My Mum Tracy Beaker review: This funny, moving reboot is a treat for kids and nostalgic millennials alike

Jacqueline Wilson’s novels were sacred texts for Noughties tweens. Unlike so many of the books jostling for space in our Groovy Chick school bags, her stories were thrilling because they felt real and unvarnished.

Wilson’s books dealt with everything from divorce to bullying to the care system and mental illness - but they weren’t gloomy tales of woe. Her irrepressible characters jumped off the page, helping a generation of girls to feel represented and understood, and to empathise with kids whose lives were different from their own. A viral tweet posted a few years ago claimed “girls who read every single Jacqueline Wilson book growing up are socialists now.” It’s funny because it’s probably true.

Undisputedly the best-loved of Wilson’s creations is Tracy Beaker, a fiery, imaginative 10-year-old with a penchant for telling her elders to BOG OFF, who chronicles life in her children’s home, brutally nicknamed the Dumping Ground. Published in 1991, The Story of Tracy Beaker spawned a handful of sequels — and in 2002, it inspired a CBBC adaptation, which starred Dani Harmer as Tracy and ran for five chaotic series. Storylines forever etched on my memory include a family of Welsh goths (a very young Craig Roberts among them) challenging Tracy’s supremacy over the Dumping Ground, a Chicago-inspired musical episode and, erm, a flu-like virus striking down everyone apart from social worker and frosted lippie pioneer Elaine ‘The Pain’ Boyak.

The show was a runaway success, and led to a handful of spin-off series. Now Harmer has reprised her iconic (to millennials of a certain age, at least) role for three-part drama My Mum Tracy Beaker, which is based on Wilson’s 2018 novel of the same name. Tracy is now a single mum to little Jess (Emma Davies), who’s wise beyond her years. There’s something very poignant about seeing her give Jess the lovely, stable home life she never had. “I’m living my mum’s dream,” this impressively perceptive 10-year-old notes in a voiceover. It’s enough to get my hayfever going.

The pair’s double act comes under threat, though, when Tracy reconnects with her childhood friend Sean Godfrey, once nicknamed ‘Football,’ who real Wilson diehards will recognise as a character from 2000 Beaker sequel The Dare Game. Formerly a Premier League ace, Sean (Jordan Duvigneau) now runs a boujee gym chain and lives it up in a minimalist Grand Designs mega-mansion. He quickly wins over Tracy, who thinks he can help provide a better life for Jess, but her daughter is harder to impress.

Will our girl finally get her fairytale ending? With her old Dumping Ground nemesis Justine Littlewood (still rocking a high ponytail that would make Ariana Grande jealous, but now furnished with “a first-class degree” that she can’t stop banging on about) back on the scene, it seems that the path of true love is unlikely to run smooth.

Initially, Harmer has revealed, producers ummed and ahhed over whether to aim this series at Tracy Beaker’s original audience, now mainly in their mid to late 20s or early 30s. The idea of a gritty BBC Three Beaker reboot sounds like a millennial fever dream, but does anyone actually want to watch our childhood avatar setting up a mumfluencer Instagram account or swiping through Hinge? Some things are sacred - and a montage of Tracy rejecting a line-up of rubbish suitors is much more fun.

Indeed, the show’s creators have made the right decision in ensuring that My Mum Tracy Beaker is cleverly calibrated to win over kids and nostalgic adults alike. The original theme tune (an earworm which was sampled by Stormzy on his most recent album Heavy is the Head) plays over the end credits, and Harmer is a delight as an ever-so-slightly mellowed Tracy.

There are cameos from her long-suffering foster mum Cam (Lisa Coleman) as well as her glamorous but deeply unreliable birth mum Carly (Ruth Gemmell, fresh from her turn as a very different matriarch in Netflix smash Bridgerton). And, of course, there’s Montanna Thompson as Justine. Almost two decades on from her breakout role, she can still eviscerate her enemies with a single eye roll or hair toss. Towards the end of the series, there’s one scene involving Cam that will almost certainly prompt unnecessary outrage from the it’s-PC-gone-mad brigade, but in the words of Beaker herself, they can just BOG OFF.

The original CBBC show dealt with weighty issues with a light touch, and never swamped its young viewers with too much didacticism, just like Wilson’s books. Writer Emma Reeves, who has worked on episodes of every Beaker series, has taken a similar approach with this adaptation. The result is a deeply compassionate drama that’s uplifting, funny and never saccharine. It handles its heartbreaking moments as confidently as its heartwarming ones. Am I crying? No, it’s just my hayfever again.

My Mum Tracy Beaker is on CBBC, Feb 12-14 at 5pm and on BBC iPlayer