Arts: And all of a sudden...

Cut-throat with plenty of surprises is Tim Firth's idea of a plotline for a children's television series. Adults won't be disappointed either. By Jasper Rees

Tim Firth, hitherto known as a purveyor of quirky northern comedies, has written a new cartoon for Children's ITV. Roger and the Rottentrolls is in some ways no departure at all for the author of Preston Front, Once Upon a Time in the North and the Ayckbournesque West End hit Neville's Island: it's still a quirky northern comedy, but instead of middle-aged middle managers or twentysomething territorials, his northerners are knee-high goblins. It is, none the less, a rare foray across the rubicon that separates the fertile pastures of adult drama from the hinterland of children's entertainment. You can count on the fingers of one hand the dramatists who have made their name writing for children. And you'd still have a couple of digits to spare. Phil Redmond, David Wood, and... er, any suggestions?

"There's this perception," says Wood, who has been writing and directing children's theatre for nearly 30 years, "that writing for children has second-division status. Most of us would want to see an improvement in the status in which the work is held because all of us believe that it is very important to offer children the best quality we can."

In fact, more eminences have written for children's television than you'd suppose. Anthony Minghella once bashed out episodes of Grange Hill, for which he started out as a script editor. Kay Mellor, who later came up with Band of Gold and whose adaptation of Jane Eyre goes into production for Granada next week, wrote Children's Ward. The award-winning Maid Marion was the work of Tony "Baldrick" Robinson.

A couple of years up the age range is the BBC Schools drama strand, Scene, which has commissioned half-hour dramas from the likes of Willy Russell, Howard Schuman and Al Hunter Ashton, the author of Safe, The Firm and Alive and Kicking. Scene is traditionally shown at lunchtime on Fridays, but it has finally elbowed for itself the space in the evening schedule that, after its lean, glowering treatments of Death of a Salesman and Hard Times, it so richly deserves. A series is currently showing each Wednesday on BBC2, affording the adult audience a rare proof that not all challenging drama is written for their sole benefit.

The latest recruit to Scene is Firth, whose play A Man of Letters, starring Sean Maguire, is just going into production. The play was originally written as a pure comedy for the geriatric lunchtime audience at Stephen Joseph studio theatre in Scarborough. But Scene spotted in its tale of two men employed to fix giant letters to the side of a building the two vital ingredients of educational drama: a relevant message, about the importance of nursing ambitions, and an attention-grabbing central image.

This looks like a departure for Firth, though in fact it's more of a return. The first forays into writing Firth ever made were musical versions of The Selfish Giant and the Nativity he wrote for the school in Runcorn where his father was headmaster. At Cambridge, when not collaborating with Sam Mendes, he helped set up the Children's Company, a publishing venture dedicated to the writing and recording of books for children, which 10 years on has established itself with a small permanent staff. While on tour with the Footlights he wrote Roger and the Rottentrolls for the Children's Company, who "needed a spooky but slightly funny story to complement all the others that were coming out from educational to fairy-tale".

At this stage he had not yet written for adults, so only in hindsight does it look like a career deviation. But when he returned to Roger to adapt it for CITV the example of his sometime mentor Ayckbourn came to mind. "It's interesting to look back at the plays he's written since writing for children. They all start to do mad things and take huge leaps and risks that very possibly they wouldn't have taken beforehand. When you've been locked into very graphic naturalism, for some reason, when you write for children you just think all those rules don't matter any more. 'I can do anything.' And you don't realise you can do that for adults as well."

That Firth has plainly derived nourishment from writing for children is corroborated by others who have worked on both sides of the divide. "As an adult, you write something that you would want to see for yourself," says Hunter Ashton. "Writing for children and young adults is like going into training. You have to focus more and you have to, maybe 20, 30 years after, remember what's it's like to be 14 again. Anything that's harder makes you better."

The principal lesson that dramatists take away from writing for a non- adult audience is the pre-eminence of plot. David Wood was once on a Canadian chat show alongside a children's publisher whose daughter had just enjoyed reading a particular book. "Being a publisher, her parent wanted to know why. Instead of replying, 'Well, it's all about this', the child thought for a moment and came out with three words: 'Lots of suddenlys.' I try and include at least three suddenlys on every page."

The point was pugnaciously restated in July by Philip Pullman, who has written for both children and adults. He accepted this year's Carnegie Medal with the rallying cry that "stories are vital. There's more wisdom in a story than in volumes of philosophy. Children know they need them and go for them with passion. But all of us adults need them too."

Firth wrote Roger and the Rottentrolls in the evenings as a kind of nightcap to the long daily slog of the third series of Preston Front. "With children I had absolutely no hesitation in going for cut-throat linearity of storyline. The first sentence of every show is something like 'There's invaders in the valley' or 'The madman has built his airship'. You know where you are from the first line. I'd then go back the next morning and look at the Preston Front script and think, 'Bollocks to getting the story started in the first five minutes. Let's have it started in the first page. Then we can play around.' "

In the higher echelons of television drama, there are precious few writers who have written for children. Lucy Gannon and Paula Milne, mothers both, write with extreme perspicacity about children; they just don't write for them. Jimmy McGovern and Alan Bleasdale both boast offspring galore, but have written not a single children's drama between them. How many children's classics has Andrew Davies adapted?

"Even if you don't have any empathy with children," says Firth, "there is a practical beneficial effect of writing for children. Even if it doesn't work for you, it means that you have a rare chance to write in your own language for a completely different set of people. If you are stuck, that can enable you to pull the saw out and start again."

n The seven-part 'Roger and the Rottentrolls' starts today at 4pm on CITV. 'Scene' continues on BBC2, Wednesday 7.30pm