CBBC Q and A 5

What are the key differences between adult drama and kids' drama?

Steven: All your stories want to be child centered and child driven. You want them to take charge of the story and you want them to sort the story out. It clearly comes from a child's perspective and that will be partly governed by their age because you want to try and sit within the framework of you know what they're going, what their experiences are. So that's the significant difference.

The question you might ask yourself is does it stray into being acceptable or appropriate for our eight to 12 audience? And that tonally is a really difficult thing. And we have to deal with that all the time, which is does it suddenly get to a point where it's so scary and so terrifying that we can only show this if we put out a warning? Which of course we can't do, and at that point you've crossed the line.

It's very hard to make that call. I've always encouraged people to push the envelope, to be a bit more challenging and a bit more daring. I think that's good. I think you absolutely should do that. You just have to accept that someone, maybe a producer, maybe an exec like myself might come in and go "Do you know what, you've gone too far. Pull it back a bit." But if it's a good story and we care about it and we're emotionally engaged then we won't mind.

There's a really nice story where we get to meet Clyde's father in the Sarah Jane Adventures. His father suddenly materialises after five years away in Germany, and it really develops into quite a challenging piece for the young end. I think to be honest that all the time that you've got your story centred within a child it's not going to stray into being an adult drama. The moment it becomes different is when suddenly the adult is in there solving it all.

The other thing that's interesting to think about is tone. Comedy is really, really difficult because there are so many sub-genres. You can get farce, naturalistic drama, completely surreal, docu-drama like The Office... Because that's really where you can really screw something up. You can get something that somebody's written in a really kind of light, naturalistic way, and then a director or a producer's come in and they've treated it like The Young Ones or whatever. And suddenly it becomes sort of absurd and grotesque.

Now that's fine if that's what you want to do, like The Legend of Dick and Dom. It's meant to be bold. But if it's a touching coming of age comedy, or it's meant to be a rooted Malcolm in the Middle type of piece then you've got to figure out have I got the tone of that right. In Malcolm in the Middle, however big those characters are, they still really are grounded. They feel real and authentic.

Are you looking for a new series ideas or are you looking to identify writing talent that you can possibly use for episodes of existing series?

Steven: Both. We're absolutely looking for new writing talent, that's really important. And of course we're looking for new series. But really most importantly I'm hoping we might find something that we just think wow, this is a really fresh perspective on growing up. These new characters are delightful, they're new, and I really care about them, and I want to spend some time with them.

We thought it would be interesting to give people a relatively blank page in order to bring some new ideas to us so that we don't feel that we're just getting all the things that we've seen before.

Of course you're going to cut across common ground when you deal with the emotional landscape of growing up. That's inevitable. But what I'd really be delighted with is if we found a new comedy. Comedy's really hard. Comedy writers are quite tough to find. And it's just one of those things where you can't make it up. You've either got funny bones or you haven't. And it would be lovely to find a new comedy that had a fresh perspective on growing up. It would be lovely to find some new cultural and social perspectives. Wherever you sit in the country as a small child growing up, hopefully at some point watching CBBC you will feel that your life is somehow represented.

So what do I want out of it? Fresh new voices. New characters. I want to try and get away from all the things we've seen and go somewhere and find some new stories in terms of the UK, what it's like to grow up wherever you live. And I want to find new writing talent.

Do you think that people who started off in adult drama can make the transition or move between both?

Elly: I have done adult stuff previously. But I like to write kids. I choose to write kids. I don't see why you shouldn't be able to do it. Just a slightly different take on things I think.

Steven: Russell Davies did Children's Ward, brilliant. Queer As Folk which is obviously not suitable for eight to 12 year olds till they're about twenty four. And then Doctor Who, and then came Sarah Jane Adventures – back to kids. So I think it's perfectly possible to make that transition.

Have there been been any previous kids' drama series commissioned based on competitions or unsolicited scripts?

Paul: We did a competition in 2002 called Story 2k2, and one of the runners up was someone called Keith Brumpton who came in for a kind of a workshop pitching day an idea called Spy Chix. And then it went away and it got developed. And then Kudos got attached to it, and then it turned into M.I.High. M.I.High's in its third series and they're writing a fourth.

Every six weeks or so we have a meeting called The Writer Talent Group where we just get as many people together from different departments as possible. And we just share names, scripts, whatever it is that people want to do. And at one of those meetings somebody from TV drama read a really great script by a writer called Jo Ho that had a fantastic young girl character in it and just thought somebody from Children's should have a look. So they read the script, liked it, got Jo in for a chat. And from that came Bo And The Spirit World.

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