The Famous Five haven’t ‘gone woke’ – they’re just not as tedious as they used to be

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You couldn’t have paid me to learn Enid Blyton after I was a toddler. This was the late Nineties and early Noughties, and the publishers behind her Famous Five novels had tried their hardest to make these Forties tales of derring-do attraction to pre-teen readers like me. Her e-book jackets had immediately come to be illustrated a lot in the identical method as RL Stine’s Goosebumps collection, stuffed with scared youngsters wearing T-shirts and denims and fleeing imminent hazard. But crack a kind of books open and also you had been met with proof that you simply’d been duped: these had been truly tales about stuffy English youths from a bygone previous, not cool American excessive schoolers fixing mysteries. Horrifying!

Our youthful heroes – tomboy George, smug Julian, scaredy-cat Anne and annoying Dick – had been budding adventurers who roamed the countryside wearing tweed and braces, acted a nuisance and sneered at foreigners, their canine Timmy making up the “five” of the title. They had been deeply, virtually pathologically uncool.

This was hardly an uncontroversial stance to take again then, for almost twenty years earlier, Channel 4 had launched with a 30-minute sketch referred to as “Five Go Mad in Dorset”, a spoof of Blyton’s kids’s journey collection starring a pre-fame Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French and Adrian Edmondson. The sketch precisely satirised the twee myopia of Blyton’s books, their informal ignorance and doubtful class politics, and their existence as merchandise of a faraway and unrecognisable England. This concept appeared to stick within the cultural consciousness, irrespective of what number of rebrands Blyton’s collection underwent to compete with the likes of JK Rowling, Anthony Horowitz or Malorie Blackman.

All of it coincided with a way that Blyton’s work had develop into too passé to have fun, too entrenched in values we’d be sensible to neglect. In 2021, for instance, English Heritage determined to preserve the blue plaques devoted to the creator, but additionally selected to acknowledge the “racism, xenophobia and lack of literary merit” to her work. It was a call that sparked outrage amongst Blyton’s acolytes but additionally felt like the best factor to do – contextual usefulness, relatively than reactionary banning or condemnation.

It additionally explains why her work continues to be being tailored. The BBC introduced the brand new Famous Five with a press launch stating that the collection would be written for “a progressive new audience” – presumably that means the spirit of Blyton’s work would stay intact however sans the unique whiteness of her heroes and her choice for untrustworthy foreigners as unhealthy guys.

Over Christmas, the BBC unveiled the primary of three new 90-minute Famous Five movies to be broadcast all year long – the primary, “The Curse of Kirrin Island” debuted on New Year’s Eve. Somewhat inexplicably co-developed by the filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn, whose most noteworthy contribution to popular culture is his neon thriller Drive, starring Ryan Gosling, the collection has already conjured an abundance of unfavourable headlines and responses. The Famous Five, it appears, have develop into newly sacrosanct, an establishment that can’t be altered and even flippantly advanced. “Fury over BBC’s new adaptation,” learn one article, which sourced aggrieved viewers moaning concerning the “out of place” rating, fashions and hairstyles. A viral tweet declared the present “a relentless moral lecture”.

This is not, in reality, the case. The Famous Five haven’t, as has been recommended throughout social media, “gone woke”. The “wokest” factor right here is the refusal of its principal character, George, to bend to gender norms (“The last person who called me Georgina got a slap,” she says at one level), and that’s fairly famously been retained from the supply materials. Unless “woke queen” bonafides can be stretched to embody purveyors of informal racism and lovers of golly dolls, nobody can truthfully accuse Enid Blyton of kowtowing to the “progressive mob” any time quickly.

If something, the one radical change within the new Famous Five happens solely in its first 45 seconds: the present’s principal titles are pasted onto ever-changing DayGlo colors, with typefaces flickering like strobe lights and its theme track a slice of dreamy electronica.

That credit score sequence, and the present’s total synthy rating, is a little bit of a ruse, although. This is hardly Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 tackle Romeo and Juliet, which smashed conventional Shakespeare into the wild anarchy of Nineties pop movies and early Tarantino (to genius impact, I ought to add). Refn’s Famous Five is usually fairly strait-laced if given a shot of vitality to masks the overall tedium of the books. We get attractive coastal pictures and a way of place – courtesy of director Tim Kirkby – and intriguing hints of the supernatural which might be largely absent from Blyton’s Five on a Treasure Island, upon which the primary on this new collection is loosely primarily based. There is (attainable) magic. There are Indiana Jones-style tunnels beneath the bottom. There is even a lifeless physique.

I’m not sure if kids will truly prefer it – it’s barely too languidly paced, and I’m assuming most pre-teens right now are just as allergic to posh youngsters in knitwear as I used to be within the Nineties – however groaning over its existence is misplaced. Even setting apart the dodgy components, from their fixation on foreign-accented, “swarthy” villains to the moneyed entitlement that the Five had in just about each state of affairs, Blyton’s work shouldn’t be handled as untouchable. Her worlds had been fantastical then and stay fantastical now, a portrait of cosy center England with its tea and niceties and delusion. Those books nonetheless exist for individuals who need them. A flippantly tweaked spin on them for youngsters right now gained’t do any hurt.

‘The Famous Five’ is streaming on iPlayer