Picture the scene: a too-close encounter with an alien organism has caused a man to mutate into a writhing mass of plant matter, the size of a building. Before we go any further, we’re not talking about the hapless mercenary Keeler in The Seeds of Doom (1976), transformed into a vast alien Krynoid. We’re talking about the hapless astronaut Victor Carroon in The Quatermass Experiment (1953), the BBC sci-fi thriller serial which, alongside its sequels, is said to have influenced so many Doctor Who adventures.
Perhaps, though, we owe the exploits of the questing Professor Quatermass a debt beyond the obvious – beyond those elements borrowed for Seeds, Spearhead from Space (1970), The Dæmons (1971) or The Android Invasion (1975), to mention just four. Because in 1953 the BBC had no Visual Effects Department to help realise writer Nigel Kneale’s vision of an alien organism writhing in the rafters of Westminster Abbey, as the final two episodes demanded. And so, as Kneale was often pleased to recall: “I did the special effects myself, because there was nobody else to do them and nobody wanted to… I appealed to the designers. I said, ‘Can’t you help?’, and they said, ‘You wrote it – you do it.’”