Dark Season

Dark Season is a British science-fiction television serial for adolescents, screened on BBC1 in late 1991. Comprising six twenty-five-minute episodes, the two linked three-part stories tell the adventures of three teenagers and their battle to save their school and their classmates from the actions of the sinister Mr Eldritch. It was the first television drama to be written by Russell T Davies, and is also noteworthy for co-starring a young Kate Winslet in her first major television role.

Background

Russell T Davies was a BBC staff producer working for the children's department at BBC Manchester, running the summertime activity show Why Don't You?. He had gained some television writing experience scripting the comedy dubbed version of The Flashing Blade for the Saturday morning children's programme On the Waterfront in 1989 and the children's sketch show Breakfast Serials the following year, but his real ambition was to write television drama.

To this end, he wrote an on-spec script for the first episode of Dark Season – originally titled The Adventuresome Three – and used the BBC's internal mail system to send it directly to the Head of Children's Programmes, Anna Home. Impressed with the script, Home asked Davies to write a second episode. When Tony Robinson decided to take a break from producing Maid Marian and Her Merry Men, a slot opened up in the Children's BBC schedules for late 1991 and Home decided to use Dark Season to fill it, commissioning Davies to write the remaining episodes of the serial. The series was filmed in Mytchett in Surrey, In Farnborough Hants (Woburn Avenue) And the long-closed Robert Haining Secondary School, in the summer of 1991. Studio material was shot at the BBC's Ealing Studios.