Royal ambitions: Cutting through with Lady Grace

Drawing inspiration from the likes of Netflix’s Bridgerton and Sophia Copolla’s Marie Antoinette, with a budget of almost £1m per episode and a host of international companies attached, The Lady Grace Mysteries is not your average live-action kids show.

But it’s also not only a kids TV show.

This adaptation of the eponymous novels that were first published in 2004 has been in the works for almost five years and ostensibly targets 8 to 12-year-olds with a story about Queen Elizabeth’s lady-in-waiting Grace Cavendish (Evie Coles), blending the contemporary challenges of teenage life with one of the most famous periods in British history.

But the show’s storylines, production values and narrative arcs have been moulded to also appeal to a broader audience, reflective of the fast-changing habits of viewers. And while The Lady Grace Mysteries’ synopsis is intriguing, so was its route to market.

“In the best possible way, this is our fault,” says Michael Dee, director of Coolabi Productions, the UK-based company behind the novel series that now stretches to 12 books. Back in 2020/2021, Coolabi was exploring new projects – while Netflix was finding global success with Bridgerton, another contemporary reboot of period-based novels.

The Lady Grace Mysteries seemed to offer potential. Dee met with Sarah Muller, senior head of children’s commissioning 7+ for BBC Children’s and Education, who suggested exploring whether a similar treatment for the novels could work.

“Our team went away and we decided that this might just be a possibility,” Dee says. Not only did the novels – written by Patricia Finney, Sara Vogler and Jan Burchett under the nom de plume Grace Cavendish – offer compelling and known IP, they would also allow exploration of some “very modern-day problems”, such as fitting in, making friends and finding one’s place in the world.

The idea resonated with Muller and Cottonwood Media co-founder David Michel. The late Michelle Forde, who previously worked at Sixteenth South and Beano Studios, was also brought in by Coolabi at the early stages of development, and the show’s mystery and ascendancy elements gave further weight to the project, with momentum building.

‘Noodling for ideas’

“We came in early, there wasn’t really even a deck – we were just noodling to see if there was something that felt different and stand-out,” explains Muller, who was at the time fresh into the role having left Sony after a three-year-spell.

“It felt like that this was an anachronistic, slightly irreverent approach that would be just right for the audience and I’ve continued to think that all along – and to be honest, every time I see clips, I’m more convinced that we did the right thing. It just jumped out.”

Forde “took the bull by the horns” when the decision to contemporise the IP was confirmed, Dee says, and her work helped to provide the BBC with the confidence to put it into development. Anna McCleery (Free Rein) then came in and brought “a certain amount of security and comfort” to broadcasters, creating a script and “a properly fleshed out Bible,” the BBC exec adds.

Fast-forward to 2023, and Michel and Muller found themselves discussing the show at Cartoon Forum, bringing in Nicole Keeb, head of international co-productions and acquisitions for children and youth programs at Germany’s ZDF. All three had worked on Find Me in Paris and shared a love of strong female protagonists. Lady Grace got the greenlight last year, with casting and writing completed in autumn 2024 and pre-production beginning at the start of the year.

“We’d had a really good experience with costume dramas from Cottonwood so we had a lot of confidence in Lady Grace, and we didn’t have a show like it in our portfolio,” says Keeb, who adds that the BBC’s involvement made it “an easy decision for us to join.”

This would not be a cheap show to produce, however.

The budget came in at £8.2m for 10 episodes, with the BBC, ZDF and France Télévisions providing the foundation funding, with support from North East Screen and NEScreen Industries Partnership, supplemented by distributor advances from Cottonwood’s sister company Federation Kids & Family, as well as ZDF Studios, which together are handling global sales.

Such UK-focused subject matter could have made the co-production tricky, but Cottonwood’s co-founder and president David Michel says the combination of partners and his company’s French roots meant there was very little creative friction. “It would probably have been more UK centric and maybe a little more closed off to the rest of the audience had it been produced entirely by UK staff, so it was a great collaboration,” he adds.

Cottonwood’s head of fiction Manon Ardisson worked with McCleery to rework the pilot – “even though it sounds like a lot of money for a period drama it wasn’t!” says the Cottonwood exec – with locations tightened up and character-count reduced.

“Anna is really a brilliant writer and producer-friendly, she got the notes and just made it happen,” Ardisson adds, with Alex Jacob joining as lead director and Louise Ni Fhiannachta (Flatmates) attached as episodic director.

The shoot itself was split between Brussels and County Durham in the UK, with half of the crew from the UK and half from Belgium and France. Locations included Brussels Town Hall in Belgium and Brancepeth Castle and Raby’s Castle in the UK, but it was perhaps in the costumes where some of the greatest innovation came.

Alexia Crisp-Jones led the creative on this front, and Ardisson says her approach helped maintain a premium feel within the constraints of the budget. “She built each main character a key look and they each have their own colour,” Ardisson explains. Lady Grace is green for example, while Lady Sarah (Twinkle Jaiswal) is in purple, and the Queen (Rebecca Scott) is in gold.

“She then created corsets, sleeves and skirts that we could quickly attach to a base layer of clothing – and because the shoot was out of story order, it allowed us to make really quick changes, which is not something you can normally do on period drama.”

