Katie Morag!  Far away, across the ocean!  Katie Morag!  Over the sea to Struay!  Dee dum de de dum de de dum de de dum…  actually, hold on.  Here’s the video.

So last time round, I looked at Balamory, CBeebies’ other show set in the Highlands.  Balamory was in part a reaction against the likes of Teletubbies and Tweenies, and it was certainly more down to earth than either.  But it was hardly rigorous in its quest for realism.  The village was ultimately a format device, and if half the cast were English or American actors using their own accents, or the occasional shot revealed the Glaswegian tenement block across the road from the nursery, well, nobody was losing much sleep about that.

Katie Morag is another matter.  It’s an adaptation of a series of books by Mairi Hedderwick, originally published sporadically between 1984 and 2007.  She lived on the island of Coll, and Katie Morag is a show that loves its Hebridean setting and remote island community.  This is the small town utopia where everyone knows everyone else because there literally aren’t that many people to know.  And the show takes its setting seriously, decamping to the Hebrides to film.

This is not the only way that Katie Morag sits at the other end of the spectrum from Balamory.  It’s also right at up the top end of the CBeebies age range (which is officially six), to the point where it also airs on sister channel CBBC.  In fact, the second series apparently has a couple of episodes filmed exclusively for CBBC.  There aren’t many shows commissioned to straddle the two stations – off the top of my head, Jamillah & Aladdin comes to mind.

Regardless, Katie Morag is a lovely show, even if it’s probably over the heads of a good chunk of the CBeebies audience.  It is, simply, the stories of Katie Morag McColl, whose parents run the island shop and post office, growing up on an island that’s tiny by most standards, but still full of wonders for her.  Much of the time, the show is mainly interested in how she deals with the adults.  What really marks Katie Morag as a gear shift from the rest of CBeebies is that those adults are not just adults as young children see them, but proper characters with full blown inner lives.  There’s a romantic subplot with two pensioners.  There’s passive-aggressive defensiveness about the wider world.

Katie’s relationship with her Grannie Island, a tractor-driving crofter (as opposed to Grannie Mainland, from the city) is placed front and centre.  Supposedly, Mairi Hedderwick’s original idea was that the character would be male, and the American publishers didn’t like that for whatever reason.  But she’s a better character as a woman, if only because a male version would be much closer to a stock character.  She’s much more effective as a female, especially since it then allows for the contrast with the much more conventional Grannie Mainland.

As a seven-year-old or thereabouts, Katie tends not to fully understand the adult characters.  Sometimes things get explained to her pretty quickly; sometimes it’s just an aside; sometimes the adults run rings around her; and sometimes she just misreads things disastrously.  So it’s pretty clear that Grannie Island finds Grannie Mainland a bit wearing, but Katie tends not to pick up on that.  Or, in one episode, she decides that the perfect way to cheer up Grannie Island would be to engineer a reunion with her estranged husband (who left the island), because what could possibly go wrong there?  The scene that follows sums up the show’s style: no fireworks, just excruciatingly awkward pauses as the adults are perfectly polite, but can’t conceal their lack of enthusiasm from a disappointed, confused Katie.

On CBeebies, the assumed audience is actually slightly younger than Katie.  On CBBC, of course, they’re mostly slightly older.  Perhaps the thinking is that dramatic irony helps to bridge the audience gap (as well as maximise the parent-entertaining potential); if you’re not old enough to get the irony, Katie just works as a straightforward point of view character.

Generally speaking, I’m not planning to write about shows where child actors feature prominently, but I’ll make an exception for Katie Morag because Cherry Campbell is genuinely great.  Though she gets a lot of narration, she’s at her best acting opposite the adults, and when she’s just watching stuff or reacting to it.  Her instincts there are pretty fantastic.  She was seven when they made the first series, with no acting background, and she really does have presence.

Katie has a younger brother, Liam, who for obvious reasons doesn’t contribute much.  The show works around that rather nicely, keeping him as a blankly impassive presence in a tiger costume.  There’s a cute running joke that Katie’s narration persists in talking about him as if he was much more active and opinionated than we ever see any evidence of.

There are, of course, limits to Katie Morag‘s commitment to realism.  It’s a comedy drama for young children, after all.  It’s happy to be a little bit nebulous about precisely when it’s set – the earliest books are some thirty years old, after all.  Officially it’s the present day, but the show only brings up things like e-mail or mobile phones when it really feels obliged to explain why they aren’t being used.  Then there’s the size of the community.  The map in the opening credits says that the entire island population is “approx 30”, which rather begs the question of how the village shop and post office are supporting a family of five (a baby shows up during series 1), let alone where the other kids in the school come from.  There’s some artistic licence here, I suspect, minimising the size of the population to keep everything closed and self-contained, but keeping some of the features of the real island of Coll, whose population is actually closer to 200.  (The show was filmed on the Isle of Lewis, which is a bustling metropolis in comparison.)

The show also keeps in touch with its storybook roots by rounding out its series with several episodes under the “Granny Island’s Ceilidh” sub-banner.  These are effectively bottle episodes, disguised by having virtually the entire regular cast in the framing sequence.  The conceit is that the islanders have a regular party at Granny Island’s house where they take turns to tell stories about the island.  Effectively it’s “Tales of Struay”, with the adults each getting an episode to simply tell a story in monologue, accompanied by spot illustrations from Hedderwick.  The storytelling format still holds up – we’ll get to Old Jack’s Boat at some point – and these episodes tend to be a pleasant change of pace, even if they’re a bit light on actual Katie Morag.

 

Katie Morag is a great show which, in a pre-multichannel era, would probably have aired on Sunday afternoons and been billed as family entertainment.  These days, viewers without small kids are unlikely to stumble upon its gentle charms, which is a shame.  It has good stories, a great cast, and a beautiful island.  And it’s funny.

It’s also the exit route out of CBeebies and up to the wider world of television, which means it’s time to turn back for now.  Next time, something entirely different: Chuggington.