Perhaps there is a God. Quatermass returns this year.
BBC4 is doing some kind of production of The Quatermass Experiment soon. Not a simple rebroadcast – I believe only two episodes of the 1953 original survive. Alarmingly, someone said the new version is to be 'modernized'. Never mind – fingers crossed that it'll keep the spirit of the original, even if it doesn't have a rubber-glove monster.
This from the BBC:
BBC Four controller Janice Hadlow said she was "thrilled to be bringing Quatermass back to life … It's wonderful to have one of the first 'must-watch' TV experiences that inspired the water-cooler chat of its day."
Water-cooler chat? Water-cooler? The average Briton of 1957 would have wondered what a water-cooler was, and why it would be so chatty. The water we drank then – I can remember those days, my friends, though my memories are distorted by the mighty shadow of Quatermass – came straight from the tap and was tepid. What would have been the point of cooling it, when the only purpose of extracting it from the tap was to boil it up and make tea with it?
Sometimes we glimpsed water-coolers in offices in American TV programmes. We wondered why there were no fish in those tanks.
Not that I would have had anything to do with water. As a schoolboy – yes, I may be old, but my age isn't into triple digits yet – I only drank brightly coloured fizzy stuff from glass bottles.
Apparently the surviving bits of the original Experiment and the whole of Quatermass II and Quatermass and the Pit are coming out on DVD quite soon. But it's such a long time to my birthday or Christmas.