They're more used to toughing it out on screen, but now award-winning TV series Bad Girls has been turned into a musical, reports Steve Pratt.

THINK about it, Kath Gotts suggests, and turning award-winning TV series Bad Girls into a musical isn't quite as mad as it first seems. "It's not like trying to think about Casualty - The Musical. Bad Girls is that heightened drama you get in musicals. It felt quite natural for these characters to sing," she explains.

She has a vested interest in wanting success for this musical transfer of Shed Productions women-behind-bars drama from small screen to big stage. Having written the theme and incidental music for four series of Bad Girls, the former Vivien Ellis Prize finalist has written the music and lyrics for the show in which the female inmates of Larkhall Prison burst into song.

She has been serving a long stretch as Bad Girls - The Musical has been developed. The idea started as a joke during late night drinking sessions among Shed people, until gradually they began to take it seriously.

The project dates back to the summer of 2002 when they did a workshop with six songs and the first draft of the first act. "We needed to know how it would be having other people playing the parts. How, for instance, were people going to cope with Nikki Wade not being the same actress as on TV," she says.

"It's a silly thing to worry about, but you do. We knew from the first workshop that it was fine. The characters are very strong. You take the change on board as you would in any other play. Once we started there was never a point where we thought it wasn't going to work."

Happy that casting fresh faces in familiar roles such as Shell Dockley, Denny Blood, Yvonne Atkins, the two Julies and screw Jim Fenner wouldn't distance the audience, the team pressed ahead.

A tour in regional theatre in 2003 was planned and then cancelled.

Gotts is pleased, in retrospect, the tour didn't go ahead. "It was all too much of a rush and I'm glad it didn't happen because we've changed quite a lot since then," she adds.

There's only the standard four-week rehearsal at West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, where the show premieres, but many problems had been ironed out following another workshop at the end of 2004.

"We did the whole putting on a show with no scenery before an audience to see how they responded. They were people in the business and some fans who knew about it through the Bad Girls website," she says.

"It confirmed that if you love Bad Girls already you should be able to go and see the show and not be disappointed. We had lots of people who didn't know the show at all and found that if you haven't seen the TV show, the musical doesn't require prior knowledge."

The show, written by series creators Maureen Chadwick and Ann McManus, takes the Larkhall bad girls back to basics by mirroring the story of the first series as idealistic Wing Governor Helen Stewart clashes with the old guard, corrupt officer Jim Fenner and his right-hand woman Sylvia 'Bodybag' Hollamby. The inmates are engaged in a power struggle too with Shell Dockley, Denny Blood, the two Julies and gangster's moll Yvonne Atkins all vying for supremacy. The governor and inmate Nikki Wade have a romance, while the first act ends with a suicide. It doesn't sound much like The Sound Of Music, although Gotts likes to think it might be what Rodgers and Hammerstein would write if they were doing it today. Whether they'd ever write a song entitled All Banged Up is debatable.

Musicals rarely offer large numbers of female leading roles. Bad Girls - The Musical has a cast of 17, most of whom are women - and very definitely not the pretty, young ingenue roles demanded by most musicals.

"We wanted them to have a bit of street cred about them, not a whole chorus of soprano ladies. We wanted a cast who were credible as inmates of a prison and with a range of voices. "It's much more singing with attitude."

To complicate matters, several actresses who've appeared in Bad Girls on TV are in the stage show in different roles. Laura Rogers, who was drug-addict inmate Sheena Williams, becomes Wing Governor Helen Stewart. And Nicole Faraday, after meeting a sticky end as Snowball on screen, returns as not-to-be-messed-with murderer Shell Dockley.

Meanwhile, filming is under way of the eighth series of Bad Girls for showing on ITV1 later this year. Shed's other famous creation Footballers' Wives was recently axed after five years. It could resurface in another form one day. "Footballers' Wives - The Musical. That's one to consider," says Gotts.

*Bad Girls - The Musical opens at West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, tonight (Saturday) and runs until July 1. Tickets 0113 213 7700.