Kneale picked the character's unusual surname from a London telephone directory, while the first name was in honour of the astronomer Bernard Lovell.

The character of Quatermass has been described by BBC News Online as Britain's first television hero,[1] and by The Independent newspaper as "a brilliantly conceived and finely crafted creation ... [He] remained a modern 'Mr Standfast', the one fixed point in an increasingly dreadful and ever-shifting universe".

[2] In 2005, an article in The Daily Telegraph suggested that the character shares other elements from other British heroes such as Sherlock Holmes[3] Little is revealed of Quatermass's early life during the course of the films and television series in which he appears.

[4] In Nigel Kneale's 1996 radio serial The Quatermass Memoirs, it is revealed that the Professor was first involved in rocketry experiments in the 1930s, and that his wife died young.

Although Quatermass succeeds in launching a three-man crew, the rocket vastly overshoots its projected orbit and returns to Earth much later than planned, crash-landing in London.

[4] Only one of the crew, Victor Carroon, remains; it transpires that he has been taken over by an alien presence, eventually forcing Quatermass to destroy him and the other two crewmembers who have been absorbed into him in a climax set in Westminster Abbey.

In the fourth episode of the serial he mentions that he never reached his twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, tying in with The Quatermass Memoirs later assertion of his wife's early death.

[14] Kneale initially named his leading character Professor Charlton,[15] but during the writing process decided he wanted something more striking and memorable.

[18] The following year the BBC's Controller of Programmes, Cecil McGivern—who had initially feared that viewers would not accept such an unusual name for the leading character[17]—noted in reference to the impending launch of the rival ITV network that: "Had competitive television been in existence then, we would have killed it every Saturday night while [The Quatermass Experiment] lasted.

[26] Despite this success, Kneale was unsure about whether the character would ever return, later telling an interviewer: "I didn't want to go on repeating because Professor Quatermass had already saved the world from ultimate destruction three times, and that seemed to me to be quite enough".

[28] Directed by Val Guest, it was retitled The Quatermass Xperiment to capitalise on the British "X" classification[29] and starred American actor Brian Donlevy as part of a deal to help the film find US distribution.

[36] This time the film was directed by Roy Ward Baker and starred Scottish actor Andrew Keir, after Morell had been offered and declined the chance to play the part again.

The Guardian newspaper wrote in 1997 that: "Keir also made many films ... most gratifyingly, perhaps, the movie version of Quatermass and the Pit (1967), when he finally replaced the absurdly miscast Brian Donlevy".

[46] The Times's television reviewer, Sarah Vine, commented of this production: "Jason Flemyng as Quatermass made a surprisingly good fist of things ... the live performance lent the drama an edge that might have been lost in re-takes".

[48] The serialisation ran in the Daily Express from 5 to 20 December 1955, although Kneale was forced to draw it to a rapid conclusion when the paper lost interest in the project and instructed him to complete the story as soon as possible.

[52] A live theatrical production of Quatermass and the Pit was staged, with the permission of Kneale, outdoors in a quarry at the village of Cropwell Bishop in Nottinghamshire in August 1997.

[56] The writer and critic Kim Newman went further, explaining in a 2003 television documentary on Nigel Kneale's career that he believed Quatermass to be not only a representation of science but of humanity itself.

[57] Like Kneale, he contrasted this to American science-fiction productions, where the alien adversary would be defeated by "it being blown up or electrocuted, or having the entire firepower of the army turned against it".

[59] Hutchings also compared this to American productions of the era: "The standard, if not clichéd, figures of the clean-cut square-jawed hero and his girl, which are present in some form or other in most US sf films of this period ... are absent".

Former Doctor Who script editor and producer Derrick Sherwin admitted on a DVD documentary that the idea of setting more serials on contemporary Earth in the early 1970s was to recall a Quatermass feel.

[72] In episode three of the 1988 serial Remembrance of the Daleks, which is set in 1963, military scientific advisor Alison Williams remarks to her colleague Dr Rachel Jensen, "I wish Bernard was here".

[73] The 2005 Doctor Who episode "The Christmas Invasion" also featured a British Rocket Group, although the organisation was identifiable only by a logo not clearly seen on screen and never referred to in dialogue.

[74] In 2009 television episode "Planet of the Dead", "Bernard" is used as the name for a unit of measurement, and it is explained that this is in reference to Quatermass—whether as a fictional or a real person is not stated.

[76] The 1997 Doctor Who novel The Dying Days, set in its year of release, features in one chapter an elderly character introduced halfway through a sentence as "-ermass", and subsequently referred to as "Professor" and "Bernard" during his brief appearance.

[77] Author Lance Parkin confirmed in his notes accompanying the later e-book release that this was a deliberate cameo from Quatermass, specifically the John Mills version from the final serial.

[79] In February 1959 the BBC radio comedy series The Goon Show broadcast a parody of Quatermass and the Pit, entitled "The Scarlet Capsule".

[44] Quatermass also appears in a short segment of the 2007 graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier, in which he takes his niece and nephew to visit an interplanetary zoo.

[82] Andrew Marshall and Rob Grant, produced, directed, and wrote the 2018→2020 BBC Radio 4 twelve-episode series "The Quanderhorn Xperimentations"[83] starring James Fleet as Prof. Darius Quanderhorn — a brilliant, but ruthless scientist keeping the world locked in the year 1952 for 65 years, with almost no-one noticing — in an absurdist parody of and homage to the Quatermass films and television series.