Katie Baxendale's best trick is a narrator braver than the girl she belongs to, and in Sugar Rush it carries a whole series. She is a sharp, reliable writer of other people's shows whose own teenage Brighton is still the place to start.
Fi1m perspective
Two girls on the pebbles at Brighton, one bottle between them. Sugar talks, Kim listens, and in our ears Kim says everything her face is already saying and her mouth never will. That gap between the voiceover and the girl is the engine of Sugar Rush (2005), and it is Katie Baxendale's best idea. We laughed, more than once, at the lust and panic arriving in narration while Olivia Hallinan calmly passed somebody a drink, because the joke is that nobody standing next to her can hear it.
She came up the usual way. Writing for television from 1997, she did soaps and ensemble series, EastEnders and Playing the Field among them, then the final two episodes of At Home with the Braithwaites in 2003 and episodes of Fat Friends in 2004. Sugar Rush, co-created with Julie Burchill from Burchill's novel, was the one she led, two series across 2005 and 2006, and by her own account she kept the main characters and changed the story completely. Since then it has been mostly other people's houses: The Paradise (2012–2013), The Last Bus (2021), Vikings: Valhalla (2022–2024), with the four-part From Darkness (2015), which she originated, the exception.
What works is speed and rudeness. The first series of Sugar Rush wants to be as unkind about teenagers as teenagers are about each other, and it manages it, and it puts a gay girl at the centre and lets her be ordinary and selfish. The second series tidies up a story that was better messy. On The Braithwaites she arrived with Sally Wainwright and Jonathan Harvey after the show had spent its secret and gone looking for incident, and we sat through a wedding in a marquee with everyone shouting, wishing for the earlier version in which the loudest thing was somebody deciding not to speak. That is not entirely her fault, but it is the risk of the jobbing writer: you inherit the arithmetic.
From Darkness we have not reviewed, so we will not judge it. Baxendale has said that before it she "would never have dreamt of writing a crime drama or thriller," thinking herself the kind of viewer who hides behind a cushion, and she built it around a flawed ex-police officer running from her past. Some reviews at the time found it leaned on crime dramas that came before it.
Start with the first series of Sugar Rush and stop when it stops being rude. She has spent most of thirty years making other people's shows run on time, and she does it well. We would rather she went back to the beach.
Biography
Katie Baxendale is a British television writer and creator. She graduated from the University of Cambridge in 1995 and began writing for television in 1997.
Her early credits include episodes of EastEnders, Playing the Field and, in 2003–2004, episodes of At Home with the Braithwaites and Fat Friends. She was co-creator and lead writer on the first two series of Sugar Rush (2004–2006), an adaptation of Julie Burchill’s novel; the first series won an International Emmy and the second was nominated for a Bafta.
Later work includes episodes of The Paradise (2012), From Darkness (2015) and Vikings: Valhalla (2022). She is the sister of actress Helen Baxendale.