The contemporary approach to the storytelling was also reflected in the patterns and textures used on the clothing. “It’s like a Met Gala kind of vibe, the Queen has got some properly high fashion looks,” Ardisson says.

Despite the kaleidoscopic wardrobe, Keeb admits to being concerned when filming began, particularly with scenes in a bleak forest during a European winter. “It was cold, it was raining, there were not even a few flowers in the ground, and I thought, how will they ever bring colour in here, how can they make it vivid and beautiful?

“I remember we had conversations asking why they just shot a cold, empty forest – and now I have such a bad conscience because the edits were so beautiful and so wonderful! There were these amazing dresses in all their colours, they’d made it so rich and opulent and beautiful.”

The addition of Alexia Crisp-Jones – who had also worked on the multi-award winning film Fires in the Dark and It Must Be Heaven – helped to give the show appeal to a broad demo, says Michel, as did DP Sacha Wiernik, whose credits include Girls with Balls and composer Jeremy Warmsley who had worked on feature films Homebound and Undergods.

“We were trying to really mix these creative sensibilities to make sure that we were speaking to the kids audience but also remaining open to a much wider audience by hitting those kind of primetime moments.”

Crash zooms & jump cuts

The pace of the show is also “really fast”, says Ardisson, with jump cuts and crash zooms to emphasise momentum, while the cast “speak like kids today”, delivering a series that “instantly makes you think this is a modern show”.

Contemporary music from Jeremy Warmsley – “it’s kind of got a pop rock, electro vibe,” says Ardisson – contrasts the period look, and the combination of these factors with the punchy colour palette and the cinematography makes for a vibrant piece.

“I don’t know if everyone would agree, but I quite like thinking about the show as a historical fantasy, so it’s grounded in the history and then brought towards us through creativity,” Ardisson adds.

One of Muller’s key focuses was to ensure the storyline kept “hitting the mystery beats to keep that sense of needing to watch more, which helps us to keep our audience”. In the UK, the show is expected to be mainly watched via iPlayer, meaning hooks are needed across the story arc to keep viewers engaged.

“We had to make sure that we had those really relevant, hooky mystery bits at both the beginning and the end – that’s a new thing, because you’ve lost not just your young audience but all your audience if they’re not gripped in the first two to three minutes these days. It’s completely altered how we tell stories, for better or worse,” Muller says.

Each episode sees Lady Grace and her best friends investigating various mysteries, with a story of the week feel, while a traitor in the midst of the court provides a broader story arc.

The show reflects the storylines from the novels but shifts in places – there are no murders in the series, for example – but the central premise of Lady Grace acting as the Queen’s eyes and ears at court remains.

“We try to have diversity in the story of the week and how they unfold, and there is a romance element with Lord Osborne (Fintan Buckard) as well,” Ardisson adds. “Eventually, they team up with Grace and find out who the traitor is.”

Michel adds that the ‘mystery of the week’ element will help propel the show’s international appeal, and ZDF’s Keeb agrees. “It makes the show more universal, it broadens the audience because the episodic stories are a little bit younger-skewing than the whole show, which has a bit more tension in it.”

The series delivers at the end of the year, and the production teams have already started collating social assets that can be deployed across YouTube, TikTok and beyond to drive engagement. The BBC is aiming for a day one drop of all episodes in April, subject to change, while ZDF and France TV’s premieres have not yet been decided.

There are also broad hopes that the show will return after its initial 10-part run despite the wider travails facing broadcasters and kids viewing habits.

“There are only so many premium shows for this audience that can be produced every year because there are only so many channels like the BBC and ZDF that can and want to invest in them,” says Michel. “There are probably only four or five broadcasters in the world that can pre-finance these kinds of shows.

“It means you can only produce so much, and for that reason, I don’t think this specific genre is suffering too much in the current context of kids TV because it was already small.”

“And we’re talking about a small number of episodes, so there’s always room and there’s always a need for good quality live action. That’s a good thing on the pre-buy side.”

Muller agrees, while Keeb adds that ZDF “needs” big budget shows like Lady Grace because they get noticed.

“Nobody else is really doing it,” she says, although more episodes are a key requirement. “Eight and 10-episode shows are not really enough for us, it’s always better if we can get 26 or 50, like it was before. Streamers gave us this recipe [of shorter series] and miniseries are in fashion, but we actually need more.”

Coolabi’s Dee is also keen to deliver more and conversations for a second season are underway.

“We absolutely were preparing ourselves on the basis that we will do more,” he says. “Halfway through the writing process on series one, we were already thinking about what could happen in series two, because there has to be that follow through. There are plenty of ideas brewing away.”

For now, however, the focus for all of Lady Grace’s myriad partners across Europe is on delivering the first season later this year. Ambitions are high – and not just on the core kids target demographic.

“I just don’t see anything we do as kids TV anymore,” says Muller. “The audience is too sophisticated and they’ve got too many options with the streamers providing great shows too.

“That notion of a ‘kids’ show doesn’t exist for me now, they just expect a really high standard and we have to work in a really smart way to deliver that level of quality and ambition on our budgets. That means partnerships. And that’s where we start from.”