Peter Viney's Blog

TV Movie, BBC iPlayer, April 2024

Directed by Assim Abbasi
Written by Priya K. Dosanjh

“Inspired by Enid Blyton’s Best-Selling novels”

CAST
Diaana Babnicova – George
Elliot Rose – Julian
Kit Rakisen – Dick
Flora Jacoby Richardson – Anne
Kip – Timmy The Dog
James Lance- Uncle Quentin
Ann Akinjirin – Aunt Fanny
Ed Speleers – Mr Roland (aka Keats)
Nora Arnezeder – Sabrina Grover
Jhon Lumsden – Private Craig
Orla Fitzgerald- Petula
Julia-Maria Arnolds- Frau Winter
Michael Lindall – Mexwell Endicott Jnr
Ryan Gage- Gene
Simon Paisley-Day- Brigadier
Charlie Bergmann – Rudi
William Ludwig – Hans Peter

SEE ALSO: The Famous Five: The Curse of Kirrin Island
This has a great deal more on the cast and the series in general.

Thank goodness! It’s not as daft as the last one, which was basically “The Famous Five Meet Indiana Jones.” We retain the cast, but there’s a new director and writer who pay more respect to the genre.

OK it’s derivative, and mixes genres but adventures in the corridors of a train are more suitable to the presumed 1938 to 1939 date, and Enid Blyton never had the real supernatural in the books.

We start off with an unpopular tutor teaching the children, Mr Roland. Hold on, we thought, that one takes place at Christmas and it’s called Five Go Adventuring Again. The second book in the series. Published in 1943. I know it well, because we once tried to write a stage version of it. But it’s not Christmas. And it’s not that Mr Roland. Kirrin Cottage still looks like the one at Winspit, Worth Matravers, Dorset.

Uncle Quentin has invented an ‘algebra engine’ which it turns out dies when asked by clever Dick to calculate the Square Root of minus one. This, my more mathematical associates inform me, will be an imaginary number and we know computers are unimaginative. It’s much sought after, and there are hints that foreign powers are after it, so we think of the Enigma machine. Carry on with that mental association of its importance, but it’s not.

It’s mechanical, like a typewriter and Dick rightly suggests it’s a mechanical abacus. Clever Dick. In the TV series, Dick is pretty clever, though in the books he seems somewhat thick and obsessed with torches and penknives.

They find a secret passage … Ah, Five Go Adventuring Again … but no, it doesn’t led to another house but to a shed. It’s a bit pointless. An intruder attempts to steal the machine, and Mr Roland reveals he is a British agent, Keats. His job is to protect Quentin’s invention.

Off they all go to take their 39 steps by train to Scottish heather and a castle. The Famous Five never went that afield, and its more ‘The Adventure of …’ series with Kiki the parrot, which starts in Scotland.

There’s an American who wants to buy the machine and a seductive lady who befriends George in the obligatory restaurant car. She packs a 22 Derringer and threatens people! There’s lots of running along train corridors. It’s a sleeper train, and Quentin and Fanny have been rendered comatose by a drug administered by an enemy agent posing as a waiter, or rather steward. There’s excitement where Agent Keats (Mr Roland) defenestrates the agent through the carriage window. I don’t think train windows would ever break like that. You’d bounce off. It’s also an unexpected flash of real violence with a James Bond comment of ‘You can’t get the staff’ which is out of style as the waiter no doubt plunges from the speeding express to certain death. Enid wouldn’t have done that.

The castle is a military base run by an irascible brigadier with a pleasant and helpful private who drives them around. (According to the IMDB, the castle was filmed in Wales, and you’d have thought you could have found one either in Scotland or Dorset to avoid a third major location).

We go to Loch Ness … I thought, oh, no! Not back into the esoteric. But the thing jotting out of the loch is a submarine periscope. It’s the Germans! They’re after it. That solves the Loch Ness monster then. It’s German submarine activity. The Germans say they’ve come from the Atlantic. Wrong side. You can get to the sea from Loch Ness, but it’s the North Sea and you’d have to navigate a river and the Caledonian canal and exit through Inverness. Submarines and Loch Ness? That’s actually a Scooby Doo film. It’s an odd inspiration as it’s a truly dire Scooby Doo film.

Enid Blyton, with an eye on series mileage, preferred “foreign spies” to explicit uniformed Germans in jackboots and silly trousers.

Authenticity? The dialogue needs work. George, as in the first, still says ‘Whatever.’ Julian says, ‘Just stop, already!‘ I know in the original books his friends call him Ju, but that doesn’t mean he should launch into New York Jewish-American dialogue. Then Anne declares, ‘If you don’t help me find her, I’ll scream!’ There they’ve drifted into Just William books by Richmal Crompton and Violet Elizabeth Bott, ‘I’ll thcream and thcream until I’m thick! I can, you know!’ It’s a shame because the TV Anne is much less “wet” than the Anne in books. Julian though has had his snotty head prefect personality eradicated which loses a lot of humour. As above, Dick is much brighter. George retains centrality. I find an Aunt Fanny who doesn;t produce vast feasts constantly disappointing.

It’s much better than the awful first in the series. But it’s not as good as it could be. Like The Adventure of … series there’s too much adult intervention, and too little of the four (and Timmy the Dog) managing on their own. They need more food stuff too.

LINKS ON THIS BLOG

 PAUL F. NEWMAN’s ARTICLE ON THE FAMOUS FIVE 
The Famous Five: A New Musical, Chichester Festival Theatre 2022
The Famous Five: The Curse of Kirrin Island