In response to who Julie Gardner and Mal Young are: Julie Gardner is head of Drama at BBC Wales (see picturehere). And Mal Young is BBC Controller of Continuing Drama Series.

Here's how Drama Commissioning responsibilities are described on BBCi.

You may also find it interesting to peruse some of the public domain documents on BBCi. There's a lot of rather idle speculation on this forum about what may or may not happen, but you can get some excellent clues in document such as this BBC Producer Briefing Day document (it's a PDF) about what the BBC are looking for in their drama series.

It is a transcript of the Genre Session they ran on April 1 this year (yes, I know, April 1). From it, you'll see information about the ratio of spend between returning drama series and serials/events; the longevity they expect of newly-commissioned series; the difference between commissions on BBC1, BBC2, and BBC3; etc. No need for wild guesswork or speculation, even at this early sage: this is published opinion of Jane Tranter herself (BBC Controller of Drama Commissioning).

Or check out the Commissioning site on BBCi, including the section about Drama.

My point is that there's a wealth of available information in public domain. We're happy enough to graze a myriad DW sites on the web, so perhaps we should spend some time looking at what the BBC actually tell us!

Now you can try and work out why I have called this thread "Five is the magic number".