Wicked

  This is OK, but it drags a bit.   They’ve split the stage show in half, and this first part goes on for 2 3/4 hours, which is the same length as the entire stage show.  People were getting rather fidgety by the end.   But I thought that Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo both did a good job, although I’m not sure why Cynthia Erivo was speaking in an American accent; and the supporting cast did well too.

Glinda/Galinda has been thoroughly Barbiefied, and is all pink clothes and popularity, whilst Elphaba, whom she meets at Shiz University, feels unloved by everyone apart from her sister Nessarose, and is laughed at for being green.  But there’s a definite sense that Little Miss Popular is a bit too entitled, whilst Elphaba is the one who’s kind-hearted enough to sympathise with the animals when they’re mistreated by the human authorities.  And Elphaba is the one who’s got all the magical powers.  But, after initially taking an understandable dislike to one another, the two become friends, after a touching scene at a dance in which Glinda steps in when all the cool kids are laughing at Elphaba.

Elphaba is invited to the Emerald City to meet the wizard, and asks Glinda to accompany her.  Once they’re there, Elphaba susses out that the Wizard is a fraud, and takes a stand against them – whereupon Madame Morrible, their university headmistress, tells everyone that Elphaba’s a baddie.

The story’s pretty much the same as the stage show, and all the songs are in there.  And it’s a good story.  The popular all-American girl and the troubled but kind-hearted outsider are both easy to identify with, and it’s very positive that an actress who uses a wheelchair herself has been cast as Nessarose.  But I really did feel that it had been dragged out a bit too much.  One long film or two shorter films would have been better.

 

1862: A Novel by Robert Conroy

I don’t usually read “alternative history” books, but this was part of a “reading challenge”.  This book sees Britain declaring war on the United States in 1862, not directly in support of the Confederacy, but as a result of the Trent affair.  It’s an interesting idea, but the Irish-American author chooses bias over what might realistically have happened, and showed Britain being defeated at practically every turn.   He doesn’t even seem to have much idea of what was actually happening in Britain at the time, claiming that the interruption to cotton supplies isn’t much of a problem because cotton could be imported from India instead.  Excuse me?  The Cotton Famine?  The dreaded Surat cotton?   On top of that, he makes some silly mistakes, such as repeatedly referring to Sir Garnet Wolseley as “Wolsey”, and some utterly ridiculous blunders, such as showing Palmerston’s Whig/Liberal government sending Disraeli as an envoy to the Confederacy.

The ending has some appeal, though.   In this version of events, the war ends in 1862, Lincoln isn’t assassinated, Britain and the US go forward on fairly good terms, a general amnesty’s granted to all Confederates, and there’s no Reconstruction.   Now that would have been a distinct improvement on what actually happened.

Incidentally, every time anyone mentions Sir Garnet Wolseley (even if they do seem to have him confused with Cardinal Wolsey), I think of Nana in Ballet Shoes going on about everything being “all Sir Garnet”.  Apparently it was quite a popular expression in both Britain and Canada at one time, but it rather confused my little self, forty-plus years ago!

OK, let’s have a good long whinge.  American authors often, irritatingly use “England” and “Britain” interchangeably, but this guy really takes the biscuit, repeatedly doing so within the same sentence.   Then he refers to “British” divisions and “Scottish” divisions as if Scotland isn’t part of Britain.   He also uses some words in the wrong context, e.g. “behoove” used to mean “possess” (as in “what behooved you?” and “incur” used to mean “inflict”.  And, on one of the very few occasions on which he mentions the effect of the blockade on the British textile industry, he refers to “labourers”.  Operatives!!   The word is operatives!!

And he seems to think that Queen Victoria dictated British foreign policy.   I love America, but there really is a lot of misunderstanding there about the role of the Hanoverian monarchs.  And I love Ireland.  Most British people do.  A lot of Irish-Americans don’t seem to get that.  (Joe Biden, I’m looking at you.)  The Declaration of Independence blames poor old George III for every single gripe that the colonists had!   Even in Gone With The Wind, Rhett Butler proclaims that “England” won’t support the Confederacy because of Queen Victoria’s anti-slavery views.  We get the same thing here, but the author gets round the idea of Britain eventually allying with the Confederacy by saying that Queen Victoria was too busy mourning Prince Albert to get involved.   Of course, in reality, the person who did most to avert war over the Trent Affair was Prince Albert, but that was a one-off.

