A Bradford screenwriter is hoping to hit the bullseye tonight as the one-off darts drama he’s penned with controversial Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh hits the small screen.

Good Arrows is the latest film to come from the writing team of Dean Cavanagh and Welsh, and tells the story of a washed-up darts player trying to reclaim the limelight.

Allerton-born Dean, 41, who now lives in Cottingley, has had a long partnership with Welsh and together they set up their own production company, Dust Films, so they could retain control over films like the 90-minute Good Arrows and their previous TV production, the dark TV series Wedding Belles.

Good Arrows was filmed in Merthyr Tydfil, a post-industrial town in south Wales which has suffered a lot of decline in recent years. Cavanagh and Welsh could have taken advantage of the burgeoning television scene a stone’s throw away in Cardiff – home of Doctor Who, Torchwood and the new Beeb Saturday drama Merlin – but decided to keep the production at grassroots level.

Dean said: “We did the right thing, and the people of Merthyr respected and appreciated that, because we roped them in to be involved. I don’t want to sound worthy again, but there might be kids in Merthyr who now realise it’s OK for people like them to want to make films or television.”

Irvine Welsh said that the team wanted to do something with darts but said the topic in itself was beyond parody: “We started thinking about doing something with darts and realised that it’s too hyper-real anyway, you can’t really do a satire about it because it’s just larger than life.”

He added: “So what we decided to do was to focus it on the culture of minor celebrity and the people that have been semi-famous about 15 years ago trying to come back into the limelight again and all the sadness that involves. So we wanted to do a comedy drama about that.”

In the film Jonathan Owen plays player Andy ‘The Arrows’ Samson and Joe McKinney plays documentary maker Seb. Good Arrows, which also stars comedian-of-the-moment Katy Brand, is on ITV4 tomorrow at 11pm.