It is also the memory of Professor Bernard Quatermass grappling with the pulsating giant plant that threatened to destroy the world from its rooting place in the Abbey's nave … The Quatermass Experiment frightened the life out of a vast new generation of television viewers whose sets had been acquired in order to watch the Coronation … Quatermass was one of the first series on British television to make life seem potentially terrifying.

At a pub, they find out that the nearby village of Winnderden Flats has been leveled to build an enormous industrial plant protected by armed guards, which is identical to Quatermass ' moonbase design.

After the guards ' departure Quatermass speaks with a tramp, who explains that there used to be a small government research unit consisting of a few huts by Winnderden Flats, and that a year ago they expanded and bulldozed the village, and built the plant and a prefab town for the construction workers.

Fowler takes Quatermass to meet with civil servant James Ward, who has the authority to inspect the plant.

Ward helps Quatermass and Fowler gain entry to the plant and they find that Dillon has been discharged from the infirmary and has left.

They then look around and discover that gases are pumped to the giant pressure domes from the pilot plant: ammonia, hydrogen, nitrogen and methane, as opposed to oxygen like in Quatermass ' moonbase pressure dome idea.

Back at the plant, Ward slips away to look inside a dome, and Quatermass and Fowler find him stumbling out of it dying and covered in black slime, which before his death Ward reveals was inside the dome instead of food.

Quatermass steals a guard's uniform from a lorry to gain entry to the plant.

Quatermass is narrowly saved from discovery by the rioting construction workers, who storm the plant and along with him are besieged inside the gas distribution centre, where they pump oxygen into the pressure domes to poison the ammonids, however some of the workers succumb to propaganda from the plant controllers, who offer them the chance to see inside the domes.

They fly to the asteroid and land on it, but en route Quatermass finds out that the night the plant exploded Leo was possessed by the ammonids.

Trying to discover what is going on at the plant and what has happened to Marsh, Quatermass contacts Inspector Lomax ( John Longden ), the police officer who assisted him in The Quatermass Xperiment.

Shot at by guards as he exits the plant, Quatermass returns to Lomax, explaining that he believes that plant is indeed making food, but not for human consumption.

Other scenes were shot in London including Trafalgar Square, where the police agreed to hold up the traffic for just two minutes to allow Guest take shots of trucks ferrying equipment through London to Winnerden Flats, and in the foyer of the House of Lords for the scene where Quatermass first meets Vincent Broadhead.

An intelligent and highly moral British scientist, Quatermass is a pioneer of the British space programme, heading up the British Experimental Rocket Group.

Despite Kneale's reservations about the casting, The Quatermass Xperiment was the highest-grossing film Hammer had made up to that point in their history, and has since been described by one academic as " the key British science fiction film of the 1950s.

Kneale was not keen to return to the character following this, telling one interviewer: " I blew him up ... and I don't feel inclined to invent a ' Son of Quatermass ' either.

Following the drilling attempt, a hole has somehow opened up in the wall which allows Quatermass and the others access to the interior chamber.

Quatermass is concerned that the memories encoded inside the ship, which have already been picked up by sensitive people near it, will trigger that impulse and that those affected will begin to slaughter their own.

Quatermass returns to the rocket and jettisons the nuclear motor, then flies the rocket back to earth as the motor blows up the asteroid, killing the remaining ammonids and relinquishing control over Dillon and all the ' marked ' humans, returning mankind to its former freedom.

This included digitally restored versions of all six episodes of Quatermass II, with the sound and vision of the telerecording copies cleaned up as far as possible, and some of the existing special effects inserts that survived on their original film elements being re-inserted into the episodes.

The first Quatermass film had been a major success for Hammer and, eager for a sequel, they purchased the rights to Nigel Kneale's follow up before the BBC had even begun transmission of the new serial.

The Quatermass Xperiment had been a major success for Hammer Films upon its release in 1955, becoming the company's biggest grossing film up to that time.

They held up an idiot board with his lines on and he said, “ What's this movie called ?” and they said, “ Well, it's called Quatermass 2 ”.

In May 1977, Euston Films, a subsidiary of Thames Television best known for The Sweeney ( 1975 – 1978 ), announced that they had picked up Kneale's unmade Quatermass scripts.

Following Quatermass he appeared in Gandhi ( 1982 ), Martin Chuzzlewit ( 1994 ) and Hamlet ( 1997 ), working right up to his death in 2005.

