ones where all Hell's breaking loose around him and he adopts
• 51:16
  the gate of one of the creatures.
• 51:18
  And that's that's pretty impressive.
• 51:19
  But then the scenes later when he's in the church, when he's
• 51:22
  enunciating the race memory of what he can see on ancient Mars,
• 51:27
  what he has given us, says Professor Katamas, was a vision
• 51:29
  of life on the planet Mars, 5,000,000 years ago.
• 51:33
  And he does this kind of, you know, it describes what he's
• 51:36
  sealing and it's possessed acting, it's fearful acting.
• 51:39
  It's it's sci-fi acting, for want of a better phrase, before
• 51:45
  it had become a cliche and before there were rules with how
• 51:48
  to do it. And it is utterly convincing.
• 51:50
  It stands up today. He's just the sort of character
• 51:53
  actor who usually played shop stewards or coppers or, you
• 51:57
  know, soldiers with a half a dozen lines.
• 52:01
  And he's absolutely terrific. And it's one of the great TV
• 52:06
  science fiction performances. You have shaky ground.
• 52:09
  And you can in my house. Yeah, he's brilliant.
• 52:14
  Do you know what I want to make a quick pump for the I'm not
• 52:16
  sure you'll be able to tell me who what her name is.
• 52:19
  The woman who's reading the tea leaves in episode 2, because I
• 52:22
  thought I'd slipped into an episode of Coronation Street for
• 52:24
  a little while. Madge Brindley as Miss Groom.
• 52:28
  Yes, marvellous. I remember my mum coming
• 52:31
  because, because, because I, I watched it all the time and I
• 52:34
  remember my mum coming in and, and, and that bit was on.
• 52:36
  And it's her and Hilda Barry who played millions of old ladies
• 52:40
  as, as Mrs. Chilcott, the, the lady who she's reading the TV
• 52:43
  saw and she has a brilliant speech, doesn't she?
• 52:45
  Where she she recalls what happened when she visited the
• 52:48
  when, when the house was haunted when she was a girl just after
• 52:51
  the general strike. See, it talks about civil unrest
• 52:53
  and also and my mum going, oh, these, these two are great
• 52:57
  because it's, it's sort of, you know, elderly character actors,
• 53:00
  you know, who've been around for years who do this sort of
• 53:03
  character acting stuff in their sleep.
• 53:05
  And it's so good. It's so rich and, and enjoyable
• 53:09
  and, you know, full of sort of character and texture.
• 53:12
  There's a guy in, in the first episode of Quatermast 2, an
• 53:15
  actor called Herbert Lomas who was retired then really largely
• 53:19
  who was a, who was a highly thought of stage and and film
• 53:22
  actor. And he's the old geezer in the
• 53:25
  pub who goes, I don't trust the government and they come with
• 53:28
  their bulldozers. And again, he's only in sort of
• 53:31
  1 scene, but he has this sort of monologue about, you know, this
• 53:34
  place well, lovely when I was a kid.
• 53:35
  And then they came and smashed it all to bits.
• 53:37
  And he's and he's and again and he's got this sort of lived in
• 53:41
  face of these sort of baggy eyes and these massive Toby Jug ears.
• 53:44
  And he's terrific and you know it.
• 53:48
  It was a strong enough part to just say to Herbert, I don't
• 53:50
  suppose you fancy coming to London for a week and, and and
• 53:53
  just giving a bit of your old, old man in crater.
• 53:56
  But oh fine, you know, he's terrific.
• 53:59
  Did I say old man Steptoe in crater mass 2?
• 54:02
  Yes, he's in the crater mass experiment and he's in crater
• 54:04
  mass two. Yeah, he's the tramp in Crater
• 54:06
  Mass 2 and he's he's his episodes of the Crater Mass
• 54:10
  experiment don't don't exist, but yeah, he's the tramp in in
• 54:13
  Crater Mass 2IN in episode 2 of Grace Mass 2.
• 54:18
  And this Marco Polo is in Grace Mass and the pit shock eye is
• 54:24
  in. Did you spot Shock Eye John?
• 54:26
  Stratton Yeah, I did. Yeah.
• 54:27
  Looking looking quite sexy I would say.
• 54:30
  What happened? It.
• 54:33
  Happened, it happened quite quickly because he's he loses
• 54:36
  his hair and he and he and he and he and he fills out a bit
• 54:40
  not not too long after, I have to say.
• 54:44
  But he's I think he's quite a hottie, isn't he?
• 54:46
  And in in Quatermass and the Pit, he's the sort of romantic
• 54:49
  hero lead, isn't he really of Quatermass and the Pit?
• 54:53
  I think what I thought throughout to and Quatermass and
• 54:57
  the Pit, there were lots of sort of bit part characters that were
• 55:01
  quite memorable. Like he he had a real skill of
• 55:04
  getting that right. Yes, you and there's people that
• 55:07
  you see that it's only when it finishes you go, oh, that guy
• 55:09
  was only in that one episode. Come back.
• 55:13
  Yeah, 1 scene. But that's because in those
• 55:15
  days, of course, you had to tell story, not through spectacle.
• 55:19
  I mean, having an establishing shot was quite a a major
• 55:22
  undertaking. So everything had to be told
• 55:24
  through character. Actors were a cheaper resource
• 55:28
  than almost anything else. So if you had some information
• 55:31
  you wanted to give or some emotion you wanted to impart or
• 55:34
  some plot you wanted to underline, you had to do it by
• 55:37
  giving actors lines. So you needed to get good
• 55:41
  actors, and you needed to give them lots to do.
• 55:43
  And that's how you told the story, largely, you know, And
• 55:47
  that's why you know, all of those bits for the actors are
• 55:49
  rewarding. That was essentially there.
• 55:51
  She lived near the pier and she was essentially there to sort of
• 55:55
  say the house was haunted. And, you know, these these
• 55:58
  things have been happening, you know, in in the past.
• 56:00
  But she was like looking after her husband the whole time as
• 56:03
  well. I just kept seeing like lots of
• 56:04
  different shadings with these sort of bit part characters.
• 56:07
  It was really great. Yeah.
• 56:09
  And they never explained that, do they?
• 56:10
  She's looking after the the husband who doesn't say anything
• 56:13
  and she just goes, yeah, don't talk to him.
• 56:15
  He's a bit, you know, like that. And and there's no explanation
• 56:19
  apart and he and he never says a word.
• 56:21
  And you go, is that just that they're saying, you know, he's a
• 56:24
  bit past it or, or, or is is there something else?
• 56:27
  You know, and it's just a little bit of a, just all a little
• 56:30
  droplet of atmosphere. Do you OK, this is another sort
• 56:34
  of simple question, but do you have like a favorite instalment?
• 56:37
  Because I thought the third episode of Quatermass and the
• 56:41
  pier where they were trying to get inside, when they were
• 56:44
  drilling inside, there was so much suspense in that episode.
• 56:48
  I think that was probably my favorite of all.
• 56:50
  That, well, that was the one they showed when they did TV 50,
• 56:54
  you know, the, the celebration of 50 years of television in,
• 56:57
  you know, the equivalent of what we've had this year of the BBC.
• 57:00
  But it was, it was in there. It was, it was, it was actually
• 57:03
  specifically a celebration, 50 years of the BBC, of BBC, of BBC
• 57:10
  Television. And they showed, So it was at
• 57:15
  8086, I think. Yeah.
• 57:18
  And they showed, they showed us selected episodes of various
• 57:22
  things. Not Doctor Who, which made me
• 57:24
  furious, but they showed episode 3 of Quaitamas and the Pit.
• 57:29
  I, I and I could see why they chose that episode and I think
• 57:32
  it's good. But of course that's, you know,
• 57:34
  you're halfway through before you get the reveal of the
• 57:36
  aliens, you know, and they're dead.
• 57:40
  How's the story going from here? We've seen a lot of
• 57:43
  cliffhangers, and I was like, that's one of the best
• 57:44
  cliffhangers I can remember seeing.
• 57:47
  And his performance at the end of that episode and that line
• 57:49
  reading of, yeah, they're already dead.
• 57:51
  That was so good. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 57:56
  They're dead. They've been dead for a long
• 57:57
  time. And you sort of go, well,
• 57:59
  where's the story going to go from here then, because they're
• 58:01
  not a threat. And I do like that episode.
• 58:03
  I also like episode 5 of Pitt because I think it's got that
• 58:09
  great Wild Hunt sequence. It starts what becomes the the
• 58:12
  climax. I think episode 6 of Greater
• 58:14
  Mass of the Pitt is amazing with, with London, you know,
• 58:17
  under duress and, you know, the world gone mad.
• 58:21
  It's extraordinary, but I like episode 5 because I like the bit
• 58:26
  in the pit when when they they wrangle the only bit of nonsense
• 58:30
  in it for me, which is the Doctor Roni, the archaeologist's
• 58:34
  convenient sci-fi mind reading machine.
• 58:39
  It's just something he's been tinkering with that can do
• 58:41
  something that even now we can't do.
• 58:44
  But. I did wonder when they were
• 58:46
  talking about that in episode, was it two or three?
• 58:48
  They just ran, oh, you're working on this.
• 58:51
  Are you OK? You're.
• 58:52
  Working on a thing? Yeah, you're working on a thing
• 58:54
  that can record the images that are in our brains.
• 58:57
  You're an archaeologist. But it doesn't facilitate that
• 59:00
  scene where where they try and get Sladden, the drill operator
• 59:06
  to recreate what he's done to make the pit go, you know, do
• 59:09
  Lally this outbreak of the poltergeist phenomena and and
• 59:12
  and you know that that sets off his visions of ancient Mars and
• 59:16
  it doesn't work with him. Sorry.
• 59:20
  No, they get they quite a master tries it, doesn't it?
• 59:22
  And it doesn't work with him, but but Barbara Judd is is more
• 59:26
  susceptible and they they end up doing it with her.
• 59:29
  And that's, that's such a brilliant sequence as as all as
• 59:32
  all the cables start to flash about and slamming himself
• 59:35
  starts to get gripped by it and they and they and it doesn't
• 59:38
  work on quite a mass. And so they strap Barbara into
• 59:40
  it and it's and it's the fact that you're sort of horned alien
• 59:44
  menace makes lights flash on and off and cables, you know, rattle
• 59:49
  and things fly through the air and and it's all tied in with
• 59:53
  poltergeists. Is is a is a very smart device
• 59:57
  from a guy that knows that you might not be able to do many
• 1:00:00
  special effects, but you can have people, including yourself,
• 1:00:02
  the writer. Just off camera lobbing things
• 1:00:06
  about and rattling cables, which is all that they did, but it's
• 1:00:09
  so effective they. Kind of been much like that on
• 1:00:11
  TV at the time of this sort of that's, that's sort of high
• 1:00:15
  suspense and. No, Most, most TV was filmed
• 1:00:19
  plays, you know, adaptations of and and and, you know, and plays
• 1:00:25
  and TV and and and you know. Theatre plays are written to
• 1:00:28
  have, you know, very few scene changes, very few sets and lots
• 1:00:32
  of long exchanges of dialogue. I mean, there were there were
• 1:00:36
  original, there were original works of television.
