Bandit takes on Thompson's wartime saga for TV

Kate Thompson’s Second World War factory drama has been optioned for television.

Bandit Television, producers of Sky’s “Delicious” and BBC’s “Rillington Place”, has optioned television rights to Secrets of the Singer Girls by Kate Thompson (Pan Macmillan), for a multi-part, returnable television series.

BAFTA and Emmy award-winning m.d. of Bandit Phillippa Giles and producer Pat Tookey-Dickson acquired television rights from James Carroll at Diane Banks Associates. The deal was brokered by Sophie Cook at Endemol Shine UK. It is not yet known if a broadcaster is attached to the project.

Secrets of the Singer Girls was bought in 2014 after a seven-way auction by Caroline Hogg, commissioning editor at Pan Macmillan, from Kate Burke at Diane Banks Associates and chronicles the adventures of a group of machinists. In 1942, 16-year-old Poppy Percival turns up at the gates of Trout’s Garment Factory in Bethnal Green with no idea what her new life might have in store.

Giles from Bandit said: “Singer Girls presents a real and raw version of how life really was beyond the city walls, built around relationships, secrets, strong families and memorable characters. Factory workers in crossover aprons and button-down boots were the beating heart of the East End. This is the real war, as experienced by a tribe of working-class women in the slums, teeming tenements and sweatshops of East London.”

Thompson was born in London in 1974, and worked as a journalist for 20 years on women's magazines and national newspapers, and is now based in Sunbury. Her fourth book, The Allotment Girls (Pan Macmillan) was published in March 2018 and she is currently working on a non-fiction book.