Bernard Quatermass

Bernard Quatermass
Place of origin:	Earth
Appearances:	DW: Remembrance of the Daleks (possible reference) NA: The Dying Days (possible cameo)

Professor Bernard Quatermass was a British scientist.

Profile

Whether he was real or fictional was unclear.

He was implied to have worked alongside Dr. Rachel Jensen in the British Rocket Group (DW: Remembrance of the Daleks). In 1997, paranoid and full of bleak pessimism, he possibly appeared on television with Dr. Patrick Moore in a panel discussion regarding the possibility of life on the planet Mars. (NA: The Dying Days)

UNIT scientific advisor Professor Malcolm Taylor named a unit of measurement after Bernard Quatermass, but Taylor might have been talking about a television character, not a real man. (DW: Planet of the Dead)

Behind the Scenes

Background

Quatermass and the British Rocket Group had originally appeared as the protagonist of a series of four horror-science fiction television serials written by Nigel Kneale. The first three aired during the 1950s on the BBC. (The last serial simply entitled The Quatermass Experiment aired in 1979, though not on the BBC.) These would have great influence on Doctor Who serials as The Web of Fear and Image of the Fendahl, to name only two. The Lazarus Experiment in its second half, all but re-makes the climax of the end of the first Quatermass story.

For his part, the creator of Bernard Quatermass, Nigel Kneale, was on record as having hated Doctor Who, and refused to write for the programme when invited.

Quatermass also inspired the Nightshade, a television serial in the Doctor Who Universe.

In 2005, the BBC aired a remake of The Quatermass Experiment. Appearing in the serial were David Tennant and Indira Varma prior to their involvement as the Tenth Doctor and Suzie Costello, respectively. Mark Gatiss, longtime performer and writer of Doctor Who spinoff productions, scriptwriter for the new series, and later a guest star in The Lazarus Experiment, also appears in the production.

In Doctor Who Universe canon

Whether or not Bernard Quatermass is a real person in the Doctor Who Universe is very much a matter of opinion, though the British Rocket Group does exist in it. Who Killed Kennedy mentions several "controversial orbital flights" in the 1950s which imply that the events of the first Quatermass serial occurred in the Doctor's world as well.

At no point in any piece of Doctor Who fiction was any character referred to as "Professor Bernard Quatermass". In The Dying Days, a character is announced midway through a sentence as "-ermass" and then subsequently "Professor" and "Bernard" are used to refer to him. In Remembrance of the Daleks, his last name is never uttered. And in Planet of the Dead, Malcolm Taylor delivers his line in such a way that he might refer to a fictional person.

In the Doctor Who Universe, the Nightshade serials (NA: Nightshade) have many similarities with the Quatermass serials. It is possible to assume that because Bernard Quatermass is real, Nightshade effectively replaces Quatermass in the Doctor Who Universe. It's also equally possible to believe that Nightshade is just a copy of the existing show, Quatermass, as there are many real life instances of two television programmes sharing multiple commonalities.

A number of actors portrayed the character, with none considered "definitive", however Lance Parkin has said that he meant to visualized the elderly, nearly crazed John Mills version from the fourth and final Quatermass serial as the one who appeared in the Virgin New Adventures novel The Dying Days.