Stand-up comedian Meryl O'Rourke is one of the winners of a £10,000 award to develop a comedy film script or pilot script for a narrative comedy television series as part of the Betty Box and Peter Rogers Creative Writing Programme.

The "Betty and Peter Award" (in partnership with Big Talk Productions and The London Comedy Film Festival) is named after Betty Box and Peter Rogers. They were the producers of the Doctor and Carry On series respectively, among many other credits, and in their wills left an endowment to the Cinema and Television Benevolent Fund.

The other winners of the award are Laura Kirwan-Ashman, Sasha Collington and Christine Robertson. O'Rourke is one of the two winners of the sitcom writing prize. All four writers will be given script development support from the film or TV team at Big Talk, will be matched with an experienced script editor to work with on their script and given professional development through CTBF and LOCO, the latter of which will also manage the programme.

At the end of the process the selected writers will have completed a feature screenplay or television pilot, which will be presented as a live, fully cast table read to an industry audience during a special LOCO event in Spring 2017.