The idea that Palmerston would send a prominent Tory such as Disraeli to negotiate on his govenment’s behalf is preposterous, and the author compounds that error by saying that it was thought that Disraeli and Judah Benjamin would get on because they were both Jews who professed Christianity.  Apart from the unspeakable tackiness of that comment, it needs to be pointed out that the entire Disraeli family converted when Benjamin Disraeli was a child, and that Judah Benjamin most definitely did not profess Christianity.  His becoming a United States senator and then Secretary of State for the Confederacy are two big moments in the history of religious tolerance and equality in America.   Conroy gets it all wrong.  Gah!

As for the conduct of the war, he shows American ironclads defeating the British Navy’s wooden ships.  Both Britain and France had built ironclads before the American Civil War started.   So there!!

So what actually happens in this book?   Following the Trent affair, and some other naval skirmishes, Britain declares war on the Union.  However, Britain doesn’t recognise the Confederacy, as public opinion in Britain would be outraged by an alliance with a slave-owning power.  You can tie yourself in knots over this.  We have a statue of Abraham Lincoln in Manchester city centre.  Lincoln wrote a letter to “the working men of Manchester”.  But there was certainly some pro-Confederate feeling in Britain – not pro-slavery,  but pro the idea of an economic alliance.  There’s also a theory, which I think is largely a Confederate theory, that Palmerston supported the Confederacy, because he felt that it was ruled by an aristocracy akin to the British aristocracy.  That’s pretty bonkers.  No-one is telling me that Viscount Palmerston regarded Jefferson Davis as his social equal!  To be fair, Conroy doesn’t mention this theory, but he does suggest that Palmerston and Lord John Russell disliked the Union because it was such a wonderful democracy.  Yeah, yeah.  He even suggests that Gladstone was in on all this.  Nonsense.  Gladstone was well-known to be pro-Union.

He does tie himself in knots a bit over it all, and eventually says that Britain agrees to work with the Confederacy in return for Jeff Davis promising to free the slaves at the end of the war.   Britain certainly put pressure on some countries, notably Brazil, to free their slaves, but the idea that Palmerston, Russell and Gladstone would believe that the Confederacy would agree to this is unrealistic, to say the least.

Then he comes up with this crazy idea of Patrick Cleburne, a Protestant, Anglo-Irish, middle-class Confederate officer, nicknamed “the Stonewall of the West”, who in this book has somehow morphed into a Fenian and a pro-Union man, raising an Irish Legion to fight for the Union, on the grounds that all the Irish immigrants in Boston and New York will want to fight against Britain.   I suppose they might have done, but they certainly wouldn’t have been led by Cleburne.   And would they have been keen to sign up anyway?   Three words – Manhattan Draft Riots (1863).

Britain then burns New York and Boston, which … well, I was going to say that it seems unlikely, but we’re only half a century after the War of 1812.  And plenty of burning did go on during the American Civil War.  We all know about Atlanta.

War breaks out in Canada.  That probably would have happened – but, in this version of events, the Americans carry all before them, which probably would not have happened!  In terms of British leaders, we’ve got Sir Garnet Wolseley, Robert Napier … and Lord Cardigan.   Cardigan is shown to make a mess of things, but he was a bit of a hero at this time.  To be fair, the Charge of the Light Brigade really wasn’t his fault, and it’s rather unfair that he now gets the blame for it.    On the American side, Winfield Scott is very involved behind the scenes, and the author clearly has it in for George McClellan.  I don’t mind McClellan, but that’s probably more because he was Orry and George’s classmate in North and South than anything else :-).

