Twenty new episodes of the Gaelic drama Bannan are to be made as part of a new four year deal between its producers and BBC Alba.

Filmed on the Isle of Skye, and produced by The Inbetweeners’ Chris Young, Bannan has been produced since 2014.

The success of Bannan has led to an international deal being signed for the series with DRG, one of the leading independent distributors of programmes in the world.

The new contract, running until 2021, will lead to at least 20 episodes, on top of the 23 already produced, being made for the channel.

The announcement was made prior to a screening of Bannan at the Edinburgh International Film Festival.

Chris Young, of Young Films, said: “I am absolutely delighted that we are entering into this new four year deal for Bannan.

"My dream was always to create a popular and successful long-running Gaelic language drama that works for Gaelic, national and international audiences."

He added: "With this new deal we have a unique opportunity to take our storylines and characters in unexpected and exciting directions.

"It also gives us scope to develop our training programme on a more strategic basis, continuing our ambition to create a new generation of Scottish and Gaelic film and television talent."

Maggie Cunningham, the former BBC executive and now chair of MG Alba, the Gaelic broadcasting company that runs BBC Alba with BBC Scotland, said: “The development of drama was a key milestone for BBC ALBA and since it was first broadcast in 2014, Bannan has proved popular with both our core Gaelic audience and non-Gaelic speakers alike.

"We’re pleased to announce a four-year deal with Young Films, which will provide longer-term certainty for Bannan’s ongoing development.

"In recent years we have awarded a number of multi-year volume deals to producers for other genres and seen resulting cost savings and collaborations which in turn has allowed more new programmes to be made.

"Whilst drama production comes at a significantly higher cost than other genres, MG ALBA believes longer-term planning for Bannan can bring similar benefits and also, that such strategic investment in drama enables us to create a strong creative foundation that benefits the future of Gaelic on screen, by strengthening the skills vital to telling our stories.”

Ms Cunningham, launching the company's annual report, said it was still pressing the case for more new content.

She added: “A key tenet of MG Alba’s strategy is to encourage international co-productions from our producers.

"This has involved significant work with our independent producers and we are now starting to see this work come to fruition, with £950,000 of added value for the channel already coming from current long-term deals as a result of collaboration.

"A fine example of this is Port, a musical series presented by Julie Fowlis that has enjoyed significant acclaim from audiences in Scotland and Ireland. With the advent of the new BBC Scotland channel, we will explore opportunities that this may give us.

"Whilst we are determined to ensure every pound we spend works as hard as it can for the BBC Alba audience, it must be acknowledged that there is a limit to what can be achieved with our current budget and that more investment in programming is required."

Ms Cunningham said the BBC Charter, did not assure there would be 10 hours of original programming per week, "we have had some assurance that there will be progress towards this target over the next few years."