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Enid Blyton

A short series of the Famous Five has been made for CBBC and the first one will be shown on CBBC on Boxing Day at 5pm. I hope it is good. Will be watching with lashings of ginger beer!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/66312108

Have you ever read the Famous Five book series?
The popular children's adventure books, written by Enid Blyton, are being turned into a TV series.
The BBC has announced Diaana Babnicova will play the role of George, Elliott Rose will play Julian, Kit Rakusen has been cast as Dick and Flora Jacoby Richardson as Anne.
The final member of the five is the gang's furry friend Timmy the dog, who will be played by Kip, a bearded-collie cross.
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As a kid, I had the entire series!
It was pure escapism, at least for me. The characters were allowed to go off on overnight cycle rides, had a private island, plenty of food and adventure ... so much different from my own life.
Yes, it was 'problematic' as it reflected children's literature in the late 40's and 50's. The jarring outlook was done well by the Comic Strip Presents ... but, take it as children's literature rather than adults choice of children's literature, it's flawed but not overt propaganda. Seems to me that it's adults getting bent out of shape over something that children just wouldn't see.
Meh out of 10. :)
 
These are adaptations for TV. Film an TV adaptations of earlier works are never word for word, or even necessarily overly loyal to the original as set out on paper - and as such they will always represent, to a certain extent, the mores of the time they are made as much as they do those of the original.

This has always happened - it's absolutely nothing new. No TV/film adaptation can fit in everything from the original - they are all cut to hell; so it kind of makes sense, if it doesn't affect the plot, or narrative thrust, to cut out that which might make a modern audience uncomfortable, before you start reducing it elsewhere.

I'm not sure why should the Famous Five be any different? It's not being produced as an academic study of mid Twentieth century popular literature, it's an example of mid Twentieth century popular literature being adapted for a twenty first century audience.

Given that - at a guess - around 25 to 40 percent (and possibly much more) of the meat of any work of literature has to be excised in order for it to be produced for the screen*, I have no idea why the dropping of a few iffy words (a removal which will probably represent a tiny proportion of all that will be missing) seems artistically problematic to some people.

It would probably be best to watch the TV series - and then judge the actual adaptations on their actual merits (or otherwise) - rather than make a preconceived decision based on the fact that they won't be using those 'bad' words. Which, when you think about it, is utterly bonkers.

*Edit: I should point out that I'm not simply talking about words of description that are superfluous with the introduction of the visual aspect of the screen - but whole scenes, and large amounts of dialogue. I seem to recall that one screenwriter - possibly Syd Field, but possibly earlier - came up with a formula for predicting how much of an original work would appear in a screen adaptation.
 
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Spookdaddy said:
It would probably be best to watch the TV series - and then judge the actual adaptations on their actual merits (or otherwise) - rather than make a preconceived decision based on the fact that they won't be using those 'bad' words. Which, when you think about it, is utterly bonkers.
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Who has said they have a preconceived decision about bad words in the TV series?:confused:
 
maximus otter said:
They were written between 1942 and 1962. Can’t they just be exciting, fun, escapist books, of their time?

maximus otter
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I absolutely agree. I've always thought that a simple warning at the start would be enough ... for those easily offended and can't contextualise.
Min Bannister said:
Who has said they have a preconceived decision about bad words in the TV series?:confused:
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I admit that it's my own assumption. The 'bad words' that might be edited/redacted would relate to the original books attitude towards foreigners, 'lower class' criminals etc.
 
I am not much of a fan of the books aimed at younger children (The Magic Faraway Tree etc. are repetitive and meaningless), but Miss Yith adores the St Clare's and Malory Towers novels and has read both series seven or eight times.

Also, although I'm no fan of 'updating' or 'tweaking' old stories, the BBC adaptation of Malory Towers is top-notch and I'm quite content to sit down and watch it with her–again.

I'd even go so far as to say that the series has helped her adapt to her own school life: friendships, rivalries, cliques, house-points, sports teams, leavers, new girls and the school nurse are already regular features in her mental life as a nine-year-old, and she seems to like to relate her own experiences to those in print and on the screen.
 
Yithian said:
I am not much of a fan of the books aimed at younger children (The Magic Faraway Tree etc. are repetitive and meaningless), but Miss Yith adores the St Clare's and Malory Towers novels and has read both series seven or eight times.

Also, although I'm no fan of 'updating' or 'tweaking' old stories, the BBC adaptation of Malory Towers is top-notch and I'm quite content to sit down and watch it with her–again.

I'd even go so far as to say that the series has helped her adapt to her own school life: friendships, rivalries, cliques, house-points, sports teams, leavers, new girls and the school nurse are already regular features in her mental life as a nine-year-old, and she seems to like to relate her own experiences to those in print and on the screen.
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Same here. My daughter, now a mother herself, has kept her treasured Malory Towers books for 25 years or so.
 