• 1:00:38
  But but, but, but but to have something that was sort of
• 1:00:41
  modern sci-fi as well, that that wasn't a send up and had, you
• 1:00:46
  know, had had intellectual ambition as well as populist
• 1:00:50
  appeal is, you know, is, is quite a heady mix.
• 1:00:54
  I thought I was a bit above a sort of jump scares now, but
• 1:00:57
  when that alien fell from the webbing in episode 3.
• 1:01:03
  Yeah, that's not in the script. That was now that that scene
• 1:01:06
  wasn't done live. That's one of the film scenes.
• 1:01:08
  But it it was the result of a mistake.
• 1:01:11
  So they were they were hanging on fishing wire and and, and it
• 1:01:16
  and it's yeah, it's not in the script that one of them sort of
• 1:01:19
  falls, but it happened by mistake where they were setting
• 1:01:22
  it up and Cartier went we'll shoot that.
• 1:01:25
  And I and I think they did it without, you know, that, that
• 1:01:28
  they, they did it as a sort of shock moment, which which really
• 1:01:33
  helps. Yeah.
• 1:01:33
  But it it was bred out of, it was serendipitous.
• 1:01:36
  And I would never want to point and laugh at old special
• 1:01:39
  effects. You know, I'm a Doctor Who fan,
• 1:01:41
  so I don't really give a damn about special effects and I'm
• 1:01:44
  long past the point of being embarrassed by them.
• 1:01:46
  But I thought like the reveal of the aliens, the lighting, the
• 1:01:50
  design, it was super impressive. I.
• 1:01:53
  I think the aliens are amazing. I think they're brilliant
• 1:01:57
  partially because they don't have to be animated because
• 1:01:59
  they're dead, which means you don't have to fit a man inside.
• 1:02:01
  It was a savvy move, I think. Yeah, but I actually think
• 1:02:05
  they're better than the ones in the movie, which look a bit more
• 1:02:08
  like locusts, and they do have a devilish aspect to them.
• 1:02:10
  And probably the ones in the movie are closer to the idea of
• 1:02:13
  looking a bit devilish. But these ones, you know, the
• 1:02:17
  suggest is that they look like gargoyles.
• 1:02:18
  And, and then the sets are very brilliantly designed to the set
• 1:02:21
  in the church has a gargoyle face that is similar.
• 1:02:24
  And there's a, and there's a cave painting that is similar.
• 1:02:26
  So it's sort of retrofitted if you like.
• 1:02:29
  But but they're a brilliant. They look like a convincing
• 1:02:31
  insectoid thing. They don't look like anything
• 1:02:33
  you'd ever have a conversation with, which makes them slightly
• 1:02:36
  unreachable. Do you know what I mean?
• 1:02:37
  And it's a it's a fantastic and intelligent design.
• 1:02:39
  They were designed by Jack Kyne who went on to become, you know,
• 1:02:43
  the head of BBC. Well he was then there the Co
• 1:02:45
  head of BBC visual effects department.
• 1:02:47
  Well not the head because it wasn't really a department.
• 1:02:49
  It was founded by Kine and and Bernard Wilkie.
• 1:02:53
  He a fascist dictator in an alternative universe as well.
• 1:02:56
  Yeah, he's, he's, he's the face on the posters in Inferno.
• 1:02:59
  Yeah. I want to, I want to very
• 1:03:02
  briefly in a second, just go on to the 70s serial.
• 1:03:06
  But we do. Another installment I really
• 1:03:10
  thought was impressive was 5 of Greater Mass 2 set in the
• 1:03:14
  factory with some really effective horror.
• 1:03:19
  Well, the question I got on Twitter was, and it was a
• 1:03:21
  question I was going to ask you anyway.
• 1:03:22
  So I thought it was interesting that it came was should that
• 1:03:24
  serial have ended with episode 5 because episode 6 goes somewhere
• 1:03:29
  completely. Different.
• 1:03:31
  It's interesting the the film dispenses with Episode 6.
• 1:03:37
  It's really curious. Quasi Mass 2, Nigel Neil didn't
• 1:03:40
  keep any of his notes, didn't keep any of his drafts, didn't
• 1:03:44
  keep didn't keep any of his planning or any synopses or
• 1:03:48
  anything like that. There's not an awful lot of
• 1:03:50
  publicity around Quasi Mass 2 either.
• 1:03:56
  It went out at a funny time of year.
• 1:03:58
  It's kind of, even though we have it and we have all the
• 1:04:01
  filming schedules and stuff. So we've got a lot of paperwork
• 1:04:04
  about the making and mounting of it.
• 1:04:07
  But in terms of his, in, in terms of the conception of it,
• 1:04:11
  it's, it's quite a mysterious 1 and, and, and, and it's the
• 1:04:15
  least well known in a way. And it is a funny beast in that
• 1:04:20
  regard, in that it sort of climaxes at the end of that very
• 1:04:25
  good episode 5, which is a kind of base under siege, but with a
• 1:04:28
  few more things going on and a bit of politics.
• 1:04:31
  Neil reckons it was the most political scene he ever made.
• 1:04:33
  When, when, when, when the workers who've who've been, you
• 1:04:37
  know, built this factory that that has propagated the aliens
• 1:04:40
  discover the true nature of their work.
• 1:04:41
  So they start to cut off the feeding supply.
• 1:04:45
  And so the management, IE the aliens start playing the music
• 1:04:49
  to say it's just a normal night at work, you know, and go come
• 1:04:52
  get, send your shop steward down and we'll have a works meeting
• 1:04:55
  and, and, you know, basically trying to convince them that
• 1:04:58
  it's just a normal night shift and, and.
• 1:05:01
  Saying like, we'll tell you anything we want.
• 1:05:03
  You want to hear anything you want to know, you know we'll
• 1:05:05
  tell you. And, and, and, and, you know,
• 1:05:07
  Neil said that was about as, as as political as he ever got.
• 1:05:10
  He wasn't party political. He was sort of more again,
• 1:05:13
  bureaucracy and secrets and that sort of thing.
• 1:05:16
  And, and. Yeah, that the Cueto Mass has a
• 1:05:18
  kind of win in terms of, you know, this, this, this, this
• 1:05:24
  the, the, the, the alien sort of housing that he has discovered
• 1:05:28
  and that is, you know, on his doorstep.
• 1:05:30
  But he has to cut off, you know, the control that is being, that
• 1:05:35
  is being spearheaded from spearheaded from space.
• 1:05:39
  And that's there's no coincidence.
• 1:05:40
  I use those words. And and so they decide.
• 1:05:44
  And because it's the, it's thematically important that that
• 1:05:47
  Quota Mass's rocket has has turned out to be very dangerous.
• 1:05:50
  And and the and the, and the serial starts with reports that
• 1:05:54
  that Quota Mass's second attempt at a rocket has blown up in
• 1:05:56
  Australia and killed loads of people.
• 1:05:58
  He's not a lucky man is so he's got this redundant rocket on his
• 1:06:03
  rocket base that is essentially a, a, a nuclear bomb in the
• 1:06:07
  making. And so it's thematically quite
• 1:06:10
  rigorous and appropriate to go. So actually we'll use that
• 1:06:13
  nuclear bomb to blow up the alien threat.
• 1:06:16
  But unfortunately, what that means is that 2 elderly
• 1:06:19
  character are sent, are sent into space in some very
• 1:06:22
  cumbersome space suits onto a planet that they don't have any
• 1:06:29
  money to do. And the designers run out of
• 1:06:31
  money and so hastily arranges some chairs and some tarpaulin
• 1:06:35
  and a lot of smoke. I actually don't think it's the,
• 1:06:38
  the, the planet set is, is, is particularly poor.
• 1:06:41
  But I, I, I know from the making of it that it was an act of
• 1:06:44
  desperation. And I don't think the actors are
• 1:06:47
  really cut out for what they're asked to do.
• 1:06:49
  Hugh Griffith was an Oscar winning actor.
• 1:06:50
  He was an incredible film and stage actor.
• 1:06:53
  I, I don't think he's on great form.
• 1:06:55
  He hadn't worked for six months prior to quota must two.
• 1:07:00
  This was his first job back after having had quite a serious
• 1:07:02
  car accident. And I and I don't think he's in
• 1:07:05
  great form and there's some lovely ideas about him.
• 1:07:09
  You know, he's been being taken over and trying to retain his
• 1:07:13
  humanity and and and and then when a character is sort of sent
• 1:07:16
  off for for a horrible cold, lonely death in space, crying
• 1:07:21
  out to his friend. But what it is, it's a not a
• 1:07:23
  very good sort of model shot and a Welshman with his head in a
• 1:07:27
  bucket going help, help. And and it's and it's and the
• 1:07:31
  idea is the idea is excellent. Yeah.
• 1:07:35
  That the the character that what it does to each of those
• 1:07:37
  characters is excellent, but it's not very good.
• 1:07:39
  Doesn't work. I was just that episode 5 was so
• 1:07:42
  tight and so claustrophobic that Tony was so on the money.
• 1:07:47
  And then I just felt like it was so jarring that that shift in
• 1:07:50
  six. It's but the final instalment of
• 1:07:53
  Quota Mass 2 is probably the worst single episode of Quota
• 1:07:56
  Mass, and that's a real shame, yeah.
• 1:07:59
  What about what about the 70s? There we have a a fair, what is
• 1:08:03
  it, 2 decades? Yeah, well, 59 to 79 isn't.
• 1:08:09
  It, yeah. And we're and we're back on
• 1:08:11
  another channel. Yeah, ITV all on film, huge
• 1:08:18
  budget, a dystopian future. So instead of being, you know,
• 1:08:23
  what's happening right now, it's what's happening to you know, I
• 1:08:26
  mean, you said it didn't you. The aliens are coming, the
• 1:08:31
  aliens are are here. And then the aliens were here
• 1:08:34
  long ago and now it's kind of it's it's all going to happen
• 1:08:37
  tomorrow. And, and it postulates a future
• 1:08:41
  where society has broken down and, you know, the government's,
• 1:08:48
  you know, trying to hold together civil unrest and make
• 1:08:51
  some pretty appalling decisions. And there are youth gangs that
• 1:08:54
  are fighting, some are hippie ish and some are sort of, I
• 1:08:57
  don't mind off type of, you know, sort of, you know, violent
• 1:09:05
  gang type things. And it's a pretty grim vision of
• 1:09:11
  the future. There are sort of South African
• 1:09:13
  mercenary police called pay cops and, you know, television
• 1:09:19
  studios are sort of ramshackle and, you know, churn out crap to
• 1:09:25
  try and appease the population. Old people end up living in sort
• 1:09:28
  of, you know, car wrecking yards and building these eccentric
• 1:09:33
  communities there because nobody's looking after them.
