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

You couldn’t have paid me to read Enid Blyton when I was a child. This was the late Nineties and early Noughties, and the publishers behind her Famous Five novels had tried their hardest to make these 1940s tales of derring-do appeal to pre-teen readers like me. Her book jackets had suddenly come to be illustrated much in the same way as RL Stine’s Goosebumps series, full of scared teenagers dressed in T-shirts and jeans and fleeing imminent danger. But crack one of those books open and you were met with proof that you’d been duped: these were actually stories about stuffy English youths from a bygone past, not cool American high schoolers solving mysteries. Horrifying!

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

This was hardly an uncontroversial stance to take back then, for nearly two decades earlier, Channel 4 had launched with a 30-minute sketch called “Five Go Mad in Dorset”, a spoof of Blyton’s children’s adventure series starring a pre-fame Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French and Adrian Edmondson. The sketch accurately satirised the twee myopia of Blyton’s books, their casual ignorance and dubious class politics, and their existence as products of a faraway and unrecognisable England. This idea seemed to stick in the cultural consciousness, no matter how many rebrands Blyton’s series underwent to compete with the likes of JK Rowling, Anthony Horowitz or Malorie Blackman.

All of it coincided with a sense that Blyton’s work had become too passé to celebrate, too entrenched in values we’d be smart to forget. In 2021, for example, English Heritage decided to maintain the blue plaques dedicated to the author, but also chose to acknowledge the “racism, xenophobia and lack of literary merit” to her work. It was a decision that sparked outrage among Blyton’s acolytes but also felt like the right thing to do – contextual usefulness, rather than reactionary banning or condemnation.

It also explains why her work is still being adapted. The BBC announced the new Famous Five with a press release stating that the series would be written for “a progressive new audience” – presumably meaning the spirit of Blyton’s work would remain intact but sans the exclusive whiteness of her heroes and her preference for untrustworthy foreigners as bad guys.

Over Christmas, the BBC unveiled the first of three new 90-minute Famous Five films to be broadcast throughout the year – the first, “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 pop culture is his neon thriller Drive, starring Ryan Gosling, the series has already conjured an abundance of negative headlines and responses. The Famous Five, it seems, have become newly sacrosanct, an institution that cannot be altered or even lightly evolved. “Fury over BBC’s new adaptation,” read one article, which sourced aggrieved viewers moaning about the “out of place” score, fashions and hairstyles. A viral tweet declared the show “a relentless moral lecture”.

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This is not, in fact, the case. The Famous Five haven’t, as has been suggested across social media, “gone woke”. The “wokest” thing here is the refusal of its main character, George, to bend to gender norms (“The last person who called me Georgina got a slap,” she says at one point), and that’s quite famously been retained from the source material. Unless “woke queen” bonafides can be stretched to include purveyors of casual racism and lovers of golly dolls, no one can honestly accuse Enid Blyton of kowtowing to the “progressive mob” any time soon.

If anything, the only radical change in the new Famous Five occurs exclusively in its first 45 seconds: the show’s main titles are pasted onto ever-changing DayGlo colours, with typefaces flickering like strobe lights and its theme song a slice of dreamy electronica.

That credit sequence, and the show’s overall synthy score, is a bit of a ruse, though. This is hardly Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 take on Romeo and Juliet, which smashed traditional Shakespeare into the wild anarchy of Nineties pop videos and early Tarantino (to genius effect, I should add). Refn’s Famous Five is generally pretty strait-laced if given a shot of energy to mask the general tedium of the books. We get gorgeous coastal photography and a sense of place – courtesy of director Tim Kirkby – and intriguing hints of the supernatural that are largely absent from Blyton’s Five on a Treasure Island, upon which the first in this new series is loosely based. There is (possible) magic. There are Indiana Jones-style tunnels beneath the ground. There is even a dead body.

I’m unsure if children will actually like it – it’s slightly too languidly paced, and I’m assuming most pre-teens today are just as allergic to posh kids in knitwear as I was in the Nineties – but groaning over its existence is misplaced. Even setting aside the dodgy parts, from their fixation on foreign-accented, “swarthy” villains to the moneyed entitlement that the Five had in just about every situation, Blyton’s work shouldn’t be treated as untouchable. Her worlds were fantastical then and remain fantastical now, a portrait of cosy middle England with its tea and niceties and delusion. Those books still exist for those who want them. A lightly tweaked spin on them for children today won’t do any harm.

‘The Famous Five’ is streaming on iPlayer