The foundling hospital gates slam shut behind Isabel Clifton's red-haired heroine in 1887, leaving Hetty Feather clutching a rag doll and a half-remembered lullaby. Over six series and fifty-five episodes, she graduates from scullery drudge to circus performer to budding novelist, always one step ahead of Eva Pope's hawk-eyed Matron and the institution's regime of porridge, prayer and punishment.
Helen Blakeman's adaptation reorders Jacqueline Wilson's 2009 novel into a sprawling ensemble piece: Dasharn Anderson's gentle stable boy Gideon, Gus Barry's rat-catching Mathias and Polly Allen's snobbish Sheila share screentime with suffragettes, street urchins and a pre-Jack Wolfe Samuel Buscombe, whose angelic voice masks larcenous intent. The production shoots in and around Cardiff, transforming St Fagans castle into the forbidding hospital and Pontcanna fields into Smithfield meat market.
Andy Price's jaunty fiddle theme bookends twenty-eight-minute chapters that balance pickpocket thrills with social-realist grit: foundlings are auctioned as cheap labour, smallpox scars faces, and the workhouse looms for any child who steps out of line. Yet the tone stays resolutely CBBC, tipping its cap to Dickens while refusing to drown in misery. When the final episode airs on 15 April 2020, Hetty walks towards a publisher's office clutching her manuscript, the foundling label snipped from her coat.
Production Details
CBBC / 6 Seasons / 57 Episodes / 2015
Created by: Helen Blakeman
Showrunner(s): Alison Davis, Foz Allan
Producer(s): David Collier
Music: Andy Price
Main Cast
Isabel Clifton as Hetty Feather
Polly Allen as Sheila
Eva Pope as Matron
Susan McCardle as Nurse Macclesfield
Gemma Whelan as Ida Battersea
Christopher Villiers as Col. Brigwell
Dasharn Anderson as Gideon
Gus Barry as Mathias
Matthew Ashforde as Cranbourne
Louis Tamone as Constable Clarke
Jack Wolfe as Samuel Buscombe
Tut Nyuot as Kitt