• 1:09:35
  And, and poor old Professor Cuetemas who lives out in the
• 1:09:38
  middle of nowhere, hasn't really been aware of how how terrible
• 1:09:42
  it is. And there is still a space
• 1:09:44
  program because they, they managed to spaf money on, on,
• 1:09:49
  you know, very symbolic gestures whilst the earth decays below.
• 1:09:54
  And quasi Massey's granddaughter has gone missing and he thinks
• 1:09:58
  she's with one of these gangs. So when he's invited to appear
• 1:10:01
  on television to, to herald a marriage in space between a, a
• 1:10:05
  Russian space project and an American space project, he, he
• 1:10:10
  goes on to the show in order to appeal for, for his
• 1:10:15
  granddaughter. And as a result, then gets
• 1:10:17
  embroiled in controversy because something goes wrong up in
• 1:10:22
  space. And that turns out to be that
• 1:10:26
  they initially think it's sabotage.
• 1:10:28
  Actually, that that was a trivial offshoot of the main
• 1:10:32
  event, which was that young people are gathering at ancient
• 1:10:36
  sites expecting to be transported to another planet.
• 1:10:41
  They all have this weird sort of race memory drive to to all
• 1:10:45
  gather in these vast numbers and a big laser beams zapping down
• 1:10:52
  and they think it's transporting them to other places.
• 1:10:55
  And quota mass realizes it's just basically sucking them of
• 1:10:59
  all their nutrients. And it's about and then quota
• 1:11:02
  mass and lots of really old people have to try and make
• 1:11:05
  sense of what is going on and they're all at the end of their
• 1:11:07
  lives falling apart. And, and I've, and I've, I've
• 1:11:12
  seen it interpreted as, oh, it's Nigel Neil going what, what's
• 1:11:16
  wrong with young people? He's cleverer than that.
• 1:11:18
  What he's doing is, and he gives quota mass a speech where quota
• 1:11:21
  mass says, you know, you don't understand us.
• 1:11:23
  They, they always said, and he's going, what, what is it about?
• 1:11:26
  Why is it that old and young seem to be on a totally
• 1:11:30
  different wavelength? And I'm going to come up with a
• 1:11:33
  science, science fiction idea. The science fiction idea is that
• 1:11:36
  young people with all their hormones and stuff coursing
• 1:11:39
  through them and their smells and their pheromones and all of
• 1:11:42
  that sort of thing are giving off pungent signals that are
• 1:11:46
  picked up in deep space by some intelligence we can never
• 1:11:50
  understand that just likes the taste.
• 1:11:52
  He talks, He meets an old chemist played by Krassis from
• 1:11:55
  the time monster, who talks about who, who used to be a who
• 1:11:58
  used to get sense for soap. And he talks about getting the
• 1:12:01
  Musk scent from the deer where you get a tiny scintilla of the
• 1:12:05
  deer itself, but you have to kill the creature to get it.
• 1:12:08
  And, and, and the postulation is we never, it's never great mass
• 1:12:12
  is never sure, because this is a completely uncommunicable alien
• 1:12:17
  intelligence. But he reckons that it's
• 1:12:19
  basically with, there's a trace of something within our young
• 1:12:22
  people that it tastes, that it quite likes the taste, the
• 1:12:26
  sensation, the smell of. And it's prepared to sort of
• 1:12:29
  filter that out and desiccate these gatherings of youths who
• 1:12:35
  have some have been programmed since the dawn of time to follow
• 1:12:38
  this call. And, and this happens every, you
• 1:12:40
  know, several millennia. But of course, so to the to the
• 1:12:45
  creature up there, that's probably seconds, but to us it's
• 1:12:48
  millennia. And so again, it ties in with
• 1:12:51
  Neil's thing about ancient, you know, ancient evil or, or, or
• 1:12:55
  things from the dawn of time, plus futuristic sci-fi stuff.
• 1:12:58
  So it's very clever. He's still in, I think.
• 1:13:01
  I think, I swear Russell Davis was paying attention when he
• 1:13:04
  wrote Children of Earth. Because I swear that's about.
• 1:13:06
  Yeah, it's a bit about. Shooting up on.
• 1:13:09
  There there is a bit of that people are quite hard on on that
• 1:13:12
  quest. I actually think it's excellent.
• 1:13:14
  I remember it being on and not realising that that's what, what
• 1:13:16
  it was. And, and, and, and you know, the
• 1:13:20
  sort of thing of driving around in Land Rovers on 16 millimetre
• 1:13:23
  film and or, you know, grubby for whatever the film is great,
• 1:13:27
  you know, but but, and, and, and everyone is sort of Wellington
• 1:13:30
  boots and big jumpers and it, and it just seemed, it just
• 1:13:33
  seemed real and plausible and sort of dirty.
• 1:13:34
  And, and I, I think it's, I think it's very good.
• 1:13:37
  It's, it's compromised because he had to write it in two forms.
• 1:13:41
  He had to write it as a four part miniseries that could also
• 1:13:46
  be truncated to an hour and a half film basically using the
• 1:13:50
  same, you know, so one's, one's compromised by being perhaps
• 1:13:54
  truncated too much and one's compromised by perhaps being
• 1:13:57
  filled out a little bit too much.
• 1:13:58
  But I, I, I still think that. I still think it's, I think, I
• 1:14:03
  think it's excellent. I think it's a really good
• 1:14:04
  production. I think the ideas are fertile
• 1:14:06
  and intelligent. Some of the performances maybe
• 1:14:10
  don't work, but some are. Some are really, really, really
• 1:14:12
  good. And I think.
• 1:14:14
  Who's basically influenced by in this one?
• 1:14:16
  Who's crazy? Mass is Sir John Mills.
• 1:14:21
  Yes, Sir John Mills and Joseph Capp, his his his friend is
• 1:14:26
  played by Simon Mccorkindale. Margaret Tysack is in it,
• 1:14:31
  Brewster, Mason, Barbara Kellerman.
• 1:14:35
  And then further down the cast is Brenda Fricker is in it,
• 1:14:38
  Bruce Purchase the pirate captain David Yip, Kevin Stoney
• 1:14:42
  pops up as the Prime Minister and there's some lovely familiar
• 1:14:47
  faces like Declan Mulholland and and Owens.
• 1:14:50
  Ethel from EastEnders is so all sorts.
• 1:14:55
  And I think Cosniel had a downer on it.
• 1:14:59
  And and because it wasn't, you know, haunting 50s black and
• 1:15:02
  white crater mass. I, I think I, I, I, I think
• 1:15:05
  people who I can understand why people who like the 50s serials
• 1:15:10
  because it's not the same, might not like it, but I, I love it.
• 1:15:13
  I think it's, I think it's terrific.
• 1:15:14
  I. Don't hear them grouped
• 1:15:15
  together. I hear the three serials grouped
• 1:15:17
  together I'd I'd never heard in the 70s one like I've never had
• 1:15:22
  it mentioned before, right? Well, I mean, it is, it is
• 1:15:24
  different and, and you know, Neil, I think himself would,
• 1:15:27
  would, would talk about them differently because you know,
• 1:15:30
  with the 50s ones, he was there, he was working at the BBC.
• 1:15:33
  He was, he was great friends with Rudolph Cartier, the
• 1:15:35
  producer. He was on set when they did it.
• 1:15:37
  He was in them. You know, he, he threw the
• 1:15:40
  stones, he rattled the cables. He, you know, he probably made
• 1:15:43
  script changes on the floor. Whereas the other thing about
• 1:15:47
  Crazy Mass 4 is that was written in 1973 and made in 197879.
• 1:15:56
  Because it was going to be made. It was going to be made by the
• 1:15:59
  BBC in the studio. It would have looked like the
• 1:16:01
  Stones of Blood and and they pulled it.
• 1:16:10
  Maybe that may be expense, maybe Neil.
• 1:16:14
  Nobody's, nobody's giving the same replies.
• 1:16:18
  I've I've interviewed a few people.
• 1:16:21
  There's not a definitive. And of course, because it was
• 1:16:23
  never made, the BBC don't have files.
• 1:16:25
  The BBC didn't even have a script for the BBC version
• 1:16:29
  because everybody who worked on it was ordered to shred them.
• 1:16:34
  Yes. And so nobody has seen a script
• 1:16:38
  for the BBC version except me because I found one.
• 1:16:44
  So that will be that. That will all be gone, gone
• 1:16:47
  through in my in my book. But yeah, there wasn't there
• 1:16:51
  wasn't a script for that. Can I ask is?
• 1:16:53
  It exactly very different from what made it to the screen.
• 1:16:55
  Not, not really you. You're actually surprised at at
• 1:16:59
  how whole tracts of it are identical.
• 1:17:02
  So I don't think he did much to it.
• 1:17:04
  I think what, you know, when they said we're going to do
• 1:17:07
  this, he went, well, all right, there you go.
• 1:17:09
  You know, I he didn't spend too much time refining.
• 1:17:13
  And so some people say that therefore that the the group of
• 1:17:16
  sort of hippies that are the planet people who are one of the
• 1:17:19
  groups of young people seem closer to sort of the the fag
• 1:17:25
  end of the 60s for the versities writing in 1973 and seems
• 1:17:30
  slightly less relevant, a bit more anachronistic for being
• 1:17:34
  portrayed at the fag end of the 1970s.
• 1:17:36
  And I, I, I can see that, but I also, I mean, you know, I grew
• 1:17:42
  up in the 80s, I knew big, I knew big gangs of hippies.
• 1:17:44
  Do you know what I mean? They were, they were still about
• 1:17:47
  and, and they work within the, the, the, the confines of the
• 1:17:50
  story, I think. But I can see why people might
• 1:17:53
  go that that that seems to suggest that it's that it's that
• 1:17:57
  it's in places, it's a, it's a square peg being fitted into a
• 1:18:02
  around whole 10. Years trying to sell that script
• 1:18:05
  for six years, then to to other television companies.
• 1:18:11
  I can't remember. I've got it written down now,
• 1:18:13
  but it's late I. Think he was.
