The Pit and the Pendulum Charles III and Charles IV only four persons were condemned. The Inquisition was, however, abolished during the period of French intervention (1808–13). The original source of the pendulum torture method is one paragraph in the preface of the 1826 book "The history of the Inquisition of Spain " by the Spanish priest, historian, and activist, Juan Antonio Llorente. relating a second-hand account by a single prisoner released from the Inquisition's Madrid dungeon in 1820, who purportedly described the pendulum torture method. Most modern sources dismiss this as fantasy. One theory is that Llorente misunderstood the account he heard; the prisoner
Quatermass and the Pit set at Riverside, enabling a sense of time having elapsed that would not have been possible in an all-live production. Made just before videotape became general at the BBC, all six episodes of "Quatermass and the Pit" were preserved for a possible repeat by being telerecorded on 35 mm film. This was achieved with a specially-synchronised film camera capturing the output of a video monitor; the process had been refined throughout the 1950s and recordings of "Quatermass and the Pit" are of high technical quality. The serial was repeated in edited form as two 90-minute episodes, entitled "5 Million Years