'Serious drama' moves into daytime

Daytime television, for so long the repository of antique hunts and quiz shows, is about to move a shade upmarket. The BBC is bringing Radio 4's successful and long-running afternoon play to its main television channel in an experiment with serious drama.

Five one-hour programmes from new and established writers have been commissioned and will be broadcast one a day for a week from 27 January as The Afternoon Play.

Mal Young, the BBC's controller of continuing drama series, hopes that the projects, filmed on a fraction of normal drama budgets, will prove so popular that they will become a regular feature. "It may show us people have a taste for them," he said.

Subjects for the BBC1 series include a middle-aged woman in a mid-life crisis who finds salvation through belly dancing, and a woman who is shocked to discover her three best friends have slept with her fiancé.

The lunchtime series Doctors deliberately avoided soap-style stories in favour of having every episode as a self-contained story, Mr Young said. "That taught me that if you give the audience good satisfaction, they come back. There's a high guilt factor with watching daytime television so they want something that says their time has been well-spent."