ABSTRACT
When television first emerged as a serious rival to the cinema in the 1950s, the film industry’s response was ambiguous. On the one hand, television was something to be feared, mocked and, if possible, resisted. It was largely boycotted by cinema stars, who regarded it as slumming. In the 1953 Ealing comedy, Meet Mr. Lucifer, television is ‘an instrument of the Devil, a mechanical device to make the human race utterly miserable’. A Film Industry Defence Organisation (Fido) was set up in an attempt to keep feature films off television, ideally for ten years. At the same time, and from a very early stage, television was seen as a source of cinema material. Terence Rattigan’s play, The Final Test, moved from television in 1953 and Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass serials (1953, 1955, 1958–9) spawned not one but three feature films (1955, 1957, 1967). In contrast to what happened later, there were few attempts to spin off comedy, the exception being I Only Arsked! (1958) which was based on Granada’s The Army Game (1957–61). Then, for a decade or so, spin-offs were forgotten and only resurfaced at the end of the 1960s.
