Professor Bernard Quatermass was a British scientist.
Profile
Biography
He worked alongside Dr. Rachel Jensen in the British Rocket Group (DW: Remembrance of the Daleks). In 1997, paranoid and full of bleak pessimism, he appeared on television with Dr. Patrick Moore in a panel discussion regarding the possibility of life on the planet Mars. (NA: The Dying Days)
Mentions
UNIT scientific advisor Professor Malcolm Taylor named a unit of measurement after Bernard Quatermass. (DW: Planet of the Dead)
Behind the Scenes
The Quatermass serials
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 Quatermass aired in 1979, though not on the BBC.) These would have great influence over Doctor Who over the years. In the Doctor Who Universe, the Nightshade serials stand in for the Quatermass serials. Although his last name is not mentioned on screen, the refernce to "Bernard" in Remembrance of the Daleks was intended as a reference to the character.
In 2005, the BBC aired a remake of one of the original serials, 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.
The character
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 as the one appearing in the New Adventures novel The Dying Days.
