Press Gang (1989)

Moffat wrote all 43 episodes of this children's comedy-drama about students running a junior newspaper, which makes it the clearest place to see where his habits began: rapid-fire bickering, a romance built on things left unsaid, and episodes that play games with dream sequences and flashbacks. Julia Sawalha's ferocious editor Lynda Day and Dexter Fletcher's wisecracking Spike are the template for many later Moffat couples. It won the BAFTA for Best Children's Programme in 1991, and despite airing as children's TV it handles abuse and a drug death with real weight. Expect early-1990s production values; the scripts carry it.