• 1:18:15
  I think he was a bit pissed off with the BBC for pulling it and
• 1:18:22
  ITV wanted to work with him and he went well.
• 1:18:25
  I've got this. I mean, he was clearly, he was
• 1:18:29
  clearly a, a brilliant man and a fantastic right.
• 1:18:32
  Was he a bit of a grumpy bugger then?
• 1:18:35
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Did.
• 1:18:40
  Did Patrick Trout like holding ladies hands?
• 1:18:45
  He was really not keen on Doctor Who, was he, Nigel?
• 1:18:49
  But, but Nigel, I mean, Nigel Neil wasn't, I mean, I, I think,
• 1:18:53
  you know, we were sort of brought up to think, oh, Nigel
• 1:18:55
  Neil had a downer on Doctor Who. Nigel Neil had a downer on a
• 1:18:58
  lot. I think part of it is it's his
• 1:19:00
  sense of humour. He has a sort of caustic,
• 1:19:03
  sardonic sense of humour that if you don't know him, may appear
• 1:19:08
  to be a bit rude. And I think he was unnecessarily
• 1:19:11
  unkind sometimes. And off the mark.
• 1:19:14
  I mean, he, he was rude about The X-Files he talked to.
• 1:19:16
  There's an SFX interview with him where he talks about those
• 1:19:19
  two non actors and you go, well, I think you're wrong there,
• 1:19:23
  mate. So, but, but I think it's hard.
• 1:19:26
  He was such a visionary and he had such great success early on
• 1:19:30
  with quota mass, which was not just successful, it was, it was,
• 1:19:33
  you know, it was ground breaking.
• 1:19:34
  It was a phenomenon. And because he was a staff
• 1:19:37
  writer for the BBC, when he did the quota mass experiment, they
• 1:19:41
  sold the rights under, they sold the rights under him.
• 1:19:43
  Basically, he had no, he had no recourse to the rights for the
• 1:19:46
  character or the OR the, OR the story.
• 1:19:51
  And he never gave up the goat on that.
• 1:19:53
  He's still moaning about it in correspondence with the BBC
• 1:19:56
  30-40 years later. He's the sort of Ray Cusick of
• 1:19:59
  script writing. And then he, he get, he gets a
• 1:20:02
  number of ex Gracia payments and they go and we really think
• 1:20:05
  that's an end to the matter. And then he corresponds with
• 1:20:07
  something else and goes and do you know what?
• 1:20:09
  By the way, you sold the rights to the Quasar.
• 1:20:11
  But but but you know what? What you failed to acknowledge
• 1:20:14
  there and it and it is it does seem very archaic to us now.
• 1:20:19
  But when you were a staff writer for the BBC, you were on a
• 1:20:21
  salary, you got a weekly wage, you got a pension and you got
• 1:20:25
  your holidays. And freelancers don't get that.
• 1:20:28
  I don't have that as a writer now because I'm.
• 1:20:32
  And so, yeah, if I write anything, nobody's paid for the
• 1:20:34
  time that I have to take out to write it.
• 1:20:38
  Nigel Neil's time was paid for when he was writing because he
• 1:20:41
  was a staff writer. That was his job, so he had a
• 1:20:45
  comfort blanket to give him time to write what he was writing.
• 1:20:48
  I don't have that. I want to write a script now.
• 1:20:50
  I have to write it with no funding whatsoever to to make it
• 1:20:54
  interesting enough or for for then people to pay for it, for
• 1:20:57
  me to develop it. So you want to go on.
• 1:21:00
  Holiday next week You've you know, that's not paid holiday,
• 1:21:04
  isn't it? No, and and and so in a sense,
• 1:21:08
  you know, what the BBC did was not unfair.
• 1:21:10
  Now, of course, if you create something that goes on to be a
• 1:21:13
  major movie and spawn sequence stuff, you're entitled to also
• 1:21:16
  go. I deserve a sort of cut of this.
• 1:21:19
  But but he certainly he bore a grudge.
• 1:21:22
  But what I think where I don't forgive him is where he's quite
• 1:21:25
  disparaging about other people and other people's work.
• 1:21:29
  He's you know, there's, there's interviews where he's very rude
• 1:21:31
  about Simon Mccorkindale in quasi Mass in the last quasi
• 1:21:34
  Mass, who is actually excellent. And, and I interviewed Daryl
• 1:21:40
  Blake, who directed the stones of blood, who was a design
• 1:21:43
  assistant on Quetta Mass two, who lived here Neil and was and
• 1:21:47
  was working on Doomwatch and said to, you know, Nigel, oh,
• 1:21:50
  why don't you come and write a Doomwatch?
• 1:21:52
  And Nigel Neil went what with that cast and you just go, I
• 1:21:55
  just don't think there's any need to be like that.
• 1:21:58
  And yet he was married to Judith Kerr, who adored him, who was
• 1:22:02
  the loveliest woman on the planet.
• 1:22:07
  And and his and his kids are fantastic and, you know, both
• 1:22:11
  imaginative, brilliant people. Taste is a brilliant artist and
• 1:22:15
  Matthew is a an award-winning writer in himself so obviously.
• 1:22:19
  And his brother Brian is a is a sculptor and a a a a a I think
• 1:22:23
  ACBEI mean a a a hugely influential and admired
• 1:22:28
  sculptor. And they, you know, and, and
• 1:22:32
  Brian speaks so lovingly of his, of his elder brother who was so
• 1:22:36
  kind to him. So I don't know what it was
• 1:22:38
  about. Maybe it was that formative
• 1:22:40
  experience of working in television, of having that
• 1:22:43
  impact that he had, which he never quite even though people
• 1:22:46
  like us admired him. And, and he was, you know, well
• 1:22:49
  thought of in the industry and he was well thought of by
• 1:22:51
  American film makers, which was why he was fated by people like
• 1:22:54
  John Carpenter and Joe Dante. And but he but he he blotted his
• 1:22:58
  copy book with John Carpenter by being mean about stuff and but
• 1:23:01
  but being difficult and intransigent.
• 1:23:03
  And, and I wonder if he was, you know, wounded by whatever
• 1:23:06
  happened after Cueto mass in the pit where he was kind of at his
• 1:23:09
  apex. And, and and never even though
• 1:23:11
  he did critically acclaimed work and work that has lasted after
• 1:23:14
  that, that seems to be the sort of climax.
• 1:23:16
  He never worked with Rudolf Cartier again.
• 1:23:19
  And, and and I wonder if having had that sort of baptism of fire
• 1:23:26
  and those experiences, that that sort of hurt him a little bit.
• 1:23:29
  If, if that made him, you know, I, I see people being mean and,
• 1:23:34
  and, and, and when you get to, when you get to know them or you
• 1:23:37
  try and talk to them and, and you see that often meanness is,
• 1:23:41
  is actually really directed at oneself and it's a defence
• 1:23:44
  mechanism. And so I'm, I'm, you know, I
• 1:23:47
  understand, I'm not, I'm, I don't, you know, I, I understand
• 1:23:51
  where some of what he did may have come from, but I think it's
• 1:23:56
  a shame. I wish he'd been happier.
• 1:23:58
  He had a bad experience at a science fiction convention, so
• 1:24:00
  he hated fans as well. I, I wish I could go back in
• 1:24:05
  time and stop him from going to whatever that event was where
• 1:24:08
  that put him off aficionados for life because he would have had a
• 1:24:11
  great time. Because, you know, we all know
• 1:24:13
  science fiction fans who can be hard work and difficult and have
• 1:24:18
  the best communication, have the best communication skills.
• 1:24:21
  But also it is an area full of intelligent, creative people who
• 1:24:25
  will ask you sensible questions and enjoy your work.
• 1:24:27
  And I mean, he did sometimes engage, but I think he was burnt
• 1:24:31
  by an experience there as well. And yeah, and he didn't like
• 1:24:35
  Doctor Who. But again, you could say if he
• 1:24:37
  tuned into certain Doctor Who's, he could rightly sort of go,
• 1:24:42
  well, this is just me done a bit cheaper.
• 1:24:46
  And also he had an objection. He said his stuff was never
• 1:24:49
  written for kids and and he felt it was irresponsible to to do
• 1:24:53
  stuff that was frightening for kids.
• 1:24:56
  But I, I again, that could just be an excuse.
• 1:24:58
  I don't know. But yeah, he was.
• 1:25:00
  He was quite grumpy, which is a shame.
• 1:25:02
  I wasn't. Was it a pot?
• 1:25:04
  Before that he was asked to write for Doctor Who.
• 1:25:06
  I think Derek Sherwin said that in an interview that he
• 1:25:09
  approached it. Yeah, I think, and I think they
• 1:25:12
  approached him early on as well. And I think he was just no, you
• 1:25:16
  know, and and and, you know, he he didn't consider himself
• 1:25:19
  really a science fiction writer. And I think it probably must
• 1:25:25
  have rankled that all of his success, all of his major
• 1:25:28
  successes were with with a genre.
• 1:25:31
  And you either you have to surrender to that or loathe it.
• 1:25:35
  And I think he kind of loathed it because they also didn't
• 1:25:39
  really respect what came afterwards as well.
• 1:25:41
  I think, you know, his stuff is really intelligent and it's
• 1:25:45
  really thoughtful and it's really rigorous and it's not
• 1:25:49
  pulpy. And, and I think he didn't like
• 1:25:51
  pulpy. And if you don't like pulpy, but
• 1:25:54
  people sort of lump your stuff in with that because it's the
• 1:25:58
  same genre. He might have, you know, he he
• 1:26:01
  could have justly sort of felt no, no, me in space, 1999.
• 1:26:04
  Yeah, they may have. They may have infected
• 1:26:07
  astronauts, but we are not the same, you know, to all extent.
• 1:26:11
  Suppose even now when crater mass is written up in things
• 1:26:13
  like the Radio Times, you know, it's it's always under sort of
• 1:26:16
  cult appeal. That's wrong.
• 1:26:17
  It was not a cult show. It was a show that bewitched the
• 1:26:21
  nation. Why have more leanings of horror
• 1:26:25
  than science fiction? Do you know when I was watching
• 1:26:26
  those series? Yes, indeed, that's what he does
• 1:26:30
  so cleverly because, you know, silver hats aren't scary cobwebs
• 1:26:33
  and ancient long dead things are.
• 1:26:35
  And I, and I think he, he tells science fiction stories often
• 1:26:39
  using the methodology of, of horror.
• 1:26:42
  It was sort of less overt set pieces and more suggestion.
• 1:26:45
  And that's what I always think. That's the best horror you know,
• 1:26:47
  Leave your imagination. Absolutely.
