Every once in a while, TCM digs up a treasure that is unusual and obscure even by that network’s exacting and exhaustive standards. This is such a case: A 1955 science fiction movie made by Britain’s lovingly low-rent Hammer Films studio, starring the equally low-rent American actor Brian Donlevy. The plot, considering that it predates the Soviet Sputnik experiment that launched the Space Race, is somewhat extraordinary. Professor Bernard Quatermass (Donlevy) has launched the first humans into outer space – three trained astronauts. The spacecraft veers off course, but crashes safely in Wimbledon, where the capsule is opened for the first time since takeoff… with only one astronaut remaining aboard. The reason I’ve gone on to such lengths about this film, and its plot, is that they’re written by Nigel Kneale, one of the most important writers in the early history of British television. And get this: Two years before the Hammer Films version, Kneale created his original work, titled the more conventionally spelled The Quatermass Experiment, as a six-part weekly drama, broadcast live on BBC Television. That version, starring Reginald Tate, was one of the first miniseries ever shown on television (by my count, the third, behind two American TV productions from 1952, a three-part NBC adaptation of Peer Gynt and a multi-part presentation of The Birth and Death of Abraham Lincoln, packaged as part of CBS’s Omnibus.) But whether on live TV or as a 1950s sci-fi movie (retitled, for U.S. distribution, The Creeping Unknown), give Quatermass credit, as I do, for helping to start the entire miniseries genre in general – and Britain’s Doctor Who, which began a decade later in 1963, in particular.