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''Quatermass and the Pit'' is a British television science-fiction serial transmitted live by BBC Television in December 1958 and January 1959. It was the third and last of the BBC's ''Quatermass'' serials, although the character reappeared in a 1979 ITV production called ''Quatermass''. Like its predecessors, ''Quatermass and the Pit'' was written by Nigel Kneale. The serial continues the loose chronology of the Quatermass adventures. Workmen excavating a site in Knightsbridge, London, discover a strange skull and what at first appears to be an unexploded bomb. Professor Bernard Quatermass and his newly appointed military superior at the British Experimental Rocket Group, Colonel Breen, become involved in the investigation when it becomes apparent that the object is an alien spacecraft. The ship and its contents have a powerful and malign influence over many of those who come in contact with it, including Quatermass. It becomes obvious to him that the aliens, probably from Mars, had been abducting pre-humans and modifying them to give them psychic abilities much like their own before returning them to Earth, a genetic legacy responsible for much of the war and strife in the world. The serial has been cited as having influenced Stephen King and the film director John Carpenter. It featured in the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes compiled by the British Film Institute in 2000, which described it as "completely gripping". ==Background== ''The Quatermass Experiment'' (1953) and ''Quatermass II'' (1955), both written by Nigel Kneale, had been critical and popular successes for the BBC, and in early 1957 the corporation decided to commission a third serial. Kneale had left the BBC shortly before, but was hired to write the new scripts on a freelance basis. The British Empire had been in transition since the 1920s, and the pace accelerated in the wake of the Second World War. More and more member states demanded independence, and a series of crises erupted during the 1950s, including the 1952 Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya and the Suez Crisis of 1956. During the same period immigration into Britain from the Indian subcontinent and the Caribbean was on the increase, causing some resentment among elements of the native population. At the time Kneale was working on his scripts black communities in Nottingham and London came under attack from mobs of white Britons; Kneale became keen to develop the serial as an allegory for the emerging racial tensions that culminated in the Notting Hill race riots of August and September 1958.〔Kneale, Nigel in 〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Quatermass and the Pit」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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