‘KIDS WHO HAD CANCER ARE NOT SEEING THEIR REALITY ON SCREEN’ New RTÉ kids’ drama Louise Lives Large tackles a host of issues, from body image to Traveller identity. talks to its creator

Tanya Sweeney

Between friendships, crushes and parents, being an Irish teenager is hard. Add being a cancer survivor to the mix, and things are even more complicated. Such is the premise of Louise Lives Large, RTÉ’s biggest ever drama commission for young people.

The 13-year-old has spent much of the previous term enduring rounds of chemotherapy, and returns to Mary Robinson Secondary School a much-changed person. She feels she has missed out and that others have galloped ahead. New allegiances have formed and old friends have become more worldly and intimidating.

The show’s creator/writer Carol Walsh can readily relate to the situation. After an accident in her Kildare home as a teenager, she also missed a stretch of secondary school.

“I was watching the Spice Girls at the Brit Awards on telly and I was babysitting my three younger siblings,” she recalls. “I was standing over the fire warming myself and was wearing nylon tights and a long flowery skirt, and it went up in flames.

“There was the physical part and the pain, obviously, but the psychological part of dealing with an accident and going back to school was definitely no craic.

“I do remember using it to my advantage, using it to get out of classes. But it really felt as though people had moved on in my absence. All the other girls were smoking fags and had boyfriends — I was a real innocent. I’m sure it would have been the same had I not had the accident, as I was a naturally innocent, dorky kid.”

Louise Lives Large deftly covers a number of ‘issues’, among them divorce, body image, LGBTQ+ identity and Traveller identity. In a typical adult series, the incorporation of all these topics might feel clunky and forced, but young people’s programming has proved an ideal platform for Walsh to do this.

“With the characters, we wanted them to feel really authentic,” says the former Fair City writer and script editor. “We worked hard to find kids who would bring a lot of themselves to the role. We had the best intentions in the world to have our characters be real, as opposed to, ‘This show is now about this issue and that issue’.”

AUTHENTIC WRITING

A ‘big episode’ towards the end of the series features the culmination of a LGBTQ+ story arc and Walsh felt it should be written by a member of that community — a responsibility that fell to Sian Ní Mhuirí, who did an “incredible job”.

Walsh had previously volunteered with Fighting Words, the young people’s creative writing charity, and had also met kids at CanTeen, a young people’s cancer support group.

“I remember the 2010s craze for films about teenagers with cancer, and half of them or more will die at the end of the film, but that’s not necessarily fair to actual teen cancer survivors,” she says. “It’s almost like these films were saying, ‘It’s only a good story if there’s a tragedy at the end’. A lot of the kids who have had cancer are not seeing their reality reflected. Apart from that, many of these kids had an incredibly dark gallows humour of their own, which was brilliant.”

Louise Lives Large was filmed in Kildare and is an international co-production with Canada’s WildBrain and Belgium’s Ketnet, as well as Coimisiún na Meán and Screen Ireland. It is primarily aimed at nine- to 13-year-olds. “I always loved Judy Blume, but often the sincerity in those novels doesn’t always make it to the small screen,” Walsh says. “What we wanted to make was something funny and true. We wanted it to be aspirational, but not about money or followers; we wanted it to be about friendship and having a sense of yourself.” Walsh, who honed her craft in a sixmonth mentorship on the esteemed BBC Writersroom programme, has a series in development with Hat Trick productions, among a number of other projects. For now, Louise Lives Large suggests the national broadcaster’s Young People’s department is moving from strength to strength.

Another of the department’s notable successes, Dizzy Deliveries, recently won a Clio award in the US, fending off competition from such global giants as Netflix, National Geographic and MTV. Its second series is launched on RTÉ next week, and was the first Irish production to include Lámh, the manual sign system used by people with intellectual disabilities and communication needs.

Another series, Man Up?, featuring rugby player Jordan Conroy, is to air later this year, and purports to explore toxic masculinity through the lens of teenage boys.

YOUTH REPRESENTATION

Suzanne Kelly, head of children’s and young people’s content at RTÉ, says representation is a “really core tenet of everything” in her department.

She agrees that when it comes to breaking ground, trying new ideas and offering positive representation, adult drama in Ireland could learn a thing or two from its young peoples’ equivalent.

“Children are a lot more open,” she says. “You’ve got so much going on in your world — whether someone is a Traveller or gay, that’s not the most important thing at that particular point in your life. Kids’ drama is a lot more joyful, with lots of really gorgeous resolutions, but also a lot of really important learnings.

“There’s such competition for kids’ eyeballs between YouTube and streamers, but Irish producers are flipping knocking it out of the park with the content they make.”

⬤ The full series of ‘Louise Lives Large’ is available to stream on RTÉ Player. It also airs on RTÉ2 Wednesdays at 3.50pm