Katie Morag (2013–2015)
Set on a fictional Hebridean island, this children’s television series gently and thoughtfully reflects on tradition and change in rural community life, from the perspective of its young protagonist.
Please support my work by becoming a free or a paid subscriber to the newsletter. Paid subscribers can access my full archive of posts at any time, and are vital to me being able to continue producing and expanding this newsletter.
This post is part of the ‘Rewound’ series of analyses of objects or episodes from cultural and political history.
Katie Morag ran for two seasons on CBeebies and CBBC between 2013 and 2015, being adapted from Scottish author Mairi Hedderwick’s series of children’s books published between 1984 and 2007. The programme centres on its eponymous child hero, Katie Morag McColl (Cherry Campbell), who lives on the fictional Hebridean island of Struay. Her parents Isobel (Gail Watson) and Peter (Kenneth Harvey) run the local Post Office and shop, while her maternal grandmother ‘Grannie Island’ (Annie Louise Ross) has a nearby farm, and her paternal grandmother ‘Granma Mainland’ (Barbara Rafferty) is a regular visitor. The show also includes an eclectic and eccentric wider cast of recurring characters, including amiable but hapless family friend and odd jobber Neilly Beag (Angus Peter Campbell) and well-meaning gossip Jeannie Baxter (Anna Hepburn).
The episodes are mostly self-contained, featuring voiceover narrative from Katie Morag herself, offering a child’s eye view of island life. Her own adventures intertwine with those of her adult relatives and other members of the local community, whom she well-meaningly, though frequently haphazardly, tries to help. They generally conclude with Katie Morag reflecting on the lessons of the episode, before she flashes a light out across the island to Grannie Island’s croft to say goodnight (her grandmother flashing a light back). There are also a subset of episodes in the first series titled ‘Grannie Island’s Ceilidh’, in which she attends social gatherings hosted by her grandmother featuring music and dancing, before one of the grown-ups tells a story about an episode from Struay’s past (their narrative accompanying still illustrations in Hedderwick’s own watercolour style).
There are though broader story arcs that carry across the episodes, including Isobel McColl’s pregnancy and the arrival of Katie Morag’s and younger brother Liam’s new baby sister, Flora Anne, and the budding romance between Granma Mainland and Neilly Beag, with the first series culminating with their wedding. Whereas the stories in the first series were a standard fifteen minutes in running time, those in the second were more varied in length, with some specifically made for screening on CBBC rather than CBeebies, because of their more mature themes. The second series finale has the McColls facing the prospect of having to leave Struay for Glasgow, which Katie Morag cunningly intervenes to prevent.
Island life and community
Each episode begins with Katie Morag telling the viewers, ‘I suppose [Struay’s] quite wee, but it’s ginormous to me!’, in a voiceover accompanied by a map of the fictional island – and this scalar paradox is integral to the way island life is depicted. On the one hand, Struay clearly is small. A limited number of inhabitants regularly feature who embody its tight-knit community, associated with particular (often occupational) roles. Katie Morag can roam the island freely without parental supervision because of the relative proximity of places like Grannie Island’s farm, but also the familiarity of all of the island’s adults, ‘who look out for me when I’m having my adventures’. However, the viewer also gets a strong sense of the space and possibilities that Struay’s rural landscape – mostly filmed on the real Hebridean island of Lewis – holds for a young child as she explores it.
Struay’s Gaelicness, and thereby its distinctiveness even from Scotland as a whole, is also heavily emphasised throughout the series. This includes its soundtrack by Donald Shaw, as well as events like Grannie Island’s ceilidhs, the island show in ‘Katie Morag and the Two Grandmothers’, or the shinty match against neighbouring Coll (the real island Hedderwick based Struay on) in ‘Katie Morag and the Big Shinty Match’. Characters also frequently use Gaelic words, with Katie Morag often translating these phrases for the show’s young viewers in ways that help render them culturally relatable, explaining for example that ‘Grannie Island doesn’t call them parties; she calls them ceilidhs’, or that a shinty stick is called a ‘caman’ (and a ball is called ‘a ball’).
The programme also highlights differences between island and mainland life. The contrast is embodied in the characters of Grannie Island and Granma Mainland: the former is decidedly unpretentious and plain speaking, with a matching appearance of cropped hair, dungarees and wellies; the latter is glamourous, with a penchant for jewellery and beauty products. However, the difference in personalities does not amount to much by the way of tension between them, and Grandma Mainland after all soon settles in Struay with Neilly Beag. Yet while mainlanders are generally depicted as welcome on he island, we also get a sense of the tensions arising from its popularity with tourists, as when Mrs Baxter complains about one party of visitors buying all the bananas in the McColls’ shop in ‘Katie Morag and the Big Picture’:
A whole box of bananas? How many are they planning to eat? It’ll be one of those fancy mainland diets, no doubt. As if they couldn’t have brought their own bananas from one of those ‘super shops’ on the mainland. Oh, I’ll be glad when summer’s over!
