Where are the great adaptations of classic Scottish novels? That was Joan McAlpine's question when she spoke at a meeting of Holyrood's culture committee. The SNP MSP observed: "Every few years the BBC repeats a big-budget drama version of the classics of English literature. But they don’t usually – ever, actually – reflect the Scottish canon."

It's Dickens, Austen, and more Dickens, and then some more Austen. If TV commissioners in London took the time to look at the acclaimed literary output of Scotland over the centuries they'd have a host of great works to adapt - and something new and interesting to show viewers bored to death by bodices, top hats and a Ye Olde Worlde vision of middle England.

Here, to help out the luvvies, we run through just a few of the Scottish options available:

1. The Private Memoirs And Confessions Of A Justified Sinner – James Hogg

“I can imagine,” Ian Rankin once wrote of James Hogg's classic 1824 novel, “myself sitting down in the office of a film production company and pitching this to them. It would be ticking all the right boxes. Thriller - popular genre. Serial killer - good and scary. Political dimension - adds extra demographic. Psychological element - makes it more grown-up. Religious spin - plausible.” What he was describing was a novel that is begging to be made into a film or dark, atmospheric television costume drama, one that follows the story of Robert Wringhim a boy raised in strict 18th century Calvinism, who comes in thrall to a strange companion, Gil-Martin, who could be the Devil himself. Here is madness, murder, stalking, religious zealotry – a heady screenworthy cocktail. Yet, while there’s been an opera and even a Polish film, the English language screen adaptation has yet to be created. Rankin, himself has had a go at a script for a film. The big broadcasters ought to be champing at the bit.

2. And The Land Lay Still – James Robertson

The book that Alex Salmond praised, on its publication in 2010, as an “outstanding and important novel about Scotland, and what it means to be Scottish” has, for a while, been looking set to make the journey to our screens. In 2011 ITV announced it was working on a £5 million adaptation of the epic tale, a kind of Scottish Our Friends In the North. But As I Lay Still is even bigger in scope than the landmark northern drama which starred Christopher Ecclestone. It’s a sweeping story carries its characters, a Tory MP, a gay photographer, an alcoholic MI5 officer, from 1950 to the present, taking in sectarianism, devolution, deindustrialisation, Thatcherism, and the legacy of war. So, our friends in the south, when's it coming?

3. The Bull Calves – Naomi Mitchison

The world can never get enough of the Jacobites - this much Outlander has proved. So Naomi Mitchison’s 1947 novel set in 1747, in the tense and distrustful aftermath of the Jacobite Risings, is ripe with adaptation potential. It follows Kirstie Haldane, member of a Whig famly, and husband, Jacobite William Macintosh of Borlum over two days, but delves deep into their personal backstories, as the drama unfolds with the arrival of Robert Strange, the man contracted to design Bonnie Prince Charlie’s banknotes, on the run and in search of a hiding place. Time travel? Sadly none. But Sam Heughan wouldn't make a bad William Macintosh.

4. Rob Roy – Walter Scott

There have already been Rob Roys on screen. Liam Neeson, of course, back in 1995 made the outlaw his Braveheart in the film by Michael Caton-Jones. But there has not yet been an adaptation of Walter Scott's 1817 novel itself, which, after all isn’t so much the story of Rob Roy but of Frank Osbaldistone, an English merchant who falls for a woman linked to the Jacobite cause and ultimately ends up crossing paths with Rob Roy. Scott’s novels which once were so popular they inspired 'Scott mania' - from dances, to tourism and fashions - have now fallen out of favour, but at heart they remain rollicking reads. However, not since the 1982 Ivanhoe, starring Sam Neil and Olivia Hussey, has there been much in the way of screen interest in his books. A revival, through a swashbuckling television adaptation, is long overdue.

