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 On the Waterfront Saturday morning children's programme 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 the second episode, and 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 and around Mytchett in Surrey, including the long-closed Robert Haining Secondary School, in the summer of 1991. Studio material was shot at the BBC's Ealing Studios.
Transmitted at 4.35 pm on Thursdays from 14 November to 19 December 1991, each episode would be repeated the Sunday morning following first broadcast. Viewing figures varied from 3.6 to 4.2 million per episode. Davies also penned a novelisation of Dark Season for BBC Books, which was released concurrently with the transmission of the serial and was advertised after each episode. He would later go on to write a second children's science-fiction serial for the BBC, Century Falls, in 1993, before forging a long and successful career in adult television drama. Dark Season was re-shown on BBC One in 1994, and in 2002 was also repeated on the CBBC Channel on digital television, cropped to 14:9 widescreen with the loss of the top and bottom sections of the original picture.
Dark Season was released on DVD by 2|entertain Ltd on 24 July 2006. Upon this release, it received a British Board of Film Classification rating of PG.
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