Ritual, tradition, and modernity
Routine and history are integral to this vision of life. The major local events are recurring in nature, as with the annual shinty match with Coll, emphasised by Peter McColl reading through a scrapbook detailing previous encounters. Characters often refer back to events from a century or more ago as possessing contemporary relevance, particularly in the stories told at the ceilidhs. Objects too are often vested with a significance arising from their being passed down between generations. In ‘Grannie Island’s Ceilidh – Stone Soup’, Isobel tells a story about a young man named Calum who had come to the island during a potato blight and pretending to make a stone using just a stone, convinced all the islanders to give what ingredients they had to garnish it, enabling him to make a large pot of soup that the whole island partook of. She reveals that the stone, which she is holding, was eventually inherited by Grannie Island, as Calum was her great-great-great-grandfather.1
Nonetheless, while the islanders are history-conscious and sometimes stuck in their ways, the programme’s position on social, cultural, and technological change is more nuanced. Continuity and modernity can sometimes appear in confrontation with each other – often embedded in the differences between island and mainland life – but that there is space for the latter if the former can also be accommodated. This is particularly the case for gender roles, with the programme’s most important character other than Katie Morag being Grannie Island, a far from conventionally feminine matriarchal figure constantly shown performing manual farm labour. Stories about Struay’s past also show women diverging from expected gender roles, such as in ‘Grannie Island’s Celidh – Hugh Handy’, which features a girl becoming a boat-builder’s apprentice, or Grannie Island telling Katie Morag about Mrs Baxter saving a boy from drowning when she was younger in ‘Katie Morag and the Struay Star’.
‘Katie Morag and the Brochan Bus’, meanwhile, explores the more challenging impacts of modernisation. The construction of a new pier has been welcomed by many in Struay, but has negatively impacted Neilly Beag, who formerly earned much of his income by bringing visitors ashore from the ferry in his rowing boat. Inspired by Katie Morag’s love of his traditional porridge (‘brochan’) he buys a trailer to sell it from, but initially struggles to attract customers because his insistence on making it in exactly the same way as has been made in his family for generations, meaning no variations in the recipe or additional seasoning except salt. However, Granma Mainland persuades him to see the value of being receptive to change and ‘the Brochan Bus’ becomes extremely popular, with Neilly Beag telling one customer that ‘we are at the cutting edge of porridge technology’. Katie Morag ruminates at the end:
Granma Mainland says people have been eating porridge in Struay for the last thousand years, and will be eating it for the next thousand, but sometimes you have to give the old ways a tweak just to keep them fresh…‘New ways and old ways,’ as Grannie Island says, ‘there’s plenty of room for them all.’
The Post Office, transport, and communication
Though not always foregrounded in individual episodes’ plots, the McColls’ Post Office and shop functions as an integral hub of island life, linking it in tandem with maritime travel services to the world beyond Struay. It is here that visitors and locals alike can receive letters and packages from the mainland and elsewhere, and buy their essentials. It is also therefore an important site of more informal communication, where customers and the McColls exchange important local information. Grannie Island’s friend ‘the Lady Author’, describes it as ‘the most important building on the island’ in the ‘Hugh Handy’ episode. This also makes it a pressure point too in the supply of goods and tourists from the mainland, evident in the very first episode, ‘Katy Morag Delivers the Mail’, in which Katie Morag tries unsuccessfully to help out her overworked parents amid the weekly arrival of a boatload of parcels, or in Mrs Baxter’s complaint (mentioned above) about them being out of bananas.
This comes fully to the fore in the half-hour long final episode, ‘Katie Morag and the Worst Day Ever’. The McColls face the prospect of having to give up their home and Post Office and leave Struay because the Cavendishes (Cal Macaninch and Shauna Macdonald), who own the premises but live in Edinburgh, want to stop renting it to them and move in themselves. When they arrive, Katie Morag deliberately takes Mrs Cavendish on a nightmarish tour of the island (in which she is bitten by midges, defecated on by seagulls, and finally falls into a bog). The close attention she and her husband receive from the well-meaning locals as a result prompts her to depart in disgust with Mr Cavendish in tow. The McColls can stay in Struay after all, to Katie Morag’s delight.
The Cavendishes are presented not merely as tourists but colonial settlers who intend to use their economic power to dispossess the locals. Mrs Cavendish has an especially patronising view of Struay, being primarily interested in its picturesque landscape and only able to see its residents and their customs as at best quaint. What particularly galls the McColls and others is her intention to convert the building into a gallery, illustrating her blasé view that local preferences are out of step with the digital age:
ISOBEL: What about the Post Office?
MRS CAVENDISH: Everybody uses email these days. And anyway, the island needs a gallery.
ISOBEL: It needs a shop.
MRS CAVENDISH: I’m sure we’ll sell little souvenirs and knick-knacks. Anyway, you can buy all your little essentials online. That’s what I do.
Despite Katie Morag’s best efforts to deter her from moving to Struay, Mrs Cavendish is ostensibly even more determined to stay, if only out of sheer dogged spite towards the child. The real breaking point, however, is the speed with which her disastrous day becomes local common knowledge and results in unsolicited assistance from her would-be neighbours. She derogatorily describes the island as a ‘goldfish bowl’ as she departs. After celebrating with her family and their friends, Katie Morag reflects:
And then I got to thinking about how strange people are. I showed Mrs Cavendish all the worst things about the island, but she still wanted to move here. Then she saw the best things: how people look out for each other, and always try to help, no matter who they are. I suppose it’s like Grannie Island says, ‘it takes all types to make the world’. I’m just glad Mrs Cavendish is the type who doesn’t like Struay, and I’m the type who absolutely loves it.
If you’ve enjoyed this post, you can show your appreciation by sharing it more widely, recommending the newsletter to a friend, and if you’d like, by buying me a coffee.
You might also enjoy these posts from the Academic Bubble archive:
This story is of course a common one that appears with some variations across various cultures.