• 1:26:49
  And that's practical as well, because, you know, quite often
• 1:26:54
  you can't show, so you have to suggest it and let the
• 1:26:56
  audience's imagination do the work, you know?
• 1:26:59
  I've got to say, there was one sequence, one special effects
• 1:27:03
  sequence where a bizarrely a bazooka was left hanging around
• 1:27:07
  on the floor and that someone picked up and blew a hole in
• 1:27:10
  that Dome and I thought they're not going to pull that off.
• 1:27:13
  And then the the, the cloud came.
• 1:27:15
  I thought that was an incredible effect.
• 1:27:18
  Yeah, that I think the way that they did that was that it was
• 1:27:26
  in, it was in water and it's powdered milk.
• 1:27:29
  Wow, Yeah. When was there a bazooka hanging
• 1:27:32
  around? Because they'd, they'd when,
• 1:27:39
  when the, when the workers go and protest because they've seen
• 1:27:44
  somebody get taken over by one of the aliens and realize that
• 1:27:47
  they've been, they want some answers as to what they've been
• 1:27:49
  building all this time. They, they sort of stormed the
• 1:27:52
  factory and the, the guards opened fire on them.
• 1:27:55
  So they overcome the guards and presumably steal a bazooka off
• 1:27:59
  one of them. Why not?
• 1:28:02
  No, they, they do. I think they do.
• 1:28:03
  There is a line of dialogue that covers it.
• 1:28:05
  I think they go, oh, look, look what we've found.
• 1:28:08
  You know, they were ready for an army.
• 1:28:09
  So I think yes, that's the other is that is that the aliens have
• 1:28:13
  armed the factory to the teeth because if they do get
• 1:28:15
  discovered and human forces come to shut them down, they can fend
• 1:28:20
  them off it with. Things when they when they found
• 1:28:23
  it on the floor, I thought that was very fortunate that that's
• 1:28:25
  there. No, I, I, I, I do think there's
• 1:28:27
  a line of dialogue to cover it, to say, you know, they were
• 1:28:30
  preparing for, they were ready for anything, which does make
• 1:28:33
  sense, really. What to wrap this up, can I very
• 1:28:36
  briefly just point you in the direction of the movies, which
• 1:28:39
  is the only thing we haven't covered here?
• 1:28:41
  Yes. And I just wanted to ask one
• 1:28:44
  sort of how they turned out they had the movies.
• 1:28:47
  Yeah. And sort of how does this work?
• 1:28:51
  Sort of truncating it down to 8090 minutes.
• 1:28:53
  Does that work? Well, it depends.
• 1:28:56
  It's really hard, isn't it? I know people whose first
• 1:28:58
  experience of quasi Massey's the movies and they find the
• 1:29:01
  television versions a bit, a bit sort of flabby and compromised
• 1:29:06
  by, you know, smaller budgets. I, I, I did the series first and
• 1:29:11
  I I find the films all a bit disappointing, largely because
• 1:29:15
  of the casting in the first two of the American actor Brian Don
• 1:29:18
  Levius quota Mass, who I think 1 and the reinvention of quota
• 1:29:21
  mass from sort of melancholic, flawed pioneer punished, you
• 1:29:28
  know, just because that seems to be the way of things.
• 1:29:31
  If you're a pioneer, you have to be punished to bawling bully
• 1:29:34
  without a conscience. And also, unfortunately, by that
• 1:29:38
  stage in son Levy's career, without much acting ability
• 1:29:42
  anymore. I think he I mean, it's a bad
• 1:29:44
  interpretation aside, it's a bad performance.
• 1:29:48
  But, you know, you talk to John Carpenter and he goes, no,
• 1:29:51
  that's exactly what Quaid a mash should be.
• 1:29:53
  You know, the the dogged scientist who doesn't give her
• 1:29:55
  monkeys and doesn't play by the, you know, fluffy British
• 1:29:58
  bureaucratic rules and cuts his way through the system and he's
• 1:30:01
  like a gumshoe. And and, you know, you can you
• 1:30:04
  can write a very forceful treaties on why that works.
• 1:30:08
  And yeah, I, I get, is it I? And, and actually Val Guest
• 1:30:11
  directs the first two in a kind of cinema verite style that if
• 1:30:15
  you've seen something like his wonderful film the the Day the
• 1:30:20
  Earth Caught Fire, which is sort of very journalistic.
• 1:30:22
  It it, it, it does have a kind of grainy black and white
• 1:30:25
  realism about it. That that juxtaposed with the,
• 1:30:28
  with the, you know, the highfalutin sci-fi is a is a
• 1:30:31
  good stylistic choice. And, and, and Guest directs them
• 1:30:35
  very well. But is it that the, the, the,
• 1:30:38
  the, the, the diligence is dialed down a bit so that the,
• 1:30:41
  the astronaut in, in creative mass experiment isn't an
• 1:30:44
  amalgamation of all three men whose, whose residual humanity
• 1:30:48
  is the key to saving the day? He's just been taken over by an
• 1:30:52
  alien and turns into a big monster that they blow up.
• 1:30:55
  You know, so there's this you, you can see why Neil was not,
• 1:30:59
  not delighted by it, because a lot of the intelligence it, it
• 1:31:02
  becomes in places a bit more like the film that he was
• 1:31:04
  spoofing in the serial then. But they're still as examples.
• 1:31:09
  If, if the serials didn't exist, I think you'd hold, you'd hold,
• 1:31:12
  well, you still would hold them up as a, as a high watermark of,
• 1:31:15
  of British film. And it was, you know, it was, it
• 1:31:17
  was very helpful in the development of Hammer.
• 1:31:20
  You know, they're just in the way that the TV versions were,
• 1:31:24
  you know, important milestones in the development of
• 1:31:26
  television. The, the films are important
• 1:31:29
  milestones in the development of British film and certainly
• 1:31:32
  British film of that type. And then then they waited a few
• 1:31:36
  years to do quota mass and the pit, which is, which is the only
• 1:31:39
  one of the 50 serials that got gets colour treatment.
• 1:31:43
  And it's yeah, it's a it's a good film.
• 1:31:46
  But I, I am so. And for some people, I think the
• 1:31:50
  film of quota mass and the pit is the, is the best of all quota
• 1:31:53
  mass. But the because I know that TV
• 1:31:56
  series by the syllable, I miss the bits that aren't there.
• 1:32:02
  I miss some of the performances and and I just think the
• 1:32:06
  haunting black and white of the TV version fits the material
• 1:32:10
  slightly better for me, even though there's much to recommend
• 1:32:13
  the film and it's and it's and it's very strong.
• 1:32:16
  I I'm I'm going to seek out the movies.
• 1:32:20
  I that's quite a mess of the pitch.
• 1:32:21
  Seems so doctored for TV because it's essentially for the first
• 1:32:26
  sort of 4 episodes. It's one or two sets, isn't it?
• 1:32:28
  It's it's a couple of locations. I can't imagine that translating
• 1:32:32
  as a movie, but maybe I'll eat my words.
• 1:32:34
  Well, they, they do the very intelligent thing of resetting
• 1:32:36
  it. And you know, there's a
• 1:32:37
  reference in the TV version to, you know, poltergeist outbreaks.
• 1:32:41
  And they said, you know, at one point there was a new tube
• 1:32:43
  extension. And actually I decided to set
• 1:32:45
  the film in a tube extension. OK.
• 1:32:48
  So it's, so it's a bit, if you know, if you're a fan of the Web
• 1:32:51
  of Fear, it's got a little bit of it's got a little bit of
• 1:32:53
  echoes of that. The film, the film's the film's
• 1:32:57
  good. But I, I love the series so
• 1:33:00
  much. You know, it would be, it would
• 1:33:04
  it would have to, you know, have to love me very hard at night.
• 1:33:07
  The film of to to make me forget my my, my youthful dalliances
• 1:33:13
  with the TV version. Well then can I ask you just to
• 1:33:17
  sort of bring this to a conclusion for you to summarize
• 1:33:19
  your thoughts on as near impossible task probably on
• 1:33:23
  quota mass as a whole and the place it hold in your heart?
• 1:33:29
  Well, I think for any of us that are fans of archive television,
• 1:33:32
  it's it's, it's really important because you can trace the
• 1:33:35
  lineage of much of what we love back to it.
• 1:33:37
  I think the other thing about it is because when we're used to
• 1:33:39
  watching old stuff, it's it's flaws become apparent just
• 1:33:42
  because of the passage of time. And I'm so glad that you, you,
• 1:33:47
  you know, when you were corresponding with me, having
• 1:33:51
  come to them fresh, that that your reactions were the same as
• 1:33:54
  mine that I had all those years ago when I was watching them,
• 1:33:57
  probably before you were born of, of going I, I can't believe
• 1:34:02
  how good this is. I was expecting to have to make
• 1:34:05
  compromises for the act. I'm.
• 1:34:06
  Not I was expecting to have to make compromises for production.
• 1:34:09
  I'm not. And, and then the writing, I
• 1:34:12
  think, you know, there's a reason, there's a reason Nigel
• 1:34:15
  Neal is so admired because he was on another level.
• 1:34:19
  He's an extremely imaginative, brilliant writer.
• 1:34:24
  And not just of the genre tropes that we love that push our
• 1:34:28
  buttons, but what he actually does with those to make them to
• 1:34:31
  to make them resonant. And then also what he does with
• 1:34:33
  character as well. They're spooky, they're
• 1:34:36
  exciting, they're thought provoking, they're hugely
• 1:34:40
  intelligent, they work, they're rigorously fitted to together
• 1:34:43
  like clockwork. And if you like Doctor Who, I
• 1:34:46
  mean, the only thing it's it's not sort of as quirkily, funnily
• 1:34:50
  funny as Doctor Who can be. There's no sort of other
• 1:34:52
  otherworldliness. And in fact, where quite a mass
• 1:34:55
  tries to be funny because Nigel Neil considered a lot of what he
• 1:34:59
  wrote to be sort of comedy. I I think some of the dated sort
• 1:35:02
  of working class character types are the perhaps the the the
• 1:35:07
  elements of the productions that time has been least kind to.
• 1:35:11
  But they still give good actors a chance to have a bit of bit of
• 1:35:13
  fun. You know, so it's, it's not
• 1:35:15
  quite as quirky or zany as, as, as Doctor Who, but in terms of
• 1:35:19
  being high end, high quality science fiction, if you if you
• 1:35:22
  like Doctor Who, I think you would, you would really enjoy
• 1:35:26
  equating us. And I think it's you, you know,
• 1:35:29
  it's the genesis of much of what we love.
• 1:35:31
  So if you are, if you are a lover of all ourselves, you
• 1:35:35
  know, don't watch the mutants for the 5th time.
