What was it like adapting The Story of Tracy Beaker?
Elly: It was interesting doing the adaptation, because the development woman at the time handed me the book and just said “What would you do with that?” So I took it away and read it. I didn’t know it. And it was just great. Jacqueline Wilson’s a great writer. It’s a stream of consciousness. There aren’t really chapters and it dives around all over the place and there are sort of fantasy bits in it as well. But in amongst that, Nick Sharratt does all Jacqueline Wilson’s illustrations. And we were going to do animation within the live action as well because there were things you just couldn’t show in live action terms. And so I said well we must use Nick’s work. We’ll animate that. Because then that really ties it down and makes it very much a Jacqueline Wilson experience so the audience will recognise it. Jacqueline’s got such a particular voice that I wanted to match that so the audience weren’t disappointed. We did 26 episodes, all 15 minutes, and I wrote nine of them. These days it’
