We’ve published our last Gladys and the chiX story and we are feeling nostalgic and wistful already. We are going to miss our girl band and their brainy younger sister.

The series of ten stories was an experiment for us. The atmosphere is very different from the beautiful Nordic settings of The Snow Queen or The Little Mermaid that our core audience loves. The Gladys stories are set in suburban modern Britain, and the girls spend a lot of time hanging around bus stops and shopping centres. The older sisters are not very admirable, and seem to think that they deserve their fifteen minutes of fame on a plate. Even I started off by disliking the sisters. But I warmed to them as the story went along.

We know from some comments on Facebook that the chiX were not every body’s cup of tea. But we also know from the nagging message on this site, constantly demanding “the next Gladys”, that she has a considerable following around the world.

We were worried that the stories might be a little old for some of our listeners, as the themes are quite teenage. But in the main, it seems that the same listeners who like Katie the Witch also appreciate Gladys. Of course she appeals mainly to girls, but age has not been an issue.

The heroine of the story is the hard working and sensible Gladys who isn’t even in the band because she is too young and too geeky. She is often underrated and treated unfairly, and the listeners identify with her and want her efforts to be rewarded. And we identify with her too. We know what it feels like to be struggling for recognition.

We weren’t trying to be trendy when we placed the girls in a single parent family with a more or less useless Dad. Nor when we gave them a decidedly “chavvy” style were we celebrating vulgarity. To a certain extent we were venting our feelings against Modern Britain rather that promoting it, but it might not have quite come across that way.

The humour of Gladys is quite dry. We laughed a lot during the recordings, and even we weren’t quite sure why we found it funny. But Gladys is a real heroine, and underneath it’s a serious story about hard work, set backs, determination, and learning to appreciate other people’s talents.

Early on in the series, Natasha did some singing to a backing track. But towards the end we felt that Gladys deserved something more polished and we hired some musicians to record the chiX song Life is a Circus. We didn’t dumb it down. It’s quite a grown up song, but it proved popular, and we really enjoyed doing it. You may also notice that we now have original pictures for all the stories by Tania Fernandes.

Sometimes it amazed me that I could find a load of teenage stuff inside me when I wrote the stories. I think it surprised Natasha too. Natasha’s feedback from the early chapters really helped the story advance in the later chapters. As ever, her voices helped the characters develop and her interpretation looped back into the writing. It was very much her idea that when the chiX achieved fame, they should find out that it wasn’t quite all it was cracked up to be, or at least, there were drawbacks. I suppose that’s the sort of problem that we might like to have one day !