• 1:35:39
  Watch Quasi Mass and the Pit for the 1st.
• 1:35:41
  Why would you do that honestly? I mean, I should think I've
• 1:35:44
  watched the mutants about 13 or 14.
• 1:35:47
  Times. Yeah, me too.
• 1:35:48
  Weren't weren't the Twitter question I'm happy to stay and
• 1:35:51
  ask. Oh.
• 1:35:52
  Yes, of course. I mean, I'm just going to add to
• 1:35:55
  that very briefly. Don't be me and be frightened of
• 1:35:58
  watching something from the 1950s, because you are going to
• 1:36:01
  be very pleasantly surprised. They're amazing productions,
• 1:36:05
  aren't they? Yeah, especially Kwait Masten
• 1:36:08
  Lapeer, which genuinely felt very modern.
• 1:36:12
  I thought there was one sequence which really impressed me where
• 1:36:15
  they do the pan across the newspapers, show the passing of
• 1:36:19
  time, how things have developed, and it's like a 15 second
• 1:36:22
  sequence. And I was just like, they would
• 1:36:25
  do that now. I mean, not quite like that.
• 1:36:28
  But the ambition is the same. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
• 1:36:32
  OK, OK, OK, let's see what we've got here.
• 1:36:36
  So Thief asks. Do you agree with Neil that
• 1:36:39
  quota mass conclusion was miscast?
• 1:36:42
  If so, who should have played the roles?
• 1:36:46
  Oh, that's a tricky 1. I mean, he, I actually think
• 1:36:48
  John Mills is, is very good. But I could see Neil said he,
• 1:36:52
  he, he felt he, he was a little sort of beleaguered in the role,
• 1:36:57
  but he, and as I say, he was very rude about Simon
• 1:37:00
  Mccorkindale. I, I, I don't think Barbara
• 1:37:05
  Kellerman's great. I don't think Bruce de Mason's
• 1:37:08
  great. So it's, it's, it's, it's, it's,
• 1:37:11
  it's not, I, I think as strong a unit as, as some of the other
• 1:37:15
  equator masses. But I think Mills is fine.
• 1:37:17
  I think Simon Mccorkindale is actually excellent.
• 1:37:22
  And some of the smaller parts are very nicely.
• 1:37:24
  I say Bruce Purchase is great in it, but who it's a hard one.
• 1:37:31
  Who would, who would you at that time?
• 1:37:34
  I at that time, who would I have cast?
• 1:37:39
  I don't know. That's put me on the spot.
• 1:37:48
  Let let that percolate as we go on, because I'm trying to think
• 1:37:51
  of who would have been around in 7879, who could have done it.
• 1:37:56
  Well, Michael Seeley asks, how's the book?
• 1:38:00
  Oh. Hello Michael.
• 1:38:00
  He writes good books. How's the book coming along and
• 1:38:03
  can you reveal the publisher? And just one word thirsting.
• 1:38:07
  Oh, bless you. Well, that's nice coming from
• 1:38:09
  Michael, who's written probably, you know, three or three or four
• 1:38:13
  books in the time that I've been typing the contents page of
• 1:38:16
  mine. Thanks, Michael.
• 1:38:20
  The publisher is 10 Acre Films, Stuart Manning's outfit.
• 1:38:27
  I, I, I talked to, to Stuart. I did, I, it was with milk,
• 1:38:31
  milk. And they, they, they, they were,
• 1:38:34
  they're no longer in business. And I was floating about a
• 1:38:36
  little bit and I, I had a chat with, with Stuart and he's
• 1:38:40
  brilliant and, and I loved their long game book.
• 1:38:43
  Have you read that about the, the, the wilderness period
• 1:38:46
  between, you know, about the relaunch of Doctor Who
• 1:38:50
  basically, you know, you know, when Russell T Davis was, was
• 1:38:56
  bringing back Doctor Who and it's an excellent account of, of
• 1:39:00
  Doctor Who coming back to the screen.
• 1:39:02
  And I, and I thought that was a superb piece of work.
• 1:39:04
  And I talked to Stuart and that. Yeah, they're doing it.
• 1:39:07
  And we've got some other plans as well, some other related
• 1:39:10
  things. And I'm very excited about the,
• 1:39:13
  and it is awful that it's taken me this long.
• 1:39:17
  So apologies, Michael, and I'm sorry.
• 1:39:19
  I will quench your thirst hopefully this year.
• 1:39:22
  I, I would like to get it out in time for the, for the 70th
• 1:39:26
  anniversary of the crater mouse experiment, which is in, which
• 1:39:30
  is on July the 18th this year. But I've just realized it's
• 1:39:34
  January and, but I have written a lot.
• 1:39:37
  I've written, you know, I've written 180,000 words and
• 1:39:42
  there's loads of stuff in there that people don't know.
• 1:39:44
  I've I've uncovered so, so even though it's taken way too long,
• 1:39:47
  seeing as I wrote to my first actor in 1989, if I'd published
• 1:39:51
  it prior to that, there wouldn't be a lot of the stuff that I now
• 1:39:55
  have that I've only discovered in recent years.
• 1:40:01
  So good things come to those. You know, to be fair, you know,
• 1:40:03
  the Martians took 5,000,000 years to see through their plans
• 1:40:08
  in great Mass and the pit. So in a way what I'm doing is,
• 1:40:11
  is I was just, it's very sad. I was just, I've just learnt how
• 1:40:15
  to digitize cassette tapes, which is very Nigel Neal because
• 1:40:19
  he was all about recording things on Stone and.
• 1:40:22
  To, to digitize cassette tape. So I digitized all the, because
• 1:40:25
  a few of the actors or people that I wrote to who were quite
• 1:40:28
  elderly said, well, I'll just record my answers.
• 1:40:31
  Instead of writing you a letter, I'll record it onto cassette
• 1:40:34
  tape. So I thought I'd better preserve
• 1:40:37
  these from posterity. And I, and I, and I and I got
• 1:40:39
  this machine to turn tape into digital.
• 1:40:42
  And this old actor, Arnold Diamond, who's in the quaint
• 1:40:44
  mouse experiment in 1984, said, I've just found your letter.
• 1:40:48
  I'm so sorry. I do hope it's not too late for
• 1:40:52
  the book because it's taken me three months to reply to you.
• 1:40:54
  And I was like, God, it's actually taken me.
• 1:40:57
  And I realised, and I realised that actually when I was
• 1:41:00
  listening to that, it was as far away.
• 1:41:03
  Him recording his memories of the Quota Mass Experiment was as
• 1:41:07
  far away from me now as the Quota Mass Experiment.
• 1:41:12
  This ancient production that he was talking about was from him
• 1:41:15
  when he was recording those words.
• 1:41:18
  So the passage of time between the production he was talking
• 1:41:21
  about and him recording that interview for me and me then
• 1:41:25
  digitizing that interview today. And it's weird because me
• 1:41:30
  getting that cassette from him seems like not that long ago.
• 1:41:33
  Whereas of course at the time I was writing to about something I
• 1:41:37
  wasn't even sure he'd remember doing.
• 1:41:38
  You know it's time it. Is humbling, isn't it?
• 1:41:41
  Honestly. But yeah, hopefully the book is
• 1:41:43
  out this year and it's it's, yeah, 10 acre films.
• 1:41:48
  Joe Short asked would you like to hear an expanded quite a mass
• 1:41:52
  audio drama series like Big Finish I've done with survivors
• 1:41:56
  and who, apart from yourself, would you see as the.
• 1:42:00
  Oh, just Joe have me down as some sort of egotist.
• 1:42:03
  I I thought I would play if I was to do it.
• 1:42:08
  I'd play full of love anyway, the funny journalist.
• 1:42:11
  You don't get the best of of of full of love in creative Mass
• 1:42:17
  and the pit, but he's he's the best character in the creative
• 1:42:20
  mass experiment. So I I think it's difficult.
• 1:42:28
  I was actually approached by the BBC to do radio versions of the
• 1:42:32
  serials, bring them up to date. But the the Wrights are so
• 1:42:36
  mired. That was after we'd done the
• 1:42:37
  road. The Wrights are so mired and
• 1:42:40
  and, and and under so many heavy layers of I don't think anybody
• 1:42:44
  really quite knows who's allowed to do anything with quota mass.
• 1:42:47
  So, so it didn't didn't happen. So it's, it's practically, I
• 1:42:51
  think impossible. But I also think, sadly, I think
• 1:42:55
  quota mass is probably Nigel Neil and, and I think I'm not
• 1:42:59
  sure what could be added to what quota mass does and has with
• 1:43:05
  Nigel Neil not being here. And I and I and, and I know we
• 1:43:09
  have this desire to go. If we love a thing, can we have
• 1:43:12
  more of it? Can we keep it going?
• 1:43:14
  Doctor Who stands carrying on and changing and developing
• 1:43:17
  because it's. That it always.
• 1:43:19
  Has yeah, it's that man, you know, it changes every story
• 1:43:21
  because they go to a different place in time.
• 1:43:24
  I I, I think Quasimas, what we have is, is pretty special.
• 1:43:29
  And I can only see me being disappointed by some aspect of a
• 1:43:36
  of a new version. So I, I think let's just be
• 1:43:39
  happy with what we've got. I mean.
• 1:43:41
  Or, or, I don't know, they're trying modernising it in some
• 1:43:44
  way and it just would lose. Yeah.
• 1:43:47
  It's potential quatamousness. Do a new thing.
• 1:43:50
  Do a new thing. If you want to capture the magic
• 1:43:52
  of quatamous, do do something else, but let it do the things
• 1:43:55
  that you love about quatamous. But don't, don't hang that
• 1:43:58
  around its neck, because that changes that skews expectations
• 1:44:02
  and and also then reverberates back to the to the originals.
• 1:44:05
  I'm I'm going to say Pete Lambert's comment, but I can
• 1:44:08
  hear you screaming in pain before I even say it.
• 1:44:11
  I I is that very Pete Lambert? I love very Pete Lambert.
• 1:44:14
  Oh. He's one of my very A.
• 1:44:16
  Great Twitterer. Hello.
• 1:44:17
  Very Pete Lambert. Wouldn't it be great to have a
• 1:44:20
  special edition colourised with CGI effects?
• 1:44:23
  I'm joking, no? No, no it wouldn't.
• 1:44:33
  I mean with a quite a mass experiment, it would just be
• 1:44:34
  great to have anything. But yeah, no, no, I like it in
• 1:44:38
  black and white. Oh, I loved it.
• 1:44:42
  The more I'm watching black, I'm exploring black and white TV,
• 1:44:45
  the the more sort of visually arresting I'm fine.
