Pump fiction: who'll fill the shoes of Posy, Petrova and Pauline in the BBC drama? Photograph: David Levene
The dramatisation of Noel Streatfeild's Ballet Shoes has only just been announced, but speculation is already rising as to whether it will galvanise a new generation of hopeful ballerinas and recreate the much-vaunted Billy Elliot effect for girls.
Written in 1936, Streatfeild's story charted the aspirations of three orphans who are sent off to stage school. In a sweet, sensible and slightly moralising fashion, the narrative mixed a little bit of grit and a lot of reasonably accurate detail into its stardust romance, making it an essential read for generations of stage-struck girls. Little Posy, who could walk around on the tips of her toes without having taken a single ballet class, still had to struggle to get herself taken seriously - and you had to wait right until the end of the story to be sure she would rise to the top. If you weren't sure you had the skill, or even the desire, to become the next Margot Fonteyn, there was always scowly tomboy Petrova to identify with - a girl who would rather be changing car tyres than putting on her pink satin shoes, and who ends up learning how to fly aeroplanes. Then there was blonde, ambitious Pauline, coming to terms with the pressures of being a child movie star.
At various phases of my childhood, I wanted to be each of these exotic, fabulously lucky heroines. The cracked spine of my ancient Puffin edition is testament to the number of times I re-read the book. I hope, when Ballet Shoes gets translated to the screen, it won't be sugared over with too much period cutesiness, and that its eccentricities and its seriousness survive intact. Whatever effect the dramatisation might have on numbers applying for dance classes, what matters more is that the book itself gets a share of the spotlight - it's a minor classic that still deserves to be read.
