Adults are so stupid. They just don’t listen when their kids tell them about stranger danger. “Mum and Dad,” wails George two-thirds of the way through this feature-length adaptation of Enid Blyton’s first Famous Five novel, “that guy’s an insane maniac who locked us in a crypt!”
“I’m not interested in what you’ve got to say,” says George’s mum. “You’ve got to grow up and that’s an end to it.”
Good grief, George’s mum. Don’t you realise that your daughter and her cousins, Julian, Anne and Dick, not to mention Timmy the dog, have only managed to escape the crypt in the Temple church in London by digging a hole through to an adjacent Tube platform? And that now they are trying to thwart an off-the-peg megalomaniac narcissist called Wentworth (Jack Gleeson, here even more sinister than he was as boy-king Joffrey Baratheon in Game of Thrones) from seizing a magical artefact from an island off Dorset? No? Well, George’s mum, you should.
Essentially, George’s moustachioed enemy thinks that in the 12th-century Knights Templar church located on Kirrin Island there is treasure, most likely plundered during the Crusades from a Syrian church. And that once he has it in his clutches, he will – for reasons too complicated to get into now – be able to see into the future. He will be able not just to know which horse will win the 2.30pm at Kempton Park but to put the world under his diabolical heel.
I don’t remember any of this from reading Enid Blyton’s 1942 novel. Not when I read it as a boy, nor when I read it to my daughter a decade ago. Writer Matthew Read has expanded the imaginative world of Blyton’s novel, including knowing nods to Indiana Jones, Moonfleet, Swallows and Amazons and, there’s no easy way to say this, Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code. Read and producer Nicolas Winding Refn have thereby liberated the Famous Five from the lashings of whimsy. The drama here is played straight, which makes it, paradoxically, even sillier.
The only thing I do remember from the books that chimes with this is that George didn’t like being called Georgina. “I am not,” she tells some grownup, “a little girl.” To which no one sees fit to reply: “George, mate, you can be anything you want.”
Diaana Babnicova plays George as a free-spirited tomboy with attitude to spare, and a pair of trainers that, if I was being picky, probably didn’t exist in 1940s’ England. “Isn’t that a boy’s name?” asks one of her stuck-up cousins when they arrive in Dorset for the summer. “The last person who called me Georgina got a slap,” says George. Well, I certainly don’t remember her saying that in the novel. The setting may be 1942, but the dialogue is definitely not.
One critic has already called this an awfully boring adventure, which seems mean-spirited. And yet, given that the franchise is being reimagined by Winding Refn, responsible for gritty Danish drug dramas and that up itself film about Ryan Gosling’s getaway driver, one might have expected something splashier and less ponderous. Apart from opening credits that seem designed to make viewers’ eyes bleed, though, this reimagining of Blyton is more muted than anything else in Refn’s CV – apart from his unexpected foray into directing a Miss Marple.
Blyton is often derided for racism, sexism and, if the biopic starring Helena Bonham Carter is anything to go by, being more unpleasant than the inadequate prole scum villains from her books. But here the patriarchy is gently subverted since George rather than Julian is clearly the Famous Five’s leader. “Has your father got a Latin dictionary?” Dick asks George when he wants to translate an inscription on a Templar goblet. “No, but my mother has.” Here, George is black too, which, I suspect, would have been beyond Blyton’s philosophy. This may be 1942 but the drama adheres to 2023’s diversity parameters.
Better yet, this retool of Blyton, like Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone, can be seen as a morality tale showing what cursed things happen when covetous Britons nick stuff from other cultures. This makes it surprisingly topical. This episode, The Curse of Kirrin Island, should be essential viewing for George Osborne and other British Museum bigwigs, and indeed anyone who suspects plundering foreign artefacts is ethically unproblematic.
At the end of the episode, though, Wentworth – being a grownup – has learned nothing. Instead, we see him concocting more schemes for world domination, thus teeing up a sequel in which, no doubt, he will be repeatedly outwitted by four plucky kids and their no less impressive dog. Adults are so stupid.
The Famous Five aired on BBC One and is available on iPlayer in the UK and on Stan in Australia.
