Exclusive: The BBC is developing a drama series about the Piper Alpha disaster, one of the most catastrophic offshore oil incidents of all time and the worst in terms of lives lost.

The drama comes around 35 years after the disaster, which took place off the coast of Scotland on a North Sea oil rig that at the time accounted for around 10% of the North Sea’s oil and gas production.

The BBC, Scottish producer Stv Studios and writer James Wood are in the research phase, we are told, and the show is yet to go into production or be given the green light. It is being developed in consultation with Piper Alpha survivors and relatives, and would be based on these new interviews, ongoing research, the 1990 Cullen report into the tragedy and the book Fire in the Night by Stephen McGinty.

Piper Alpha began production in 1976 around 120 miles north east of Aberdeen,...