LONDON: The BBC and Fox Television Studios in the US are joining forces to make a drama about a fictional terrorist attack on London.

The three part series The Grid will be told from the point of view of the US and UK anti-terrorist agencies and the terrorists themselves. The show is said to be loosely based on the BBC drama series Spooks.

The show is being produced by Fox and British company Carnival films, and will be shown on the BBC and TNT in the US. Carnival produced the highly-acclaimed 1989 drug-trafficking mini-series Traffik, which became the inspiration for Steven Soderburgh's Oscar-winning 2001 film.

One of the show's executive producers, Gareth Neame said, "There are quite a lot of similarities to Traffik. The Grid is an international project that looks in detail at a terrorist cell operating on a global level and how it carries out major terrorist acts and atrocities."

A BBC spokeswoman said that the series would look at international terrorism in a way that Spooks - which deals with one story each episode - would not able to do. "Spooks is obviously UK based and this is looking at things on a much more global scale," she said. She also said the series would be based on a fictional terrorist group.

One UK scriptwriter will join a team of US scriptwriters who are working on the show. The series will not be on screen until late next year at the earliest. The show's total budget is expected to be about ?10m, and it will be based in the US, the UK and Africa.