• 1:44:48
  I love it. I I love it.
• 1:44:50
  There's nothing spookier than the than black and white.
• 1:44:54
  Maybe it's the the association I have with those universal black
• 1:44:57
  and white movies, but black and white has always because it's
• 1:45:01
  the residual, slightly maudlin thing.
• 1:45:03
  Me maudlin never of you know, it's always you sort of knew
• 1:45:06
  when you were a kid. If you're watching something in
• 1:45:07
  black and white, sort of everyone in it was dead as well.
• 1:45:09
  Do you know what I mean? So it wasn't the juice.
• 1:45:11
  You were watching something spooky.
• 1:45:12
  The thing itself was a sort of remembrance, a reconjuring of of
• 1:45:18
  something, you know, long dead. It was a resurrection of the
• 1:45:21
  dead, which I found really sort of, which is why I now write a
• 1:45:24
  pictures and always tweet when somebody dies.
• 1:45:26
  I'm very there is something wrong with me?
• 1:45:30
  I I don't think so. So I found your end of year
• 1:45:33
  montage very, very moving. Actually, I feel with black and
• 1:45:37
  white TV I'm kind of exploring something preserved.
• 1:45:39
  You know, there's something, I'm unearthing something.
• 1:45:43
  I find it, I find it terribly moving.
• 1:45:45
  The fact that, you know, the, that little figure moving behind
• 1:45:48
  that pillow or whatever is somebody like you and me is
• 1:45:52
  somebody that had a life prior to that with, you know, massive
• 1:45:55
  things happening to them, great emotional things to trivial
• 1:45:58
  little things. And then after that had a life
• 1:46:01
  where, you know, they, they, you know, fell in love.
• 1:46:05
  They had kids, they had disasters, they had triumphs.
• 1:46:08
  They learned that they were going to die, you know, and but
• 1:46:11
  that's what, but we've got that of them a bit where they go
• 1:46:14
  across the street. I, I find that I find, is there
• 1:46:16
  something really extraordinary about that?
• 1:46:20
  You and I talked before on a previous commentary about John
• 1:46:24
  Levine's interesting statement about the child in the Time
• 1:46:29
  Monster. Yeah.
• 1:46:30
  But I do think there's something in that, like, I think he said
• 1:46:33
  it in the wrong way, but I'd absolutely agree with what he's
• 1:46:36
  saying, that it's there for posterity.
• 1:46:37
  That person's life is on record, and we all need after they're
• 1:46:41
  gone. Yeah.
• 1:46:43
  OK. Andy Parkinson.
• 1:46:45
  Lovely Andy. Hello, Andy.
• 1:46:47
  I remember seeing the Andre Morrell version when I was quite
• 1:46:51
  young and it frightened the pants off me.
• 1:46:54
  But it's hard to find the series now on a streaming platform.
• 1:46:57
  Why is that? Yeah, now you see, I woke up
• 1:47:00
  this morning to about 30 tweets and I was like, what?
• 1:47:05
  And then I started working backwards.
• 1:47:07
  And so that was one of the first ones I saw.
• 1:47:08
  So I replied to it and and then I saw more and more questions
• 1:47:12
  and I was going on, am I some sort of unpaid bloody Oracle?
• 1:47:16
  What's going on here? And it was only when I got to
• 1:47:18
  the bottom that it was you going.
• 1:47:20
  So does anyone have any questions for?
• 1:47:21
  I just thought everybody had decided to bother me this
• 1:47:24
  morning and asked me questions about because I do sometimes get
• 1:47:27
  a bit resentful when people sort of don't bother to look at
• 1:47:29
  something up on IMDb and send me a message Facebook message
• 1:47:32
  instead and after. All coincidence if everybody
• 1:47:36
  contacted me about quite a mass on the same day.
• 1:47:39
  Yes, well, I I, I was I mean I was half awake.
• 1:47:41
  I forgot, you know, and any yes, so I so I, I answered Andy's and
• 1:47:47
  then and then sort of went back to the beginning and realised,
• 1:47:49
  Ah, no, I don't need to translate.
• 1:47:50
  But yes, I did answer Andy's, but for but just to repeat it
• 1:47:53
  orally is it was actually on iPlayer.
• 1:47:56
  But screw the streaming platforms.
• 1:48:00
  There is a beautifully remastered from the Negatives
• 1:48:03
  Blu-ray which has a commentary on every episode, which I think
• 1:48:06
  for something made in 195859 is not bad.
• 1:48:11
  And I opened up my archive. A lot of those taped interviews
• 1:48:14
  that I had with the designer and the visual effects guys who are
• 1:48:18
  no longer with us have been put on there.
• 1:48:20
  So it's not just me talking. You've actually got some of
• 1:48:23
  those guys. We've also got sort of live
• 1:48:26
  contributors as well. We went to the, the houses of a
• 1:48:29
  few people who were still alive. So it's a, it's a sort of mosaic
• 1:48:33
  of different, different ways of doing commentary.
• 1:48:35
  But we, you know, we were asked to do a commentary on an
• 1:48:38
  episode. We, we filled it.
• 1:48:40
  We did all six. I tracked, I found a load of
• 1:48:43
  photographs that I was saving for the book, but we we couldn't
• 1:48:47
  have a, we couldn't have a photo gallery that was definitive
• 1:48:50
  without being definitive. So it's got all the photographs
• 1:48:53
  I found from, from quite a mass and the pit from different
• 1:48:56
  places, somewhere at Paddy Russell's house somewhere
• 1:48:58
  Anyway, So it's a, it's a damn good DVD.
• 1:49:02
  We worked really hard on it for about a quid.
• 1:49:06
  And so you get your money's worth, I tell you.
• 1:49:09
  And it looks beautiful. Not DVD blue.
• 1:49:12
  I know it's a passion. For you people, you know, that's
• 1:49:14
  why I pay you a quid, isn't it? But but Blu-ray.
• 1:49:17
  It was a Blu-ray, not a DVD Blu-ray.
• 1:49:21
  OK, the gorgeous Robert Valentine, big Finnish writer.
• 1:49:25
  Oh yeah. Hi Rob pops in with two
• 1:49:28
  questions. Though Neil disliked Doctor Who,
• 1:49:30
  to what extent does the Professor owe the Doctor his
• 1:49:33
  survival in popular consciousness?
• 1:49:38
  I'm not sure that he does, because I think Doctor Who fans
• 1:49:42
  will be surprised when they watch Crater mass.
• 1:49:44
  We go, oh, OK, I didn't realise quite how many of our Dr. E
• 1:49:49
  adventures were so directly influenced by Quota Mass.
• 1:49:52
  But I think Quota Mass cast enough of a shadow, as I say,
• 1:49:56
  spoken of with hallowed tones by our parents and grandparents
• 1:50:00
  that reputationally quota mass would have survived whether
• 1:50:05
  Doctor Who existed or not. And I think it's a shame now
• 1:50:08
  that in recent years people seem not to have heard of it because
• 1:50:11
  that definitely wasn't the case. 1015 years, you know, you'd say
• 1:50:15
  to teachers, oh, quota mass, they go, oh, yes, quota mass.
• 1:50:18
  So I'm I'm sad that a generation or two of maybe it's it's it's
• 1:50:23
  it's not in their in their race memory, as it were.
• 1:50:27
  But I don't think that's anything to do with Doctor Who
• 1:50:29
  or otherwise. And I just, I, I hope that the,
• 1:50:37
  so long as there are Doctor Who fans now that they might, yes,
• 1:50:40
  they might, they might invoke equation mass, but you know,
• 1:50:43
  you'd never seen it up until this.
• 1:50:44
  So you knew of it, but you'd never actually watched it so.
• 1:50:48
  I know I knew of it because of Doctor Who, because it's
• 1:50:50
  mentioned by so many of the creators of Doctor Who.
• 1:50:54
  So actually, maybe I'll backtrack.
• 1:50:55
  Maybe originally it didn't, but maybe now that that general my
• 1:50:59
  my parents generation is is you know, is is dying out.
• 1:51:03
  Maybe, yeah, no, maybe probably now that it does.
• 1:51:06
  But I, I I resist that philosophically, even though in
• 1:51:11
  actuality it's probably true. Is my fudged answer to that.
• 1:51:15
  Accidentally, you've answered his second question as well.
• 1:51:18
  My old dad, 79, doesn't like science fiction at all, but he
• 1:51:22
  still utters the name Quatermass in hushed, respectful tones.
• 1:51:27
  What's that all about? Well, I, yeah, I think we've
• 1:51:30
  talked about that and I used my mum as the example I and I think
• 1:51:34
  Rob sums it up perfectly there that yeah, for for that
• 1:51:37
  generation, it was even non science fiction aficionados.
• 1:51:41
  It was. Oh yeah.
• 1:51:42
  But that was that was a serious business.
• 1:51:45
  And it was at the, you know, it was the dawn of the medium as
• 1:51:47
  well, you know, the. Description there hushed,
• 1:51:50
  respectful tones that's that's. Exactly how it was spoken of in
• 1:51:54
  our house too, yeah. All of Time and Space podcast
• 1:51:57
  are seeing how good Quota Mass and The Pit is.
• 1:51:59
  It makes me wish we had more of the original series.
• 1:52:02
  Did you like the David Tennant version and do you think Quota
• 1:52:05
  Mass is due for another remake? So maybe the second-half of that
• 1:52:08
  question, we haven't. I all I would like I would like
• 1:52:14
  to do the missing 4 episodes of the quota mass experiment as
• 1:52:22
  live in a studio multi camera black and white with slightly a
• 1:52:32
  bit like that mission to the unknown.
• 1:52:34
  You know, with with the with the acting evoking the style of
• 1:52:38
  television acting from the time. So that we had a sort of record
• 1:52:44
  of what it might have been like, a bit like the recreation of the
• 1:52:47
  of the dads armies that they did on UK Gold with Kevin McNally.
• 1:52:51
  And not to try and do anything with it or reinvent it or make
• 1:52:54
  it more relevant, but to actually give us an audio visual
• 1:52:58
  representation of what it might have been like.
• 1:53:00
  I would like that because I'm a completist and a purist and I
• 1:53:04
  think it would be quite instructive.
• 1:53:05
  And it would be, it would be nice to see those scenes
• 1:53:08
  rendered, you know, in an approximation of of of how they
• 1:53:11
  would have been done at the time.
