Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

subjects who watched the coronation on TV and
heard it on the radio bragged about the massive
scope of the listening and viewing audience, some
twenty-seven million people in total.
Whereas Terry was a war baby, his father torn
away by a world in tumult, David Jones was a TV
baby, where the world was literally brought to you
and the figures inside the glass tube seemed like
family after a while. While H. G. Wells had his
borrowed library on the summer estate, early English
TV is likely responsible for introducing young David
Jones to the concept of outer space, a theme he
would later use to such great effect throughout his
songwriting and acting careers.
Almost exactly one month after the televised
coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, the BBC broadcast
a serialized science fiction drama en titled The
Quatermass Experiment. The ratings were massive
and this somewhat pulpy production captivated an
entire nation. Watching The Quatermass
Experiment today (I’ve located a grainy dubbed
videocassette copy), it quite obviously belongs,
along with that other wildly popular BBC production
The Day of the Triffids, to the subgenre of alienpossession-as–Cold
War–metaphor films (best
exemplified in America by the original 1956 version
of Invasion of the Body Snatchers). Quatermass
begins with two young lovers wooing each other in a
field when they hear a noise and spot an object in
the sky. “That’s not a jet!” the man shouts. A rocket
crash-lands in the countryside, part of a top-secret