The Comic Strip, Part 1 - Nostalgia is a double edged sword

"Five Go Mad in Dorset" - November 2, 1982

As an American I grew up completely unaware of Enid Blyton's Famous Five except for their portrayal in The Comic Strip. I had no idea that this episode (and its sequel) were based so closely on actual books - I thought it was a generic pastiche. I found out one Sunday evening in the dorm television room when a British exchange student was watching with us.

"Oh God no. This" (waving at the television) "is exactly like the real books. The woman who wrote them was a Nazi."

Not quite. But I wasn't to know that at the time.

What I did know was that I wanted to have a look at one of these books.

After years of failed attempts at getting myself to England, as well as countless instances of welcoming folks back and being greeted with "Oh yes, I knew you wanted something, but all I had written down was that you wanted five books."

And then my luck changed considerably. I went and married a Famous Five fan.

The Five in a nutshell: Three siblings (Julian, Dick and Anne) get together with tomboy cousin George to go camping or hiking or horseback riding and so forth. They then stumble upon some form of complex criminal activity and Scooby-Doo everything back to goodness and righteousness. One of the things that I never figured out until I saw the genuine article was that the fifth was their dog, Timmy.

These books are certainly "of their era." Some of the subtexts (in terms of race, class, country of origin, roles of women in society and so forth) are jarring to 2005 ears, as they were to 1982 ears.

I took a look and found The Enid Blyton Society and saw that their forum has a thread on this episode. The sense is that this episode was written with a certain amount of nostalgic affection, while the follow up (we will get to the follow-up in due time) goes perhaps in the wrong direction. My wife's reaction confirmed this: every few moments brought another cry of "they got that part from Five go to Spooky Gulch!" or the like. This didn't happen at the points in the episode where they had an innocent man arrested for "looking foreign" or had semi-self-aware conversations about their sexuality. Over and over.

In the same way that they were referring something that was antique when they were cutting edge, I was looking at something that had the cutting edge lost after twenty years of sitting in the drawer. It wasn't that it was badly done - some of the set peices still held up quite well and the cast was clearly having a great time putting this all together - it's just that with the shock gone the episode didn't escalate the way it once did, leaving a two-minute concept playing out over a half-hour. Sort of like they were given a barrel of fish and then spent the day shooting them until we were left with a barrel of fish confetti.

As the credits rolled, my wife turned to me and asked "this is really what you thought of the Famous Five?" My nostalgia for a television show and her nostalgia for a series of books had collided, in a strange and slightly uncomfortable way.

Further bits of trivia:
This episode was shown on the first night that the British Channel 4 was operational. There is a special guest star credit for Sandra Dorne (Aunt Fanny) who seems to have been a British pinup star of the fifties.