BBC Scotland sets sights on creation of new drama, comedy and history 'juggernauts'

Broadcaster BBC Scotland is seeking to launch made-in-Scotland shows across the UK

BBC Scotland has revealed ambitions to create a slate of home-grown drama, comedy, history and entertainment "juggernauts", which would be shown across the UK.

Scottish commissioning chief Louise Thornton said the broadcaster was stepping up efforts to find funding partners to launch more "high-impact" shows suitable for the UK-wide network.

Finding new screen roles for leading Scottish stars, developing new drama series targeted at younger audiences, creating long-running factual series and nurturing fresh talent are among the key priorities for new BBC Scotland shows in the next few years.

The broadcaster’s ambitions have emerged in the wake of the fifth anniversary of the launch of a dedicated Scottish channel, which was created as part of an annual £19 million boost to BBC Scotland's budget.

Under BBC Scotland’s enhanced budget since the launch was launched, more than £162 million has been spent on Scottish programming, including news, drama, comedy, documentaries and sports coverage.

Its strategy of co-commissioning programmes has attracted around £36m in additional investment from elsewhere in the BBC, funding agencies like Screen Scotland, and external producers and distributors.

Thornton hopes to emulate some of the biggest success stories from the past five years, including Bafta Scotland award winners like Neil Forsyth's hit drama Guilt, which ran for three series, and Jono McLeod’s Alan Cumming-starring feature documentary My Old School.

Mark Bonnar and Jamie Sives starred in the hit BBC Scotland series Guilt. Picture: Anne Binckebanck

She has also pointed to the rise of comedian Ashley Storrie, who will be launching her own sitcom this year, a major new drama series being created by actor and comic Richard Gadd, the recent commissioning of a new sitcom starring Gregor Fisher and Greg McHugh, and the success of documentary series The Agency: Unfiltered.

Another new project is aimed at creating new returning factual entertainment and history series for the network, which would "portray Scotland in a brilliant light”.

Thornton said: “The focus of the channel has been brilliant because it brought additional funding for the commissioning of Scottish content. It enabled us to bring the kind of content that was doing well on social media onto the iPlayer and the channel. We really wanted to take a few risks and do things we wouldn’t have been able to do previously.

“A good example of the new way of thinking is that one of the first things that we showed was a drama called The Grey Area, by Garry Fraser, which we’d been working on with him and we were initially thinking it would be for YouTube.

Stage and screen star Alan Cumming, who plays schoolboy imposter "Brandon Lee" in Jono McLeod's doumentary My Old School, has called for more support to help The Birks cinema in Aberfeldy remain open.

“Ashley Storrie was doing short-form comedy on social media when I first came across her. She did some shorts for us, then we commissioned quite an experimental show with two other comedians – Christopher Macarthur-Boyd and Rosco McClelland. Now she has a Radio Scotland show and a network-funded sitcom she has written and is performing in.

“That’s almost the epitome of what BBC Scotland should be doing. It’s exciting when you can see that happening across different genres."

Thornton cited Guilt as an example of a show she believed would not have got off the ground without the extra investment in BBC Scotland, but went out across the BBC network when it launched.

Only Child, the north-east set comedy focusing on a father-son relationship between the characters played by Fisher and Gregor, and Lions, Gadd’s six-part Glasgow-set drama series that will span almost 40 years, will also be shown across the UK.

Louise Thornton is head of commissioning at BBC Scotland.

Thornton added: “Guilt is a show everybody in our team is proud to have delivered. It was dark, comedic and contemporary Scotland, and it was bold and distinctive. We’re very much looking for our next Guilt. What story of contemporary Scotland can we really champion?

“I’m very hopeful for Only Child. Still Game was brilliant and still does brilliant numbers for us. Two Doors Down has been amazing as well. But one of my big priorities for me was to get a new network-funded sitcom. Comedy is so important in Scotland – we need to keep driving it forward.

“Now that we are five years in, we don't want to lose the original spirit of the channel, but we also do want the juggernauts. How do we get those big, premium shows which are delivered from Scotland, by working with the money we’ve got, and working with our network colleagues and international broadcasters?

“We have to balance that up by making sure that all our commissioners have innovation and new talent on their slate. We have to keep renewing and refreshing. But I can also see how meaningful it is when we get big Scottish stars in network shows. It’s massive for our confidence as a nation and it's massive for the portrayal of how meaningful the BBC is in Scotland.

"We have a feature film project in development with BBC Films, that hasn’t been announced yet and we recently launched a development initiative to find big new factual entertainment and history series to be made in Scotland."

Thornton said BBC Scotland was raising its ambitions to ensure it was able to compete with the growing number of channels and streaming platforms available to audiences in Scotland.

Gregor Fisher is to star in new Scottish sitcom Only Child.

She said: “Whatever we’re commissioning, we really have to interrogate it, think about who is going to watch it and what they’re going to say about it. It needs to be commissioned with an audience in mind. We need to understand how to reach that target audience.

"We want to make sure we are being as ambitious as possible and making the most of what we commission.”

Thornton was speaking ahead of a new series of the award-winning short form drama Float, a queer love story focusing on two young women in a seaside coastal town.

She said: “A good question for me is what we’re doing in terms of drama for young audiences in Scotland. Float is brilliant, but I don’t want to stop there. Where are young people in Scotland seeing and hearing themselves? That’s something we’re very much talking about at the moment.

"The response to our factual series The Agency has just been astonishing. The audience it gets is massively young. It was commissioned with that in mind.”