Writer Journeys - Keith Brumpton

BBC writersroom played a pretty significant part in how my children's series, M.I.High came to be created and commissioned.

I'd quite a bit of experience in writing animation and was still enjoying doing so. But I was also keen to get into drama. After visiting the BBC writersroom website, I saw a competition advertised there. It was open to northern-based writers new to drama. We were invited to create a thirty minute drama on a contemporary theme.

A few weeks after, I submitted a new piece I'd written for the competition called Giant, about an Albanian kid coming to the North East of England and struggling to fit in. I got a call some months later to say that it had been shortlisted. (There were six in the list, I think.) The eventual winner was a drama about Foot and Mouth and its impact on a farm. That show was transmitted on BBC and well-received.

A sort of consolation prize for the other writers was a visit to CBBC HQ and a chance to pitch a new idea to a team of producers and the then head of Children's TV, Elaine Sperber. After much deliberation I pitched a show called Spy Chix - later to become M.I.High. We had three minutes with a giant clock ticking at the end of the room! The pitch seemed to go down quite well, and several of those at the event suggested I develop the idea and get back to them.

It was not long after this that I met up with Faith Penhale and Jane Featherstone from Kudos (makers of Life on Mars, Spooks, and many more). They really liked Spy Chix and suggested we do some work on it, then take it back to the BBC.

Several years and a new title later, M.I.High was commissioned, not by Elaine, who'd by then left, but by Jon East. A career lowpoint came one Friday in Buchanan Street shopping arcade, as I took a call from Faith telling me that Elaine had left her job and no-one knew what was going to happen to shows in development but not yet commissioned! It turned out we were OK as Jon liked it, though we lost a girl and gained a boy from our original line-up...

From my first contact with the writersroom to the commissioning took just under three years, which is pretty fast going in TV terms. M.I.High is now on its third series. I hope M.I.High runs and runs and runs. I'm now developing a sitcom with a fellow M.I.High writer and various interactive projects.

You can read The Cold War (PDF) (called The Inside Job during the writing process), an episode from the second season of M.I.High, in our Script Archive.