In the middle of all this, the Irish Brigade proclaim a “Republic of New Ireland” in part of Ontario.  Er, no.  That so wouldn’t have happened.  When exactly did Lincoln have anything to do with Ireland?!

The fact that Britain has possessions in the West Indies, which would have been relevant, is never once mentioned.

The British and the Confederates then join forces, and there’s a lot of fighting in Maryland.  The Americans win, of course.  And the Irish are very involved, of course.   But then Lincoln abandons the Irish Legion.  I’ll just get my violin.   And I dread to think what Patrick Cleburne, the Confederate hero, would make of any of this!  Robert E Lee is injured, but even Conroy can’t bring himself to kill Lee off.

A slave woman, who has taught herself to read and write, then takes some letters from Jefferson Davis to Wade Hampton, which prove that the Confederacy never intend to emancipate the slaves.  And some false evidence is produced, showing that the Trent affair was a set up.  Britain comes to terms with the Union, and persuades the Confederacy to do the same.   Britain agrees to cede central and Western Canada to the US, in return for America supporting British annexation of Hawaii.  I have no idea how Hawaii got into this, but it’s an interesting idea!  Everyone agrees to try to keep the French out of Mexico.  And it’s agreed that slaves in the southern states will be freed in five years’ time, and that slaveowners will be compensated.

Alternative history isn’t real.  Obviously!   So we’ll all have our own ideas about how certain scenarios might have played out.  But this version of events is just ridiculously biased, and some of it’s downright inaccurate.   However, I did have great fun reading it, and even greater fun criticising it.  So thank you to the author for all of that!

 

 

 

 

 

 

At Midnight in a Flaming Town by Lorraine Bateman with Paul Cole

This book is about how the lives of a number of characters, most fictional, some real, become intertwined as Germany invades Belgium in August 1914, much of it revolving around the Sack of Leuven/Louvain.

There’s still some debate as to the extent of German war crimes in Belgium, and the international press undoubtedly exaggerated them, but there’s no doubt that war crimes were committed.  This book, published in 2011, takes a surprisingly old-fashioned view, talking about “Prussians” being responsible for the atrocities.   It also draws heavily on the international reports about German soldiers raping nuns, with one of the characters being a young nun, Therese, who is gang-raped by the Germans and becomes pregnant.  A lot of the general emphasis is on the attacks on women – which undoubtedly happen, and which continue to happen in wars around the world.   Male soldiers thinking that they have the right to assault local women.

Therese, and many other young women, are taken to a Brussels hospital – the one at which Edith Cavell was in charge.  Another of the main characters is independent-minded British nurse Marion, who works with Edith Cavell and, alongside her, becomes involved in sheltering British soldiers and helping them to reach the neutral Netherlands.  Marion is able to escape with the help of her American boyfriend, Russell.

There are numerous other characters.  Too many, really – the story keeps flipping about.  It’s not a brilliantly-written book, and it’s extremely annoying that the ending is ambiguous, but it’s an interesting attempt at showing a horrible period in history, which had a very significant impact both within Belgium and beyond.   The war crimes committed during the First World War have perhaps been overshadowed by what happened during the Second World War, but let’s not forget what was done in Belgium, Serbia, Eastern Galicia and elsewhere – nor, of course, the horrific events in the Ottoman Empire.  Civilians always suffer in wartime.  Some things never change.

 

 

 

An Infamous Army by Georgette Heyer

The first half of this is classic Regency romance stuff; but the second half is an account of the Battle of Waterloo and the attempts by hitherto sheltered women to help the wounded, which is something different.  It’s set mostly in Brussels, as the upper classes of Britain, “Belgium” (the book refers to “Belgians”, but there wasn’t a Belgium as such until 15 years later!), the Netherlands (including the royal family) and numerous German states gather there to flirt and party … whilst Napoleon approaches and the fate of Europe hangs in the balance.

