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.
