THE BBC banned Enid Blyton for decades during her lifetime.
Relentlessly mediocre, tenacious second-rater. That sort of thing. She couldn't get a guernsey at the Beeb.
Enid got her own back, of course. There's something about selling 500 million copies of your 800 titles in dozens of languages that closes down debate.
Even so, mud sticks and I remember as a kid being very sniffy about The Famous Five and The Secret Seven. Not Good Literature. Truth be told, the adults around me tended to agree with the BBC and steered us gently to Anne of Green Gables and Seven Little Australians. If we happened, perchance, upon a Blyton book while out and about we'd sneak a quick squizz but we knew better than to ask for Enid for Christmas or birthdays.
Apart from anything else, my elders were unmoved by all those coves and smugglers and snowed-in half terms. At least Ethel Turner wrote about sheep stations - although I am not sure how Anne Shirley, resident of Prince Edward Island, Canada, made the cut.
I can't recall any disquiet over Blyton's other alleged sins of racism or sexism, but then again, we're talking the 1950s here.
Whatever the reason, when a bundle of Blytons hove across my desk the other day, I realised that I hadn't read much from the woman who could teach J. K. Rowling a thing or two about popularity. I'd thrown my first - and only - Harry Potter across the room in disgust after a couple of pages, so leaden was the prose of an author who was supposed to have turned a generation on to the written word. Could Blyton be as bad? The five Famous Five books being republished by Hachette as a 70th anniversary special looked harmless. Enid had been persona non grata for most of my life, but surely there was nothing to fear now, surely dipping into Five Go Adventuring Again was unlikely to do any lasting damage.
Anyway, it turns out that Blyton is indeed no stylist, her plots are unbelievable and her children talk like adults from the Home Counties. But gosh, she can spin a story. Her kids know more than her adults and the smartest of the Five is a gender bending girl called George who's prone to disregarding parental orders as she hunts down spies and other miscreants. Super fun, not to mention downright subversive.
No wonder Mum and the BBC tried to keep Enid off our reading lists.
When noisome objections to noises annoy
I'M not sure what it's like in other Australian cities, but where I live we're being monitored by the Fun Police.
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