The author says in her foreword that she was a bit nervous about the setting, because it’s so closely associated with Vanity Fair.  I seem to remember that it also features in one of the Cynthia Harrod-Eagles Morland books.  It’s just such a strange part of history.   The map’s being redrawn.  Belgium, the former Austrian Netherlands, is to become part of the Netherlands.  Finland’s being detached from Sweden and handed over to Russia.  Norway’s being detached from Denmark and handed over to Sweden.  Most of Poland’s being handed back to Russia.  Rulers are being restored all over various German and Italian states.   Everything could change if Napoleon is able to defeat the Coalition.   There could be another decade of war.  The showdown’s approaching.

And all these people are hanging around in Brussels, drinking, dancing, gossiping and trying to bag wealthy spouses … whilst the middle classes and working classes of every country are at home, trying to cope with the impact of years of war.  Georgette Heyer does depict it very well.  There’s a rather daft storyline involving a secret marriage, but it’s generally very good.   And the switch from standard Regency romance fare to the horrors of war, with a number of characters killed or seriously injured, and women who seemingly think of nothing but clothes and romance helping to tend the wounded, is done very well.

Just one random point.  French was the international language at this time, but Brussels was still a predominantly Flemish (OK, Dutch!)-speaking city.  Fast forward 100 years, and it was a predominantly French-speaking city, and still is.  I mean, Anderlecht’s a very obviously Flemish name!   An awful lot of European cities have changed countries in the last 200 years, several more than once (could the Romanian FA *please* ask its fans to behave in future?!), but how many have changed their main language?

Anyway.  Rather enjoyed this.  Much better than the last Heyer book I read!

Angel of Grasmere by Tom Palmer

 

Whilst I could have done without the Leodensian author’s cracks about Manchester – some people are just very bitter about having been relegated to the Championship 🙂 ! – it made a very nice change to come across a Second World War book for children in which the evacuee character was *from* Manchester, and which referred to the Christmas Blitz and to the bombing of Barrow.   It is a pet hate of mine that practically every book about evacuees features kids from London, and that TV programmes (although not books so much) about the Blitz always focus on London.   The war affected the rest of the country too!  This book, as the title suggests, is set in Grasmere, and centres on three friends, aged 10/11 in 1940, when the story began.

Tarn (a nickname), the daughter of the village headmaster, dreams of getting into grammar school in Ambleside and becoming a writer, but has had her world blown apart by the death of her brother in the evacuation from Dunkirk.  Peter is the son of a farming family, and Eric, an evacuee from Manchester, is living with them.  As I said, there are various cracks about Manchester, mostly made by the local bully in relation to the construction of a dam to provide drinking water.  I drove myself mad trying to work out whether the author meant Thirlmere or Haweswater; and then, in the afterword, he referred to both!

It’s not particularly realistic – Eric appears to be the only evacuee from his area in Grasmere, Peter is allowed to leave school at the age of 11 and a small family farm has two Land Girls to itself – but never mind!   It shows the effects of war in Northern England and on the countryside, and there aren’t enough books which do that.  It even brings in the suggestion that the Nazis mooted the idea of invading Britain through the Lake District rather than the south coast.  And we hear about the bombing of Barrow, only 35 miles distant.   (We’re told that a Grasmere girl called Agnes Strickland was amongst the dead.   Agnes Strickland was a historian who wrote about the lives of the Queens of England.   Why did Tom Palmer use her name?!)  There are also several mentions of Peter’s Auntie Nella, who lives in Barrow.  Nella, as opposed to Nellie, is an unusual name, and so that has to be a tribute to Nella Last.

I read this whilst I was staying in Grasmere.  Such a beautiful place, and the geography of the village is faithfully depicted in the book.  The war has changed everyone’s lives drastically, but the children are still able to get out and about and enjoy the countryside.  They’re constantly going up to Easedale Tarn, where Tarn spent a lot of time with her brother.   However, the book makes it sound as if getting there from Grasmere village is a gentle stroll.  It is anything but.  It is a horrendous scramble!!   And, whilst all this is going on, a mysterious man is living up there, and doing little kindnesses for the people of the village.  Hence the idea of the “angel”.