Oh yeah. Yesterday’s Secret Seven is too much for modern sensibilities.
One major change through the book is the reference to violence. At first the children are alerted to danger when they hear a scream but his has been changed to a noise. When they hear this they have a little cold shiver of fright which has been changed to cold shiver. When they eventually see through the window it is described as hand up, he was going to hit someone. Oh there’s another scream. Peter what… This is now hand up. Peter what… Also a most bloodcurdling howl becomes a really loud noise.
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When we see the “baddies” they’ve got knives has been cut as has the phrase Where’s my knife, Peter saw that he had a knife in his hands, and just you put that knife down. When the girl is explaining what is going on though she states I have to scream like anything! This has not been cut from the new book yet there has been no mention previously of any screams being heard, just a lot of loud noises.
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https://worldofblyton.com/2014/07/31/secret-seven-books-at-mcdonalds-by-su-part-three/
 
The Jacqueline Wilson continuation of The Faraway Tree is brilliant. I can completely recommend the Christmas one. I listen to audio books at night, children's stories are fabulous for being soothing but enough to keep my brain engaged, and I bought this one when it came out! Very Christmas-wish-fulfilment and utterly lovely.
 
I wish they'd ask, or try it out adaptions on the people it's aimed at.

We had a promotion to get everyone in the borough to read a "set" book. It was a title by Mike Gayle (Not my sort of thing it it were a film it would have had Hugh Grant in it) but readable and probably with a broad audience. Part of the publicity was Mike turning up and being interviewed, and taking questions from the public by IIRC the local BBC.

We were asked to have some questions "from the audience" ready in case questions from the public dried up.

Now Mike is Black British, so I asked him about the need for role models that appealed to various groups in children's books and what books inspired or entertained him as a kid.

His answer. Crompton's Just William books. He said that I seemed surprised and I told him that I've always been a fan but William, a privileged upper middle class white kid from 1930s Britain would now be seen as a strange choice.

Bless him, Mike replied along the lines of; "I didn't see any of that, he was a naughty schoolboy getting into all sorts of adventures that I loved reading about."

The important thing was that he liked the stories and they got him reading and loving reading and from that writing. Interestingly, at least in his book that I read the characters could be of any racial background, it didn't matter to the plot.
 
I also collected The Three Investigators, ghost written for Alfred Hitchcock. At least, I assume they were ghost written. Their setting was completely alien to my own yet I enjoyed the mysteries they talked of.
Thinking about it, many of the books I enjoyed as a child were unconnected to my own situation; the Famous Five (family, independent in an idyllic summer holiday), Malory Towers (girls boarding school), The Three Investigators (American, Californian), Jennings (1950's all-boys boarding school) and so on. I think I enjoyed them not only for the mysteries but also for complete escapism.
Funny to say, when I did eventually and unexpectedly go to boarding school, it was nothing like that which I'd read about.

Seriously, I think the biggest problem with adaptations of children's books that were written in the past is that it's adults taking property they enjoyed then but applying an adults perspective from today. Kids enjoy adventure, mystery, the different ... I'm not entirely sure they read them with an adult's judgement value. Like the excerpt above, I'm not convinced that there was any need for "[...] a scream" to be changed to "a noise." or "a little cold shiver of fright" to "cold shiver." After all, children scream with delight, surprise or excitement too, and they go on funfair rides for a fright. I'm all for adjusting language to suit the readership - after all, many words and phrases have fallen out of use or their meanings have changed. But it can walk ... I mean ... tip-toe into overprotection. The adult editors are reading them with adult perceptions.
All this said, I appreciate that some folks believe that if a child reads of certain attitudes or perceptions then it normalises these and may carry over into the real world. But we have to accept that children read books as escapist entertainment, not instruction manuals.
 
Get your point - but I'd suggest the distance between the readers life and the characters life makes it more escapist. The more the reader can relate to the character, the harder it is for them to disassociate fiction from fact.
In the Famous Five originally, their lives were so divorced from the average child reader that it was easy for them to enjoy as a break from the humdrum.
I think the harder producers strive for the viewers relating to the characters, the more adaptation the creators have to do. It's one thing writing original work with a modern child audience in mind - you can treat some issues with sensitivity. However, it's easier for the producers to take older creations and apply a censorship filter. This is why I object to heavy-handed editing; if you need to do that a lot, then create your own setting etc. Trouble is, most production companies see the 'risk' of using original writing and avoid it.
I've decided I'm going to watch one episode of FF and see what it's done to my 'childhood favourite'.
 
Well I enjoyed The Curse of Kirrin Island. I liked the slow pace, the cheesy villain and the beautiful sets. It was more Indiana Jones than smuggling by moonlight but that is fine by me as I always felt a bit sorry for the people who wouldn't get their whisky and silk stockings after the smugglers got caught.

Anne and Dick were funny characters although George was kind of a, how can I put it? Cold blooded psychopath? :eek: All good actors though.

Anyway, I'll happily watch the other two, if I remember.

