Tracy Beaker Returns: Series 1 - Episode guide
Tracy Beaker is back and she is in trouble again. This time it's big financial trouble and she needs a job - quick!
Devised by multi-award-winning children's author Jacqueline Wilson and the drama team at CBBC, the series sees Dani Harmer reprise the role that made her a household name.
> Read our interview with Dani Harmer.
Five years after the last series, Tracy Beaker Returns catches up with the eponymous heroine, now a young adult and living with her foster mother, Cam.
> Buy Tracy Beaker on DVD.
> Buy Tracy Beaker books.
Episode 1: Tracy Beaker Superstar
Tracy gets arrested after using Cam's credit card to vanity-publish her autobiography. Fearing Cam's wrath, Tracy runs away from home, seeking refuge in the Dumping Ground. The kids believe she is a celebrity, having seen her on television publicising her book on a local news show.
Needing to pay Cam back, Tracy asks Mike for a job. After seeing how she handles the kids and desperately short-staffed, Mike agrees to make her an assistant care worker.
Episode 2: New Life's Eve
Tracy is more concerned with writing her regular column for the local community newspaper than she is about keeping her promises to the kids. The situation worsens when she finds an old letter from her birth mother that Mike and Cam never told her about.
With Tracy alienating kids and staff, Mike has no choice but to sack her. A petition organised by Gus listing the things "Tracy's done right" is all that saves her.
Episode 3: Bad Luck Boy
Toby is convinced that his life is jinxed, inspiring Tracy to write a funny column called "Bad Luck Boy". He becomes the butt of everyone's jokes and Tracy sets about making amends before he meets some prospective foster parents.
Meanwhile, she clashes with Sapphire about tickets her father has sent her for a concert he's a roadie at. Mike and Gina won't let Sapphire go but Sapphire intends going anyway and during an argument with Tracy rips up the tickets. Toby gets Sapphire to draw a tarot card to see what his future will be. When she draws the death card Toby freaks out. Tracy and Sapphire persuade him the card symbolises a new beginning.
Toby tells the foster parents he wants to stay at the Dumping Ground. Sapphire is told she can go to the concert with Tracy but Johnny has flushed the torn tickets down the loo.
Episode 4: By The Book
Tracy is told to enforce the cleaning rotas and, believing it will help get him and Tee fostered, Johnny starts volunteering himself and Tee for everyone's chores in return for gold stars in his file.
Tracy feels Johnny is bullying Tee and promises her gold stars no matter what she does. Tee starts behaving badly, climbs the big tree in the garden and gets stuck. Johnny blames Tracy and Tee falls, narrowly escaping serious injury thanks to an intervention by Toby.
Tracy believes she'll get sacked but none of the kids have told Mike or Gina about it and her intervention has brought Johnny to a closer understanding with his sister and a realisation he has anger issues.
Episode 5: Family Values
When Lily and her sisters get fostered, Tracy doesn't take Carmen's upset about it too seriously, encouraging her to play with someone else. But the other kids have their own issues and don't want to play with Carmen, who becomes increasingly alienated and starts behaving deviously.
Matters come to a head over lunch when she lambasts the people in the house, especially Tracy. That night, Carmen steals something precious from all the kids and barricades herself in her room with them. Tracy is let in to talk while the kids carry out a window assault using a ladder and water bombs. The attack is prevented, resulting in Gina getting soaked.
Tracy comes to realise that Lily and her sisters had become like family to Carmen. She returns the kids' belongings and they come to realise Carmen wasn't thieving so much as reminding them what it's like to lose something precious. They let Carmen back into the fold.
Episode 6: Anarchy In The DG
While Gina is out, Tracy gets the all-night shift with Mike, who is ill and takes himself off to bed. Matters soon escalate out of Tracy's control as every kid gets increasingly hyperactive, driving Tracy mad with their own agendas.
Things come to a head after Sapphire takes the lock off the bathroom door, Gus pees in her room and Frank and Liam are dragged back to the Dumping Ground by an angry man who caught them selling Tracy's uneaten pizzas door to door in a fake fund-raising scam.
Tracy is convinced she'll get the sack as Gina arrives back, panicked by what Harry told her on the phone. But she finds the kids tucked up in bed as they should be – Harry's story passed off as a bad dream.