• 1:53:14
  This isn't a question, but it's a comment and she'll never
• 1:53:17
  forgive me if I don't say it. Lucy McCall says I can't think
• 1:53:22
  of a question, but I'll say that both the complete series, I
• 1:53:26
  think she means quite a mess in the pit, are unnerving in a way
• 1:53:29
  that stays with you long after watching, and that when I saw
• 1:53:32
  the man rush out the ship in the pit it disturbed me so much I
• 1:53:36
  had to turn it off and have a little rest.
• 1:53:38
  Good. Yeah, it's it's one of the great
• 1:53:40
  sequences in in in TV's TV sci-fi.
• 1:53:43
  It it, it printed itself on generations of viewers and it's
• 1:53:47
  and it's really well done. There's a question here I don't
• 1:53:50
  understand, so you're going to have to explain it to me, John
• 1:53:52
  Porter asks. Where's SEK gone?
• 1:53:56
  Who's SEK? CE you mean the actor The Yeah,
• 1:53:59
  CEC. That's the actor who plays
• 1:54:02
  Doctor Matthew Rooney as CEC Slinder.
• 1:54:05
  SEC CEC is short for is short for Cecil, so it's C Slinder.
• 1:54:10
  But British, British people did pronounce it SEK actually, but
• 1:54:16
  it should be pronounced cease. I, I don't know.
• 1:54:18
  I don't know if he means where, where's he gone in the sense
• 1:54:21
  that I've got a picture of his gravestone.
• 1:54:24
  He's buried in, he's buried in, in Canada.
• 1:54:28
  He was a, he was Auk based Canadian actor.
• 1:54:32
  He plays Felix Leiter in Goldfinger.
• 1:54:34
  He's excellent as Doctor Rooney. I think he, he, he is a key to
• 1:54:38
  it's sort of modernness because he has that sort of vital, sort
• 1:54:41
  of slightly more Americanized delivery that sort of works to,
• 1:54:48
  to, to help that some of the more sort of staid, stuffy
• 1:54:51
  British acting styles and, and, and, and, and, and sort of
• 1:54:55
  contrasts with that and it makes you feel like you're watching
• 1:54:57
  something that's, that's getting a bit more modern and
• 1:54:59
  naturalistic. I don't know if he mean, I don't
• 1:55:02
  know what he means by Wes. He's he's, he's, he's, he's gone
• 1:55:07
  to the, the, the great Martian spaceship in the sky, but not
• 1:55:10
  before writing to me and sending me a lovely letter full of
• 1:55:15
  trivial facts, like he liked Branston Pickle when he came to
• 1:55:19
  England, things like that. I.
• 1:55:21
  Can't wait to read his books, you know.
• 1:55:24
  Well, my dear friend. Cyhar asked.
• 1:55:28
  Should Quaidamas have come back in the 70s?
• 1:55:30
  Was it specifically a 50s thing? I I think there's a good,
• 1:55:34
  there's a good argument to say it was specifically a 50s thing,
• 1:55:37
  but I like the fact that that 70s version exists.
• 1:55:40
  I think it speaks to a lot about, you know, how television
• 1:55:44
  works. I think it's really interesting
• 1:55:46
  to have this all film ITV version of something that was
• 1:55:49
  such a phenomenon in the 1950s. And as a result, as well, we get
• 1:55:53
  the reprints of the script books, which Nigel Neil wrote
• 1:55:56
  some lovely introductions to, which means that I've got 2
• 1:56:00
  copies of, of, of those publications, which is lovely.
• 1:56:03
  And, and I think it adds to the, the sort of mythic nature of it
• 1:56:08
  that, that, that it was sort of revisited.
• 1:56:10
  It was, it was deemed worthy of a revisit.
• 1:56:13
  And it was a bit of a television event, but they were scuppered
• 1:56:17
  by a bit of, of, of chance and scheduling as well.
• 1:56:22
  So no, I, I, I like the fact that you suddenly got this funny
• 1:56:27
  other one that pops up at some point.
• 1:56:30
  But I can equally understand why people, you know, don't think of
• 1:56:33
  it in this, in the same grouping and and and and why they
• 1:56:40
  identify it very much with, you know, the style of the the
• 1:56:44
  1950s. But no, I'll, I'll, I'll have
• 1:56:46
  it. It's more.
• 1:56:49
  Johnny Morris asks. Oh, I have.
• 1:56:52
  We've been here already. Equator Mass 2.
• 1:56:54
  Should they have stopped at episode 5?
• 1:56:56
  Yes, yes. Well, that answers that one.
• 1:57:02
  Thief asked. With the recent resurgence of
• 1:57:04
  interesting folk horror, could no There's another remake
• 1:57:07
  question. Everyone wants to know about a
• 1:57:08
  remake, but we'll skip over that one.
• 1:57:11
  Sorry Fee, we were happy from you.
• 1:57:13
  David G asks. Is Imps and Demons truly one of
• 1:57:16
  the best episodes of TV of all time?
• 1:57:19
  Well, that's the episode you chose.
• 1:57:21
  Oh, then yes it is. I mean, yeah, I mean, I, I think
• 1:57:25
  Quota Mass and the Pit is one of the greatest television dramas
• 1:57:30
  of all time, irrespective of genre.
• 1:57:33
  I think it's a phenomenal piece of television.
• 1:57:37
  And and you know, I love Doctor Who, but I but but but in in
• 1:57:44
  terms of, you know, grown up television drama, drama, not,
• 1:57:51
  not sci-fi, not not entertainment, proper drama,
• 1:57:56
  like I I would, I'd put it in there with secret army, with our
• 1:57:59
  friends in the north, with the singing detective, with, you
• 1:58:03
  know, proper grown up, intelligent, smart, clever, but
• 1:58:09
  also entertaining, accessible, imaginative.
• 1:58:14
  It's a high watermark in television drama and one of the
• 1:58:17
  best things ever made. I think quite a mass on the bit
• 1:58:20
  and impson demons is a great episode.
• 1:58:21
  It certainly is not. Sure.
• 1:58:23
  How you keep doing this? His second question was.
• 1:58:25
  And what is the secret of Pitt's success in longevity?
• 1:58:28
  I wish you'd just answered, yeah.
• 1:58:31
  It's, it's, it's brilliant. It's it's, it's full of great
• 1:58:33
  ideas and it's really well done. Do you know Secret Army is one
• 1:58:37
  of the shows that some of this show?
• 1:58:39
  I've never watched an episode so I cannot wait to explore.
• 1:58:41
  That, oh, it's fantastic. It's excellent.
• 1:58:44
  I'm hoping a low low hasn't spoiled it for me.
• 1:58:47
  Nah, you'd be fine. You'll be fine.
• 1:58:49
  It's it's really good. It's really strong, great cast
• 1:58:52
  and and and how bleak it is will really surprise you.
• 1:58:58
  It's you know, it's, it's pretty on the nose.
• 1:59:00
  We think. I think we think of things made
• 1:59:02
  in the olden days as being a little bit old fashioned, don't
• 1:59:04
  we? They'd never shock us like they
• 1:59:05
  do with television now. No, it's really, it's really,
• 1:59:09
  it's really horrible in places. Secret army and and the heroes
• 1:59:12
  aren't necessarily nice. That's the other thing where you
• 1:59:15
  go then they're not. They're not asking us to like
• 1:59:17
  these people or what these people have to do.
• 1:59:21
  Oh, it's great. Sounds wonderful.
• 1:59:23
  Why do you talk about dark? I watched Tenko recently and
• 1:59:26
  that was yeah. Yeah.
• 1:59:29
  Uncompromising. Well, that's that is the end of
• 1:59:32
  our questions. I have to say it is absolutely
• 1:59:36
  beguiling being educated by Toby.
• 1:59:38
  And I, well, I, I hope I didn't go on and I hope I didn't give
• 1:59:41
  away too much of what happens. I tried to keep some spoilers
• 1:59:45
  under wraps, but I needed to give some things away in order
• 1:59:48
  to explain why it's good. So I hope that's been all right.
• 1:59:52
  I think, I think we've done, we've been going nearly two in a
• 1:59:54
  bit hours now. We've done a fair summation of
• 1:59:57
  Crazy Mass and the Pit. Obviously you said your book is
• 2:00:00
  due out at some point this year. Yeah, it's got to be out this
• 2:00:06
  year. If it's not out this year, I I
• 2:00:08
  think I deserve to be buried in a builder's excavation in
• 2:00:12
  Knightsbridge in the next 5,000,000 years and then I will
• 2:00:16
  be dug up and forced to apologise.
• 2:00:19
  Street with. Blazes and.
• 2:00:21
  Spillings, but. Yes, well, well, I mean my
• 2:00:25
  surname gets spelt in so many different ways anyway.
• 2:00:28
  Haydocks Lane would it would have haddocks Lane above it.
• 2:00:33
  I first saw that and I was like, well that's odd.
• 2:00:35
  That's a weird error to have right at the beginning of this.
• 2:00:39
  It's cleverer than that, isn't it?
• 2:00:40
  Like it was a plot point. Yes, the listener might not be
• 2:00:43
  aware that the opening shot of Kwetz Master and the Pitage is
• 2:00:46
  set on Hobbs Lane. A builder's excavation at Hobbs
• 2:00:48
  Lane but Hobb. It has two street signs, one
• 2:00:52
  modern, 1 old, and in the first spelling it is with a single B
• 2:00:55
  and in the second spelling it is with two BS and there is a
• 2:00:59
  reason for that but I will not explain.
• 2:01:03
  But it's great. It's a really smart piece of
• 2:01:04
  storytelling. Honestly, Toby, I need you in my
• 2:01:06
  life all the time. Every time I'm obscure, you
• 2:01:09
  could explain what I'm going on about just like that.
• 2:01:12
  It's been wonderful. Thank you very much for having
• 2:01:16
  me and doing this, and I believe at some point in the future you
• 2:01:21
  and I are going to embark on 7 episodes of The Silurians.
• 2:01:25
  Yes. I can't wait to do it's the only
• 2:01:29
  only story from season 7 I haven't covered now so.
• 2:01:32
  Oh really well, I love season 7 because it is quite, quite a
• 2:01:36
  messy and I and I and I think the Silurians is is sort of
• 2:01:41
  underrated. It's really strong.
• 2:01:44
  And I, you know, I think, oh God, will I have enough to say
• 2:01:47
  over 7 episodes? And then I agreed to talk to you
• 2:01:50
  for an hour and you, you barely get to say anything.
• 2:01:53
  And I gab on for what we've just done for two and a quarter.
• 2:01:56
  So I'm sorry. I I probably can fill 7 episodes
• 2:01:59
  and I'm very very sorry about that.
• 2:02:02
  Well, I came here to learn today.
• 2:02:03
  I've learned an awful lot and it's been delightful.
• 2:02:06
  So once again, thank you very much.
• 2:02:08
  Pleasure.