The identity of the “angel” is very obvious from early on, and spelt out about halfway through the book.  He survived, is suffering from PTSD after Dunkirk, and has deserted because he can’t cope with the idea of going back to war.  The author’s very critical about Dunkirk, pointing out that French and Belgian civilians were left to face the Wehrmacht, and, in the afterword, criticising Churchill for making a defeat sound like a victory.   Well, it’s very easy to be critical from a distance of 84 years.   What was the alternative?   The British Expeditionary Force was outnumbered.   France, Belgium and the Netherlands had crumbled before the Nazis.   Evacuation was the only real option.  As for making a defeat sound like a victory, morale had to be kept up somehow.

But the point about PTSD is certainly a very valid one.   My own grandad was treated for shell shock/PTSD after being trapped in a burning building during the D-Day campaign.   Few of the villagers judge “the angel”, and, after spending some time in a military prison, he’s able to serve the war effort in a different way, making use of the skills he’s learnt from growing up in the Lake District.

The Second World War as a setting for both children’s books and adult books continues to remain very popular.   This is something a bit different – it’s not set in a bombed city, nor is it about evacuees escaping the war by being sent to the countryside, because Eric doesn’t escape the war.   It shows how the war affected every corner of the United Kingdom.  And, whilst I’d take issue with the author’s views on Dunkirk, shell shock/PTSD is rarely covered in children’s books, and probably should be.

And the author’s said that the character of Tarn was inspired by a young girl whom he heard interviewed after her brother was killed in the war in Ukraine.   Children’s lives continue to be affected by war in so many parts of the world.   We can’t, individually, stop that, but we can all try to do little kindnesses, just as the “angel” in this book does.

Hotel Portofino (Season 2) – U&Drama

  This is a bit confusing.  Hotel Portofino has moved from ITV to U&Drama.   We’re only just starting on Season 2, when America’s already had Season 3, and I think Italy has too.  And there was no recap at the beginning: it took me a while to remember who was whom!   But, on a dark, wet November evening, it was lovely to see all those glorious shots of Italy.  (OK, Croatia masquerading as Italy.)   And it was quite entertaining, even if it wasn’t the world’s greatest programme.   The soapy stuff about affairs, bad marriages and debts is interesting enough, and it’s balanced by the serious storylines surrounding the rise of Mussolini.

It’s been a long time since the first series (I do wish that the media would stick to “series” rather than “season”!) was shown, and it’s nice to see this back.

Paddington in Peru

  As everyone seems to be saying, this isn’t as good as Paddington or Paddington II, but it’s still lovely.   It’s cold and dark outside, there’s a lot of worrying stuff going on in the world, and we need Paddington in our lives.

Hugh Bonneville is seriously underrated as a comedy actor: he’s very, very funny as uptight Mr Brown.   Olivia Colman’s also funny, as a singing nun with a guitar.   (Well, obviously we all know that all nuns have guitars and sing in the mountains.  She didn’t break into The Hills Are Alive, but you get the idea.)   And Paddington, with his kind heart and impeccable manners, is just wonderful.  He works better in London, though.   Adding a load of Indiana Jones stuff, chasing around down the Amazon and channelling Esteban and the Mysterious Cities of Gold wasn’t the scriptwriters’ most inspired idea.  But he’s still Paddington, and we love Paddington!

Taking characters on location is always awkward, and I’m amazed that the usual whingers aren’t screeching their heads off over all the talk about conquistadors, and the use of Machu Picchu (which I was fortunate enough to visit in 2015) for stunts.   Still, the AI-generated scenery looked very nice.  Especially the big orange grove at the end.

We started off with Mrs Brown feeling sad about Judy flying the nest and Jonathan spending all his time in his room, Mr Brown being fed up with his new boss, and Paddington receiving his first British passport.  Paddington then received a letter from the Mother Superior in charge of the Home for Retired Bears in the Amazonian jungle, saying that Aunt Lucy was missing him badly.  So off the Browns headed to Peru (where everyone appears to speak English), only to find that Aunt Lucy has gone AWOL.  They set off to look for her, on a boat skippered by Antonio Banderas … and, of course, everything went wrong, but ultimately ended up happily.   The Browns bonded, and Paddington, despite learning that he was a member of a special tribe of bears, decided to return to London with them – because they were his family.

