The good news is, now is your chance. The bad news is, you need to be a student between 9-11 years of age, enrolled in a British primary school and a resident of the UK. Overseas (where we are) submissions cannot be considered. Better put pen to paper soon, deadline for submission is 13 June, 2011.

The Doctor Who: Script to Screen Competition has just been announced by BBC Learning. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for team of primary students, again, aged 9-11, to create a 3-minute Doctor Who mini-adventure starring the Eleventh Doctor, Matt Smith.

The winning team will travel to the BBC studios in Cardiff with Doctor Who Confidential on hand in order to take the winners and viewers behind the scenes to show how a script goes from paper to the big screen, including, script reading, cast read-through, on-set filming and finally, the final edit.

The BBC Teachers site includes an introduction to the project, teacher resources, curriculum links and also, numerous lesson plans. Sorry, kids, television production isn’t always the ‘lunch in LA, dinner in New York’ career that you might have thought it was. Don’t forget, deadline for entry is 13 June, 2011, and open to residents of the UK enrolled in a British primary school, ages 9-11. Who knows, you could be the next Steven Moffat!

That said, this is just cool, plain and simple. I wish this had been around for Star Trek back in the day.