David Lister: The Week in Arts

I'm sure that somewhere in the publishing world there is a copy editor whose sole job is to bring Enid Blyton books up to date. He or she is the unrivalled expert on the Famous Five, Noddy, the Secret Seven and Malory Towers. And one day this publishing executive will solemnly announce as a specialist subject on Mastermind the social history of Toytown in the middle years of the 20th century.

This week we learned that for a new edition of some of her stories, discreet revisions are to be made to Blyton's text so that boys and girls shared the housework and there was a more multicultural feel to the text.

A number of inconvenient words and phrases have been brought up to date. "I say" has been replaced by "Hey", "queer" by "odd" and "cookies" replaces "biscuits" as one must never forget the American market.

In addition, Dame Slap is to become Dame Snap, who now scolds naughty children rather than smacking them; Bessie, a black girl with a name associated with slavery becomes Beth, a white girl; Fannie and Dick have been changed to Frannie and Rick. I suspect that Miss Blyton would have puzzled for hours over that last change and given up attempting to work it out.

But, don't worry. I'm not going to debate the old chestnut of Enid Blyton and political correctness. You either agree with Blyton and others being made more socially and politically correct for today's social climate or you don't. But it isn't the changes on grounds of racism and sexism that have alarmed me. It is something that is seemingly far more trivial, but which I find utterly depressing. What amazed me when I read about this was a breathtaking aside in the official defence by the publishers. Margaret Conroy of Hodder was quoted as saying: "The books have only been very slightly altered, with the addition of decimalisation to bring them up to date."

Well, as I say, you can argue either way on whether to amend literary texts for sexism or racism. But coinism? Does every reference to a former monetary system have to be brought up to date in every children's story book? What are the children reared on a newly decimalised Blyton to make of the old money of Charles Dickens when they move into secondary school? Or will they now encounter a modernised Mr Micawber who counsels: "Annual income Twenty Pounds, annual expenditure Twenty Pounds and two and a half p, result Misery." At least the new version would rhyme.

Why do publishers believe that children only want to see their own world reflected? Surely children love to escape into a world which had different customs. Surely, too, they have parents and teachers whom they could ask about these weird-sounding shillings as well as those bizarre pounds and ounces. Do they really need to be so cosseted that classic texts have to be stripped of every historical difficulty?

In its peculiar way, the updating of Enid Blyton to take account of decimalisation is the most depressing of all the changes. For it shows that publishers of children's stories have no faith in children. They think that children are unimaginative, incurious and stupid. The publishers can't get it into their own unimaginative heads that children might actually be interested in a world that existed before they were born; that children might actually understand that things were different; that children might actually be intrigued by that world, by its differences, by its weights and measures, and by its antiquated coinage.

Caught in the act

You never know whom you might bump into at the opera. I was interested to watch the photographer in the lovely grounds of Garsington Opera in Oxfordshire last weekend. He was extremely busy taking pictures of audience members supping their champagne or picnicking or just looking splendid in their summer finery. He was, in fact, the celebrated war photographer Don McCullin. I asked him what he was doing in such a milieu, and he said he was compiling a book on Englishness. The 71-year-old veteran, above, didn't stay for the performance as he had to hurry back to his Somerset home where he has a three-year-old child. Perhaps it's good that he didn't stay. The opera that night was Don Pasquale - a comedy about a septuagenarian who yearned to find a bride and have children.

I can't wait to see the results of Don's Garsington pictures. But the opera-goers who were delighted to be photographed in their most colourful outfits should be warned: Don works only in black and white.

* Which is one of the most innovative museums in the country? A contender seems to be the new multimillion-pound Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum. The arts trade magazine AI describes it as "brilliant" with a dazzling mixture of light, hi-tech and the old fashioned - special effects cause John McEnroe to give us a tour of the Victorian Gentlemen's Dressing Room.

Ah, it must be just a little frustrating for those who have worked on improving this museum at such expense. They have clearly come up with the goods and have a bonus that few museums could dream of. The world's press is in the grounds, but virtually none of them will have the time or inclination to visit the tennis museum. They're too busy watching the real thing. I wonder if the curators of the museum are the one group of people in the country hoping that rain stops play for a couple of hours.