5. Loitering with Intent

Some of Muriel Spark’s novels have made it to the screen, most famously of course the unforgettable The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, nailed by Maggie Smith, and The Driver's Seat, which starred Elizabeth Taylor. But many more merited a dramatisation. Loitering With Intent, inspired by her years as an aspiring young writer in post war London, is weird and funny enough to be the basis of a zany adaptation. When Fleur Talbot takes a position as a secretary for the bunch of upper-class twits that is the Autobiographical Association, things start to turn a little strange. Events from the novel she has been working on start to come true. Yes, it's farce, and delicious with it.

6. Red Dust Road – Jackie Kay

Scotland's Makar is surely made for the screen. Between Kay’s memoir Red Dust Road and her first novel Trumpet, it’s hard to pick which might make a better television adaptation. Trumpet, telling as it does the story of jazz trumpeter, who is revealed after his death to have been assigned female at birth, not male, touches on current issues around transgender identity, and offers potential for a great jazz soundtrack a la La La Land. But there’s also something about Kay’s own story, as told in Red Dust Road, that is just begging to be recreated on the screen. In fact, her funny and moving telling of the story of her search to find and get to know her birth parents, interspersed with a memoir of her childhood in Glasgow, is so rich and vivid that, once read, it feels like you’ve almost seen it.

7. Swing, Hammer, Swing – Jeff Torrington

Around twenty years ago it looked like Swing, Hammer, Swing, Jeff Torrington’s Whitbread award winning first novel, was well on its way to being made into a television drama. The great Glaswegian dramatist Peter McDougall has written the script for BBC Scotland. Then the show was axed. McDougall said the decision was proof that BBC Scotland had no clout and was “completely and utterly answerable to London”. As such, another swing of the hammer is required, for Torrington’s book has, in spite of its relatively basic plot, so much to offer the screen. It’s the Gorbals in the 1960s, the tenements are being felled and we follow a week in the life of Thomas Clay, which revolves around pubs, adultery, and a visit to his pregnant wife in hospital. “I was about two parts human to one part cadaver,” Clay remarks and the line couldn’t sound more like the perfect voiceover opening for what would be a riot of a drama. Maybe it's too working class for the London telly types though?

8. Lanark: A Life In Four Books – Alasdair Gray

Some have said that Lanark is unfilmable. Those people probably also believed it wasn’t possible to put it on the stage, but David Greig and Graham Eatough did just that in 2015, and it was a heroic triumph. A screen version could take us somewhere else entirely – to the kind of places Guillermo del Toro has gone with his Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape Of Water. CGI, after all, was made for challenges like how to work together a plot that includes the realism of Duncan Thaw's Glasgow life, and Lanark's surreal wanderings in Unthank. Plus, Alasdair Gray clearly thought his 1981 novel could work on screen. Back in 1983 he was commissioned to write a film script and produced three quarters of it, with storyboard. Anyone for Lanark: A Life In Ten Episodes?

9. An Oidhche Mus do Sheòl Sinn (The Night Before We Sailed) – Aonghais Pàdraig Caimbeul

“It’s time,” wrote former director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, Hannah McGill, last year, “the vibrant modern literary revival of Gaelic found screen representation beyond specialist TV." Aonghais Pàdraig Caimbeul’s rich family saga would be an ambitious place to start, and with its international scope, emotional complexity and powerful characterisation, it’s nothing if not cinematic.” McGill was really suggesting film adaptation, but the scope and scale of the drama suggests television. Go on, give us the great Gaelic epic. Non speakers of the language, after all, can take a few subtitles as Babylon Berlin has just proved.

10. Laidlaw – William McIlvanney

Why on earth are still we waiting? It’s over 40 years since the book which single-handedly created Tartan Noir first hit the streets, and still no small-screen Laidlaw. This first novel in the classic detective trilogy has long seemed it should be prime source material for makers of TV crime dramas. It was Laidlaw, after all, that laid the blueprint for Rebus and we all know how television loved him. Why a series hasn't happened yet is one of broadcasting's great mysteries, and not without some history. In the 1980s McIlvanney was in talks with producers to have the books adapted – then Taggart, so similar to Jack Laidlaw, hit the screens and it seemed the Scottish crime spot was taken. Later, in 2013 Company Pictures optioned the rights to the trilogy. But where is it? The wait is almost criminal.