Scaredy Cat

Anne Fine's source picture book

Anne Fine, the British author and former Children's Laureate (2001-2003), wrote and self-illustrated the picture book Scaredy Cat, published by Egmont UK in 2002 with watercolour-and-pencil illustrations. The book centres on an orange tabby kitten who panics at the slightest household sound — running taps, the boiler clicking on, the postman's knock — and is gradually coached toward bravery by his nine siblings.

The CBeebies adaptation

The BBC commissioned a short-form animated adaptation through CBeebies, the corporation's pre-school channel which had launched in February 2002. The animated Scaredy Cat began airing on CBeebies in 2003 in three-minute pre-bedtime slots. Cosgrove Hall Films, the Manchester-based animation studio previously responsible for Danger Mouse (1981-1992) and Count Duckula (1988-1993), produced the first 26 episodes before the studio's closure in 2009.

Voice cast and Anne Fine's consultancy

Tim Whitnall, who later wrote the Olivier Award-winning play Mister Holgado (2014), supplied the narration and voice for Scaredy Cat across the entire CBeebies run. Anne Fine served as story consultant and reviewed each script in development, a role she described in her 2007 essay collection Reading the Tiger as a way to preserve the original book's tone. The series uses a single narrator-led voice track rather than full character dialogue.

International distribution

BBC Worldwide (now BBC Studios) licensed the series for international broadcast: ABC Kids Australia aired the show from 2004 onward in its 6:00 PM bedtime slot; TVOKids Canada acquired it for the same age-group strand in 2005; and the show ran on NRK Super in Norway and KRO Jeugd in the Netherlands through 2010. The series remained in the CBeebies Storytime app library as of 2024.

Anne Fine's broader cat writing

Anne Fine had previously written cat-focused books including The Diary of a Killer Cat (1994), which received the Smarties Book Prize Gold Award in 1995. Her later The Killer Cat series ran to six volumes from 1994 to 2014, with cumulative sales above two million copies according to a 2014 Guardian profile. Cosgrove Hall later returned to Fine's work with a 2008 animated adaptation of The Diary of a Killer Cat, separate from the Scaredy Cat property.