* The role in which he is pictured here, as Professor Bernard Quatermass, is that for which he is best remembered and most likely to be looked up in Wikipedia.

* The role in which he is pictured here, as Professor Bernard Quatermass, is that for which he is best remembered and most likely to be looked up in Wikipedia.

* The role in which he is pictured here, as Professor Bernard Quatermass, is one of those for which he is best remembered and one of the most likely reasons for him to be looked up in Wikipedia.

Beginning with black and white adaptations of Nigel Kneale's BBC science fiction serials The Quatermass Experiment ( 1955 ) and Quatermass II ( 1957 ), Hammer quickly graduated to deceptively lavish colour versions of Frankenstein, Dracula and The Mummy.

In the critically acclaimed and influential 1950s TV series created by Nigel Kneale, Quatermass and the Pit, depictions of supernatural horned entities, with specific reference to prehistoric cave-art and shamanistic horned head-dress are revealed to be a " race-memory " of psychic Martian grasshoppers, manifested at the climax of the film by a fiery horned god.

Hammer's first significant experiment with horror came in the form of a 1955 adaptation of Nigel Kneale's BBC Television science fiction serial The Quatermass Experiment, which was directed by Val Guest.

As a consequence of the contract with Robert Lippert, American actor Brian Donlevy was imported for the lead role, and the title was changed to The Quatermass Xperiment to cash in on the new X certificate for horror films.

The film was an unexpectedly big hit, and led to an almost equally popular 1957 sequel Quatermass 2again adapted from one of Kneale's television scripts, this time by Kneale himself and with a budget double that of the original: £ 92, 000.

The unmade prequel serial Quatermass in the Third Reich, an idea conceived by Kneale in the late 1990s, would have shown Quatermass travelling to Nazi Germany during the 1936 Berlin Olympics and becoming involved with Wernher von Braun and the German rocket programme, before helping a young Jewish refugee to escape from the country.

Despite this trauma, Quatermass continues with his space programme, and by Quatermass II ( 1955 ) is actively planning the establishment of Moon bases.

In the fourth episode of the serial he mentions that he never reached his twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, tying in with The Quatermass Memoirs later assertion of his wife's early death.

They did release an adaptation of Quatermass II in 1957, called Quatermass 2 and this time with Kneale's involvement in the script.

Hammer also purchased the film rights to Quatermass and the Pit ( released in the USA as Five Million Years to Earth ), as it had done with the previous two TV serials, although they did not release their version until 1967.

Possible remakes of one or more of the Hammer film adaptations were also mooted at various points during the 1990s, with Dan O ' Bannon scripting a potential new version of The Quatermass Experiment in 1993, but again nothing was eventually filmed.

In 1995, BBC radio producer Paul Quinn approached Kneale with the idea of making a new radio series based around Quatermass, and the resulting project was produced and aired as the five-part serial The Quatermass Memoirs on BBC Radio 3 in the spring of 1996.

The serial had three strands: a monologue from Kneale recounting the background to the creation and writing of the original 1950s serials ; archive material from both the original productions and contemporary news broadcasts ; and a dramatised strand set shortly before the 1979 serial, with Quatermass being visited in retreat in Scotland by a reporter eager to write his life story.

A live theatrical production of Quatermass and the Pit was staged, with the permission of Kneale, outdoors in a quarry at the village of Cropwell Bishop in Nottinghamshire in August 1997.

The adaptation was written by Peter Thornhill and mounted by Creation Productions, with David Longford starring as Quatermass.

" As a leading scientific innovator, Quatermass is invested with scientific and moral authority.

( In the 1979 Quatermass, he has acquired a granddaughter ; possibly connected with this is the fact that here he seems a much weaker figure who can only defeat the aliens through the sacrifice of the lives of both himself and his granddaughter ).

Although Carpenter wrote the screenplay, in the film's credits the writer is listed as Martin Quatermass, a homage repeated in the film with Kneale University.

The storyline features elements associated with Kneale ( the ancient evil aspect of both Quatermass and the Pit and The Quartermass Conclusion, the idea of messages from the future from The Road, and the scientific investigation of the supernatural from The Stone Tape ).

Shortly thereafter Ngakane went into exile in the United Kingdom, where he appeared in Quatermass and the Pit ( 1958 ) and in the television spy series Danger Man ( Deadline, 1962 ) with Patrick McGoohan.