Production company fails to get court to stop BBC broadcasting "copied" show

A company has failed in its attempt to get an interim injunction to stop the broadcast of a BBC comedy it claimed was copied from a script it produced.

Happy Campers Production says it had written a script called "Down The Caravan", about two women who inherit equal shares in a caravan site in Wales after the death of the site's owner. It says it sent the script to Margaret Russell, a producer at the BBC in July 2015. Russell apparently replied almost three years later the script was "not very good" and the BBC in London would likely not consider making it into a television show.

Kay and Jerry Lockett, the two owners of Happy Campers Production, learned months later of a script for a BBC pilot called "Pitching In", about a widower who owns a caravan park in Wales.

But for reasons not included in court documents, Happy Campers Production waited about six months before the first episode of "Pitching In" was to be broadcast on BBC One Wales, before applying for an interim injunction to prevent the broadcast from going ahead.

The judge questioned whether there was any copying involved. Although the two scripts are similar at "at a very broad level", there was a difference between the two.

One distinct idea from the "Down The Caravan" script which was not in the script for "Pitching In" was that the show would start with the death of the owner of the caravan site, thereby leading to a series of events in the local town, at the caravan site, and the two women inheriting the caravan site. But the owner would appear through the rest of the show as he recorded a series of messages before his death.

This idea did not appear in "Pitching In", which was basically about the life of a recent widower in a caravan park.

In refusing the injunction application, the judge also remarked that the claim was "dreadfully late", referring to the six months it took for Happy Camper Productions to bring the interim junction claim.