It’s not as good as the other two.   But Paddington’s Paddington, and this is a must see.  Pass the marmalade sandwiches …

Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light – BBC 1

I still haven’t got round to reading The Mirror and the Light.   According to Amazon, I bought it in May 2021, so it’s been on the TBR pile for 3 1/2 years.  Oh well, a lot of books have been on there for much longer than that.  Ahem.  I didn’t actually enjoy the first two Wolf Hall books that much, because I don’t really get on with Hilary Mantel’s style of writing.   However, the TV adaptations were superb, and this one looks like being the same.  It’s certainly a different interpretation of this part of Henry VIII’s reign!   Mary sobbing in Cromwell’s arms, saying that he’s her only friend?!

Mark Rylance is excellent as Cromwell.  He somehow manages to be both appealing and menacing at the same time.   And it’s so rare to find a portrayal of Cromwell that’s anything other than negative.   This portrayal’s perhaps a bit too positive, but the balance probably needs redressing.  Yes, the Dissolution of the Monasteries was very badly done, but surely it was Henry who wanted rid of Anne Boleyn, not Cromwell.  And it was hardly his fault that the Cleves marriage was such a disaster.

He’s an interesting character partly because, as the programme said, he had no “affinity”.   Henry VIII’s court was surprisingly meritocratic, both Wolsey and Cromwell coming from pretty humble backgrounds.   Wolsey, incidentally, made a surprising number of appearances in the first episode of this – considering that he’d been dead for six years.

It was really all about Cromwell, though.  We didn’t see very much of Henry VIII.  And, apart from Margaret Pole, the women were all presented as wusses.  Mary did a lot of crying.  Jane Seymour was portrayed as a quiet little mouse who spent most of her time praying.  And Anne Boleyn was portrayed as saying nothing at her execution, which was most definitely not accurate.  That was quite annoying.  Chapuys had quite a big part, but the ‘Allo ‘Allo accent made it difficult to take him seriously.  Mark Rylance was just brilliant, though.  So was Jonathan Pryce as, er, the ghost of Wolsey.

People from the West Country probably had fun spotting locations they recognised.   It’s not an area I know very well, but it was nice to see Great Chalfield Manor, which I visited (whilst staying in Bath in 2020) because it’s the inspiration for Pamela Belle’s Wintercombe, as Austin Friars.

There’ve been a million and one TV dramas about the reign of Henry VIII, but they’ve nearly all focused on his separation from Catherine of Aragon and relationship with Anne Boleyn.   It’s arguably the best known period in English history.   And yet there wasn’t much in the way of Reformation until later.   Cromwell and Cranmer.   (There were way too many people in the 1520s and 1530s called Thomas!)  Cromwell doesn’t have the soap opera appeal that Henry VIII’s marital career does, but he deserves our attention.  And he’s getting it.

 

War and Turpentine by Stefan Hertmans

  Today is Remembrance Day.  Tomorrow is Armistice Day.  “In Flanders Fields, the poppies blow.”   John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” is familiar to most of us; and we wear a red British Legion poppy, for remembrance.  But there are very few books available in English about the Belgian experience during the Great War, even though it was “Plucky Little Belgium”, rather than the assassination of an Austrian archduke in Sarajevo, which dominated the British press during the early months of the war, the heroic story of Edith Cavell is well known, and so much of the fighting on the western front took place in Belgium.  This isn’t a particularly good one, it has to be said, but it has its interesting moments.

Incidentally, I cannot find anywhere a novel about Belgian refugees in Britain during the Great War, even though it was the biggest ever influx of refugees into this country.  There must be one somewhere, but, if there is, I can’t find it!   Anyway, to get back to this book, it’s not a novel as such.  It tells about how Stefan Hertmans, the author of The Convert, was given the diaries of his grandfather, who served in the Belgian forces during the Great War, and what he learnt about what his grandfather went through.

