In 1996 the BBC dramatised my children's book Agent Z and the Penguin from Mars. It was adapted by Jeremy Front and produced by Marilyn Fox.
I subsequently wrote scripts for The Wild House which Marilyn also produced for the BBC.
A couple of years later I wrote Microsoap for the BBC and Disney, a comedy drama series in which Joe and Emily cope with the aftermath of their parents' separation and divorce. Their father starts a relationship with his therapist. And their mother starts a relationship with a local builder who moves into the adjacent house with his three appalling children. The characters included a dog (played by a very talented dog), a snake (played by a very unconvincing rubber snake) and a very large blue mouse who was invisible to almost everyone. There were also some eccentric fantasy sequences which seemed like the very cutting edge of comedy writing until some very similar eccentric fantasy sequences appeared on Ally McBeal a couple of weeks later. The series got a BAFTA, but you probably won't see it unless you stumble across a rerun on one of the more obscure digital channels.
After Microsoap, I wrote a few scripts for Carlton TV's Star Street.
And then I did no more scriptwriting for TV until I was asked to write the screenplay for Fungus the Bogeyman, an adaptation of Raymond Briggs' classic picture book. The production was enormous fun. And the programmes were fun, too. Though, in the end, I think we were a little too dazzled by the possibilities (and blind to the shortcomings) of computer generated imagery and didn't quite do full justice to the sheer sliminess of Raymond's wonderful book (grime is not too difficult in CGI; wet, runny, bubbling grime is a nightmare). We should, I think, have dressed the actors playing the bogeys in rubber suits and covered them with a layer of damp manure. Next time, maybe...
Recently, I have been working on a screen version of my radio play Coming Down The Mountain for Tiger Aspect and the BBC. It begins like this: 'So I decided to kill my brother. If I was thinking straight I'd have planned to kill him in a sensible way. Like one where no-one finds out. Chaining him to a manhole cover and dumping him at sea. Chopping him up and burying him in a forest. That kind of thing. But I guess when you decide to kill someone you're not thinking straight...'. It is (we hope) going to be directed by Julie Anne Robinson who directed Blackpool for the BBC.