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The first episode of my Sarah Jane Adventures two parter (”Warriors of Kudlak”) went out last night as a preview on the children’s channel CBBC before it hits BBC1 next Monday evening.

As ever, watching one’s own script writing made real was a fascinating experience. The cast and crew did a fantastic job, and it’s been a real, rare joy to be asked to contribute to such an imaginative series.

I started thinking back over the writing process, and in particular the way the story twisted and changed over the 8 or 9 months it took to write the screenplays. In particular, last night’s episode had a moment I don’t think many parents will have missed– a tribute to the Kate Bush “Cloudbusting” video.

I’d almost forgotten that the story I originally pitched had been inspired by the character Donald Sutherland plays in that video – a man called Wilhelm Reich. I’ve been interested writing a script about Reich for well over a decade, but when Matthew Bouche (the SJA producer) called me in to pitch last September it was coincidentally just a couple of days after I’d seen the Kate Bush video again for the first time in ages, so Reich, his son Peter, and of course that famous hill top scene, were all very much alive in my mind.

We had our first story meeting and talked about the possibilities, and the very first draft of what eventually became WoK had an discredited inventor just like Reich, who inadvertently created a device that attracted the attention of a passing alien space ship. (Reich was clearly unstable at one point, and enlisted Peter in his ongoing battles with what he believed were UFOs. Pete has written a moving account of the night they apparently defeated one). Shenanigans ensued, the father being eventually abducted to the alien ship by a lonely, almost ogreish alien, and the son finally offering up his own life to save him. (Son survived, obviously.)

Matthew and Lindsay (the wonderful script editor on the series) liked these thoughts, so I started to do some more work. Kate Bush has said she based her video on her own reading of a book written by Reich’s son Peter, called the Book of Dreams - so, ever the obsessive, I started looking for that too. Not at all necessary, but I was enjoying the research.

But I couldn’t find the book. It was out of print, and the rare ones that did turn up were going on Ebay for £50 or more - more importantly the shape and tone of the Sarah Jane Adventures was morphing almost daily at that stage, and pretty soon the story had moved in other directions. I came up with an idea for a different, darker slant, with all our characters stalked and held captive overnight by a malevolent alien in a shopping mall, which then became a Laser Quest place, which then necessarily became a war cadet story, at which point Orson Scott Card stood up and begged for attention… etc etc, on and on in the process of finding the story.

As ever, when Russell T Davies gets his hands on a Doctor Who style story, the final show has far more in it that I would have dreamed of last September - but, you know, it is so good to see the original seeds still discernible: The lonely Kudlak and his kidnapping alien spaceship, and Sarah Jane and Maria out on a hillside making rain.

And Wilhelm Reich remains, unscathed this time, fascinating as ever.

I’ll be back.

Watch ‘The Sarah Jane Adventures’, Monday 22^nd Oct, BBC1 at 5.00pm.