programmes to combat the new rival for television audiences. Referring to the 1953 science-fiction serial The Quatermass Experiment in a memo written in 1954, BBC Television's Controller of Programmes, Cecil McGivern, noted that: "Had competitive television been in existence then, we would have killed it every Saturday night while [The Quatermass Experiment] lasted. We are going to need many more 'Quatermass Experiment' programmes." Having recently signed a two-year extension to his BBC staff writer's contract, Nigel Kneale was specifically commissioned to write a sequel to The Quatermass Experiment in early 1955 to challenge the new ITV network. Kneale was inspired by contemporary fears over secret UK Ministry of Defence research establishments such as Porton Down, and also by being required, as a BBC staff member, to sign the Official Secrets Act. As with The Quatermass Experiment, Quatermass II was produced and directed by Rudolph Cartier; he and Kneale particularly enjoyed working together. Since the first Quatermass serial, the two men had collaborated on the literary adaptations Wuthering Heights (1953) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954), and on Kneale's abominable snowman play The Creature (1955). Quatermass II comprised six half-hour episodes, transmitted live from Studio G at the BBC's Lime Grove Studios in London. The episodes – individually subtitled "The Bolts", "The Mark", "The Food", "The Coming", "The Frenzy" and "The Destroyers" – were shown every Saturday night at 8 p.m. from 22 October to 26 November 1955; because of the live nature of the performances, most of the episodes overran their allotted half-hour slots slightly. Each episode was rehearsed on the Monday to Friday before transmission at Mansergh Woodall Boys Club in St John's Wood, London, and then camera rehearsed in studio for most of the day on the Saturday. Not every scene was performed live; because of the increased budget – £7,552 was spent on the serial, nearly double the amount spent on The Quatermass Experiment – Cartier was able to include a larger proportion of pre-filmed inserts on 35 mm film, which were included during the live transmissions of each episode. Most of the pre-filmed material was shot on location at the Shell Haven oil refinery in Stanford-le-Hope, doubling for the factory where the alien creature is being grown on Earth. Filming also took place in rural Essex for material showing the meteorites being discovered in fields, and in the boiler rooms of the under-construction BBC Television Centre in London