A deep dive into the BBC Famous Five Films

When I first heard that Nicholas Winding Refn was involved in making not one but three Famous Five films for the BBC, I was intrigued. Scratch that, I was fascinated. I have written a lot about Enid Blyton on this blog because she is an inescapable figure in children’s literature and to understand or even think about the books that I write about (and just plain old write), you have to face up to who she is and figure out how you feel about her. She’s not going anywhere. (And were she here, I suspect she’d take a great amount of pleasure in that). The thought of somebody doing a film of her work? Three of them? And that somebody being a deeply left-field choice? That’s the good stuff right there.

Enid Blyton is a complicated figure for anybody to work with. She’s messy. She’s often deeply offensive. She can embrace every ‘ism’ that there is out there and then invent several new before the end of chapter one. She’s readable. (She’s brutally readable. She will make a reader get to the end of her books if it kills her). Her writing is ferociously unspectacular, often immeasurably repetitive and yet some of the most remarkable stuff out there. She is messy, often suddenly, sharply cruel, and deeply, singularly, her own person. She is also immeasurably popular, not just in the United Kingdom but on an international basis. In 2007, she was the fourth most translated author in the world with 3924 translations to her name (Unesco). She was more translated than the Brothers Grimm and Nora Roberts and Barbara Cartland. The only three people ahead of her in the list? Agatha Christie, Jules Verne and William Shakespeare. (I first came across that statistic a few years ago and even now, I find it delightful. Enid Blyton is more translated than Lenin! Mark Twain!)

When I first began to write on this blog, I was in my early days of understanding what children’s literature was to me. I was doing an MA with Roehampton (amazing, do it) and sneaking into the children’s section of a nearby university and gently staring at the spines there. I had always been a user of libraries because they gave me what I needed – access to a world’s worth of literature on the budget of a twelve year old – and I had always been fascinated by the language of such spaces. I read everything and in many senses, Blyton was always there. She has been a bedrock of literary culture, fought over and discussed and rejected and favoured, and I’d be surprised to find a library or a bookshop that has nothing by her in stock. To understand children’s books is to make a decision on Blyton, on where you stand and what she does.

And every now and then, I return to her, the problem that she is and I try to figure her out all over again. I write and I read and I think. I think about books like Pea’s Book of Holidays by Susie Day (in many senses, still the best “modern day” take on Blyton that I have ever read). I think about how my understanding of Blyton has shifted over the years alongside my research work and how now, I find a huge amount of interest in the erasure of her voice and the appropriation of her work. Women wrote, women have always wrote and some women were pretty horrible people but they still wrote. And I think, perhaps, society is still trying to figure out how it feels about that. The bad woman writer. The angry woman writer. And maybe, rather than erasing that or trying to pretend that it does not exist, I think that there’s maybe interest in recognising the wholeness of something and allowing it to remain whole, to not feel the need to dissemble it, to take it and make it into something else.

In the last twenty years or so, Blyton has been having something of a lengthy moment. Not only have there been substantial adaptations of her work across a number of mediums, she has also received a healthy amount of reprints and sequels written by new authors. A particular favourite of mine was New Class At Malory Towers (2009) and I remain very fond of the Wise Children production of Malory Towers on the stage. CBBC debuted the first episode of their new series of Malory Towers in 2000 and it’s now broadcasting a fifth season. In 2022, Hachette published a graphic novel version of ‘Five on a Treasure Island’ which is something that delighted me intensely. Not only was it a charming graphic novel version of the original story it was also also an English translation of a French graphic novel adaptation of an English book. (That’s Bamboozle!)

And then there’s the films, three of them, broadcast across 2024 on BBC One. They were shown across bank holidays and during Christmas and in a prime tea-time slot and that was interesting to me because it meant that they were being taken seriously. Quite often you will see something big and heralded start out in a visible slot but then be moved towards a later and later showing. Sliding from the schedules. On demand services have naturally impacted this because we’ve moved more and more towards viewing material when we want to and how we want to, but that initial moment on the schedule is still one with resonance, a statement of intent.

The Curse of Kirrin Island was the first and I liked it. A lot. It wheeled swiftly away from the source material into something that embraced “Indiana Jones, Moonfleet, Swallows and Amazons and, there’s no easy way to say this, Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code.” (The Guardian) and that’s all kind of fabulous. I loved it. Go big or go home.

James Lancie and Jack Gleeson were the main names that I recognised in the cast and Gleeson, in particular, did something rather delightful with his role. Being a Bad Sort in a Blyton book is not a subtle thing nor is it a particularly delicate thing and I felt like he got it and had an enormous amount of fun with it. From the children, I was particularly convinced by Dick (played by Kit Rakusen). Dick in the books can be a rather thankless character (and occasionally quite mean one) but here he was something kinder and much more interesting and open to the world and I thought that was a wise, smart choice.

