for scenes set inside the factory. The location film sequences were the most ambitious that had then been attempted in British television drama, which was usually predominantly studio-bound. Each episode of Quatermass II was telerecorded onto 35 mm film during its live transmission, for a scheduled repeat the following Monday night at 10:15 p.m. All six episodes survive intact in the BBC's archives, although the telerecording copies in some cases suffer from poor quality sound and vision. Owing to either technical or artistic problems, Cartier had some scenes re-performed by the cast immediately following the live performance on the Saturday evening, and these were telerecorded and used to replace the live versions in the Monday night repeats. Quatermass II was one of the first BBC drama productions to be repeated from a telerecording, rather than having the production re-performed live for any second showing as had been the norm in the past. Episode three, "The Food", was repeated in a slightly edited form on BBC 2 on 26 August 1991 as part of The Lime Grove Story. This was a day of programming to commemorate the closure of the studios after 40 years of use by the BBC. Reception and influence The available British television audience had doubled since The Quatermass Experiment had been shown in 1953, and the viewing figures for Quatermass II were accordingly higher. The serial gained an audience of 7.9 million viewers for its first three episodes, rising to 8.3 million for the fourth and fifth and concluding with 9 million. A BBC audience research report commissioned after Quatermass II had finished found that 90% of those questioned in the sample had watched at least five episodes of the production. Quatermass II received positive newspaper reviews in the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, although the BBC's Radio Times listings magazine published letters of both praise and criticism for the serial. The serial was also criticised internally at the BBC by Cecil McGivern, who felt it to be not as good as the original. One letter received by the production team before the transmission of episode five came from a woman in Haverfordwest who was concerned that she would never find out what happened in the end as the week before the final episode's transmission she was due to move to Ireland to spend the rest of her life in a convent; she wondered if the