Continuing the Legend

My Mum Tracy Beaker has been CBBC’s biggest ever launch, racking up over 2.1 million streams on iPlayer in the first weekend alone and setting social media reaction on fire in early 2021.

I have to confess the world of Tracy Beaker – Jacqueline Wilson’s feisty ‘problem child’ –  had escaped me.  I was born too early for it to hit my childhood viewing or reading.  All the same, I knew Tracy was an essential part of the cultural landscape for my children.  Blimey, hadn’t Stormzy even quoted the theme tune?

So when long-time collaborator, producer/director John McKay (Compact Pictures) invited me to come aboard this new chapter for CBBC –  My Mum Tracy Beaker – it was a great thrill and opportunity to be part of the canon, but I needed to bone up quickly – I immediately devoured the previous series over several days.

John saw the new series as a love story between mother and daughter, seen through the eyes of Tracy’s daughter Jess.  Along the way, it examines ideas of home and stability, and more sombre questions of mental health, parenting and childhood trauma – something which resonated, of which more later.

It was clear the bond between Tracy and Jess needed an emotional thread, a simple, tender and honest musical idea to return to. After a few false starts, I presented a slightly hymnal, almost folk piano sketch which I performed to John on the on a Zoom call and it seemed to hit the spot – aspects of sanctuary and tenderness. With his encouragement I found it blooming into an expansive second section under my fingers, before returning to the spare, opening mood and a gentle resolution; John could hear this forming a Heart and Home theme and it became a central element of the score.

The script was shouting for other musical reactions, so even before they were shooting – under Covid restrictions, of course – I started to present other character sketches to John and CBBC exec Spencer Campbell in Zoom meetings.  John and I often work like this – it’s very much a dialogue in the early stages, trying things out, writing away from the picture, trying to capture the spirit of the story in character sketches and subtextual layers.  On occasion, a musical approach might trigger a bold editing idea or even a new sequence – always exciting.

First was a potential title theme for Tracy in her groove, on top of her world: confident, cheeky, with a hard-won toughness but not without emotional depths. I heard rhythms of reggae and ska, the dubby sounds of a diverse, contemporary Britain, with eclectic instruments for the melody: banjo, melodica and the Arabic oud.  A toy piano – and elsewhere mandolin – consciously evoked Tracy Beaker Returns in a nostalgic nod to Joby Talbot’s delightful earlier work. The fresh, swaggering theme found a perfect home in the opening sequence, here.

To reflect Tracy’s hair-trigger rage when threatened or challenged, and perhaps work as a main title theme, I created a kind of 80s-pop stomp-and-clap with a playground-type chant.  I went through several versions improving it or so I thought, making it punchier, busier, ever more aggressive, but John kept returning to the demo for its simplicity and sense of fun. I think they even dubbed the demo into the final film, despite our slicker later mixes

For me, the character of our narrator Jess – precocious, bookish, perhaps as wilful as her mother – called for something naïve yet spirited which we found useful for bridging passages, to suggest time passing and things changing.  Here it melts into luxurious loungecore as they arrive at Sean’s swanky pile.

Much as I made every play to bag the theme tune, it was perhaps inevitable that nothing could displace the original Keisha White song Someday, so long and affectionately associated with the Beaker universe.  EP Spencer approached the original producer/co-writer Brian Harris who soon brought us several new versions with a fresh vocal from Keisha: a cool, dark R&B mix edit became our end-title music, and the fabulous disco-tastic arrangement got a star appearance in the wedding scene.

The score was mixed by my long-serving engineer Steve Parr. Given the geographical and Covid constraints, we were forced to mix remotely. In a successful first experiment, we had Steve operate my computer workstation here in Newcastle from his facility in London, while I simultaneously streamed the full-resolution audio back to him. We kept in contact via a continuous WhatsApp call on our phones – it worked a dream and saved loads in time and travel costs.

The Heart and Home theme runs through the story whenever Tracy chases a dream of stability for her and Jess, something Tracy wasn’t lucky enough to experience consistently in her own upbringing.  There’s something bittersweet about it that seems to make it work on both happy and more melancholy scenes.

It wasn’t until I was in sight of the finishing line, polishing the closing cue with more mandolin and starting to relax, that I had a small epiphany: so much of the story in fact had deep echoes in my own family history, echoes now triggering a wave of unexpectedly powerful emotion in me.  At once I recognised again the many parallels between Tracy’s story and that of my own, dear late mother, whose upbringing had brought its own challenges and struggles throughout her life.  While their personalities could not have been more different, I realised what I had been writing for Tracy B, I had also been writing for her.

So Mum, this one’s for you.

Barbara Jean Sargent (née Jones) 1930 – 2003