Katie Morag in her habitual white jumper, kilt...

The  first paperback edition of Katie Morag  (1986).

A year ago, on the day of the Scottish BAFTA’s in 2011, I met with Don Coutts and Lindy Cameron of MoveOnUpTV over a leisurely Americano in Clive Ramsay’s cafe in Bridge Of Allan.

Sitting on the table between us was a copy of one of  Mairi Hedderwick’s Katie Morag stories. They asked me what my take on scripting a potential TV adaptation might be.
I told them about the research we had been carrying out at University Of The West Of Scotland as part of our Team Writing For Television module.
TWFTV is a level 9 Module which tasks teams of student screenwriters to come up with the Bible and individual Scripts for a new Long Running Television Series. I told them that after 5 years of work on this at UWS, my colleagues Dr John Quinn and Martin McCardie  had developed a robust methodology which would precisely fit the demands of the  creation of 26 Episodes of a new, live action Katie Morag series.
Lindy and Don obviously liked what I had to say, and a  month later, we started work on the proposal. We built up a team of writers, then worked collaboratively on the specifics. Starting with  Theme, Tone and Genre, we went on to create a detailed series arc grid,  individual Episode ideas,  thrashed out a detailed proposal ,  and finally wrote the first 5 Episodes. (If you look closely at the picture you will see the actual grid that we used.)

Martin McCardie, Lindy Cameron, Jan Storie, Louise Wyllie, Stuart Hepburn & Sergio Casci in the Move On Up TV HQ in Cromarty.

A  year later I am delighted  to announce that the BBC has finally committed to 26 Episodes of this wonderful children’s drama to be filmed in Lewis next year.  Congratulations to Lindy and Don, and to writers Martin McCardie ,Sergio Casci, Louise Wyllie and Jan Storie.
 Full details can be found on the BBC Press release below. Look out for Katie Morag and the Troublesome Ted!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2012/katie-morag.html
If you are interested in studying Film Making and Screenwriting at University Of The West Of Scotland, you can find all the details here.