Unfortunately, it’s a very short book, and lacks detail.   Also, it’s rather annoyingly written in the present tense; and both the sections about the author and the sections about his grandfather are written in the present tense, which is confusing.  But it does convey something of the story of a life disrupted by the German invasion, the German atrocities (which, whilst admittedly exaggerated by the international press, were horrific) and the war.   It also shows us how injured Belgian soldiers were brought to Britain to recuperate.  The author’s grandfather came to Britain on three separate occasions – once to Liverpool, once to London, and once to Windermere.   And it shows us how the Spanish flu epidemic devastated a world only just emerging from the war.

Stefan Hertmans is lucky to have this account of his grandfather’s experiences.  I’m sure that many of us wish that we knew more about our own family history, but people didn’t talk much about the world wars when I was younger.   It’s strange: the Second World War, in particular, still had so much influence on the world of the 1980s, but many people didn’t feel able to share their personal experiences.   It’s different now.   There was a time when we wondered if Remembrance events would continue into the twenty first century – but they do, and it’s important that they do.   Today and tomorrow, we remember those who’ve died in conflict, and we think about those they left behind, and about those living with life changing injuries as a result of conflict.   And we should all, especially those idiots who may seek to disrupt or hijack today or tomorrow for their own selfish purposes,  be taking a few minutes to remember what the world might look like if those brave people hadn’t made that sacrifice.

Apparently, there’s now a computer came called “Brave Little Belgium”, in which people play at the 1914 invasion.   I’m not sure that that’s very tasteful; but I’d certainly like to see more books about both life in Belgium during the Great War and the experiences of Belgian refugees in Britain.   I’ll keep looking!

Come to think of it, wasn’t Poirot a Belgian refugee?  Yes, he was!  Wikipedia says ” At the time of Christie’s writing, it was considered patriotic to express sympathy towards the Belgians”.   It’s something that seems to have been rather forgotten.  Maybe it’s time to remember.

Malory Towers (Season 5, continued) – CBBC

Hooray, it’s back!   We were shown the first ten episodes of Season 5 back in the summer, and then no more.  No explanation was given, nor any word as to when we’d get to see the rest.  Very annoying.  However, whilst hunting around on Google to try to find out what was going on, I was delighted to find a discussion forum on the CBBC website, and a load of Malory Towers videos on TikTok.  Obviously I don’t take part in children’s discussion fora, and I don’t even know how to use TikTok; but it’s wonderful to see a new generation embracing Enid Blyton’s boarding school stories.

I was at primary school in the late ’70s and early ’80s, when the attitude amongst teachers was that kids should be discouraged from reading Enid Blyton books at all costs.  I took no notice of this.  Nor did anyone else in my class.  Discussions about Malory Towers, The Naughtiest Girl in the School, the Famous Five et al took place regularly.  I’ve got an awful recollection of a friend and myself trying to stick “Bold Bad Girl” labels on other people’s coats in the playground!  But there’s still a rather snotty attitude that kids today aren’t interested in Blyton’s types of settings and characters.   Wrong!   Wrong, wrong, wrong.  Now, if only something could be done to publicise all the other Girls’ Own type books that I read so voraciously 40-plus years ago.  And still do.

However, it has to be said that this TV series has strayed a very long way from the books.  The pantomime hasn’t been mentioned.   Nor has Maureen from Mazely Manor.  Nor has Moira.  (Enid Blyton seems to have had a thing about M names whilst writing the fifth book in the series!)  And even most of the girls in Darrell’s form seem to have disappeared.  Where’s Gwendoline?   The focus is all on Felicity’s form, presumably because the producers think that young viewers will be more interested in younger girls.  The storyline about the fake nurse is quite interesting, and the storyline about the maypole dancing was rather sweet, but they’ve got absolutely nothing to do with the Malory Towers books.   So I’ve got some mixed feelings about this series, but I think the fact that it’s created so much new interest in the genre outweighs the fact that a lot of the storylines have been completely made up by the scriptwriters.  Bring on the rest of the series, and bring on Season 6!