Ooh and someone said a bad word!

balls
 
Min Bannister said:
Well I enjoyed The Curse of Kirrin Island. I liked the slow pace, the cheesy villain and the beautiful sets. It was more Indiana Jones than smuggling by moonlight but that is fine by me as I always felt a bit sorry for the people who wouldn't get their whisky and silk stockings after the smugglers got caught.

Anne and Dick were funny characters although George was kind of a, how can I put it? Cold blooded psychopath? :eek: All good actors though.

Anyway, I'll happily watch the other two, if I remember.

Ooh and someone said a bad word!

balls
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Epilepsy inducing opening credits.

Gosh Ju, you're pretty mature for a 15 year old.

If Dick comes (stop sniggering Floyd1) anywhere near my books he dies.

And agreed on the character assessment of the dog stealer George, an interesting first meeting with her cousins.
 
gordonrutter said:
And agreed on the character assessment of the dog stealer George, an interesting first meeting with her cousins.
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There was also her attitude to finding a dead person and her reply to Quentin on his heart rending story (Can I go now? Erm. Okay) Perhaps not having a maid or a cook made her that way? :)

Yes, Dick is not kind to books.
 
The actor who played Wentworth is 31 as opposed to the 18 he looks! He also wasn't a nice person in Game of Thrones. And i was expecting a "He can't be a priest with those shoes" moment.
 
Total plot details below.

They had to find the Holy Grail (not) on Kirrin Island and escape the (not Indiana Jones) trap, so they could go to London to find the sword so they could go to Syria to find that they have to go to Kirrin Island to get the treasure.

The batty old mother does give good sized slices of cake.

If you look really carefully there is a single piece of scenery that went unchewed.

Fun and exactly the sort of thing the Famous Five should be!
 
gordonrutter said:
...Fun and exactly the sort of thing the Famous Five should be!
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Yup. Watched while on a marathon cooking session, and really quite enjoyed it. I'm not naturally attracted to such stuff, and have a low tolerance for nostalgia, but since my niece has appeared on the scene, I've had to adapt - and it's not been quite as painful an experience as I was expecting.

(Actually, having said that, I realise that I have always made an exception for The Princess Bride - which is quite obviously the best film ever made.)
 
By chance we were reorganising Miss Yith's Enid book collection and she gathered the Enid Blyton component together. Are we missing anything good?

SmartSelect_20231231_190049_Gallery.jpg


For a Fortean element to Enid Blyton, see here:
https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/the-enid-blyton-code.30623/
 
Oh, the Wishing Chair! I loved those!

How about Mr Galliano's Circus?
 
Tunn11 said:
I wish they'd ask, or try it out adaptions on the people it's aimed at.

We had a promotion to get everyone in the borough to read a "set" book. It was a title by Mike Gayle (Not my sort of thing it it were a film it would have had Hugh Grant in it) but readable and probably with a broad audience. Part of the publicity was Mike turning up and being interviewed, and taking questions from the public by IIRC the local BBC.

We were asked to have some questions "from the audience" ready in case questions from the public dried up.

Now Mike is Black British, so I asked him about the need for role models that appealed to various groups in children's books and what books inspired or entertained him as a kid.

His answer. Crompton's Just William books. He said that I seemed surprised and I told him that I've always been a fan but William, a privileged upper middle class white kid from 1930s Britain would now be seen as a strange choice.

Bless him, Mike replied along the lines of; "I didn't see any of that, he was a naughty schoolboy getting into all sorts of adventures that I loved reading about."

The important thing was that he liked the stories and they got him reading and loving reading and from that writing. Interestingly, at least in his book that I read the characters could be of any racial background, it didn't matter to the plot.
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In an awful lot of books, the race and background of the main characters is never explicit. When the reading public is overwhelmingly white and middle class, they tend to assume that the main character shares their background. Someone once asked me why I mainly wrote about white people and I asked them to point to any passage that stated that my main character was white, which stumped them a bit. (I do tend to write chiefly about white people, simply because I am white and it would be the worst kind of appropriation for me to assume I knew what it was like to have characteristics I just don't have, although I frequently write secondary characters who are non-white and non-straight, but I am rarely so specific that you could pinpoint a character's background from my descriptions.)
 
catseye said:
In an awful lot of books, the race and background of the main characters is never explicit. When the reading public is overwhelmingly white and middle class, they tend to assume that the main character shares their background. Someone once asked me why I mainly wrote about white people and I asked them to point to any passage that stated that my main character was white, which stumped them a bit. (I do tend to write chiefly about white people, simply because I am white and it would be the worst kind of appropriation for me to
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catseye said:
assume I knew what it was like to have characteristics I just don't have, although I frequently write secondary characters who are non-white and non-straight, but I am rarely so specific that you could pinpoint a character's background from my descriptions.)
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True but many children's books are/were illustrated so even if the author hadn't specified the look of the characters the illustrator did.
 
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