What I think also worked well was how seriously it was all taken. I think that’s the key with stories like this and indeed, it’s something I think about a lot in my own writing. Children’s books must go places and people must do things, the same as with all literature. The thing about children’s books is that their protagonists are often young people who may not possess the agency, the ability, the power, or indeed the money to get to the places where the things that must be done, for their story to be told. And so the world is required to take a different shape about them to make it happen. Circumstances will circumstance. A wardrobe will prove to be a portal to a different land, an adult will look the other way when they need to sneak onto the bus, or there will be a magical land at the bottom of the garden. The key is to take these moments seriously and to give them legitimacy, rather than point at them and wink at the reader. A tiger comes to tea because that’s what tigers do. Terabithia exists beside the creek because it does. This is the rule of the space that you’re in and you take that seriously because everything will fold if you don’t.

The Famous Five films take themselves seriously, even in the archest of moments. One of those comes in the second episode, Peril On The Night Train, where the children find themselves trying to stop a macguffin from falling into enemy hands and everything turns more than a little bit 39 Steps. (I recently watched the 1959 film adaptation of this and am not yet quite over the absolute lols of Kenneth ‘sensible sweater and a nice cup of tea’ More being on a Life Or Death mission, I mean, what, the man is mildly irked at best throughout this entire film). There’s a risk of this all sliding into disaster but I think that the commitment of everybody throughout makes it work. Enid Blyton is high camp, I think, and to understand that and to take seriously is to master its world. (I am reminded of the time the Find Outers were after a criminal who had a finger missing – and the policeman said something basically like “Ah, you mean Jimmy Missingfinger” and everything was solved in time for tea).

The third episode, The Eye of the Sunrise, was the weakest for me. Part of this was due to the subject matter, an embrace of the supernatural and of ‘powers’, a plotline that strays far away from any of the Famous Five books I’m yet to come across. I did like the fact that it embraced a circus setting because I feel that they’re a surprisingly strong space for Blyton’s work. She’s very good with a carnival (nb: a Bakhtin carnival and not a dodgems carnival) because it allows the adults – always somebody that she has little patience with – to be placed on an equal level with the children. The hierarchies of power collapse somewhat and although Mr Galliano or whomever is still the ringmaster, you know that the other characters are equally important (if not moreso). The circus also allows the children to work and earn their keep, something that I think Blyton is always more comfortable with. She’s not fond of people who don’t pull their weight or, to be more precise, people who don’t pull their weight in the way that she’d like it to be pulled. The domestic labour of somebody like Anne is not ever going to be seen as important in a Blytonian world.

So do the films work as a whole? Yes, I think they do and if they bring more people to Blyton’s work, then that’s fine by me. There are moments of them that don’t work – I was not particularly convinced by some of the choices made in the third, nor the tendency of the Famous Five to Clearly Outline Their Plans To An Obvious Villain, but then I told myself that I am not the target audience for this sort of thing and to get a grip because these are very bright, and classy stories for children told seriously and well on the big screen and that is always a good thing. So I did.

It’s important to understand your own reading of something especially when that project involves something for children. Children are unique. Childhood is unique. My childhood was not yours. Yours is not the same as the eight year old’s down the road. It is all infinitely different and variable and you are an adult now, and you are somewhat distanced from your audience. It doesn’t mean that you can’t write for children nor watch things intended for them – it just means that you should just understand where you’re coming from and what got you there and not, perhaps, try to lay your understanding upon that of others. Cultural imperialism, so to speak, is not a cool thing.

Books need readings and enactments and doings about them that turn them into something new and fresh because stories need to live and be remade and shaped by their readers and we should not be afraid of that sort of thing happening nor of a text itself. I am in favour of fanfiction, for example, and the day I saw some fanfic of my own stories made me fall off my chair in happiness. I am in favour of films when they work and even when they don’t because they’ve not been afraid of the text that they’re working with. (This doesn’t mean that I cannot dislike them intensely at the same time, of course, for the decisions that they’ve made. Multiple readings are fun!).

I liked the films and I recognised that they took some choices that I wouldn’t and that’s okay. They didn’t get things wrong, they didn’t get things right, they just made new choices that didn’t quite work for me. I was thrilled that they were made and broadcast and that they committed so hugely to their premise. I loved the quality of them, the way that they looked on screen was excellent, the Ab Fab style credits were delicious [url links to flashing imagery, please note], and I was very much in love with how they just wholeheartedly embraced to the idea of adventure. Such a simple thing but one that I think we can forget. There is such adventure in the world, such adventure.

So here’s to you Enid, you complicated little noodle, and the ripples that your work causes even now. I am glad that people adapt your work (although I suspect you may not be) because I think it’s important that we are able to engage with cultural touchstones such as this and challenge them and question them and retell their stories. Now if you’ll forgive me, I’m going to go and write my own Anne spin-off in which she is finally recognised for the secret Queen that she always was.

[Thank you for reading! This is a slightly different post than normal and I hope you’ve enjoyed it! If you feel able to, I do have a Ko-fi here for donations and even if you are not, thank you for your support. You’re the tops].