No room at the Beeb for monstrous Enid Blyton

How BBC executives snubbed the ‘second-rate’ children’s writer for nearly 30 years

LAST UPDATED 6:43 AM, NOVEMBER 16, 2009

The writer Enid Blyton, author of some of the most popular children's literature of the past century, including the Famous Five and Noddy books, was banned from the BBC for nearly three decades because the broadcaster considered her a "second-rater".

The writer made repeated approaches to the BBC, some via her husband and agent Hugh Pollock, between the years 1936 and 1963 but was rebuffed every time because her work "lacked literary value", in the view of one executive, and was "too shallow" according to another.

She eventually got to appear on Woman's Hour in 1963, five years before her death.

Letters and memos showing the BBC's disdain for the writer have been revealed on the eve of the broadcast of Enid, starring Helena Bonham Carter as the author. Which brings more bad news for the generation brought up on Blyton's books: she is portrayed as a monster - a bad mother to her two daughters, Gillian and Imogen, and a cheating wife.

She had an affair with a married surgeon called Kenneth Waters, and after she left Pollock and married her lover, she airbrushed Pollock from her life and allowed him no access to the girls.

Blyton showed "no traces of maternal instincts", according to Imogen, who was consulted on Enid and has praised Bonham Carter's performance.

This is ironic given that Blyton invented such cute characters for her children's stories that Jean Sutcliffe - head of the BBC Schools department during the period concerned - felt bound to write in yet another memo damning Blyton's stories that "they haven't much literary value and there is rather a lot of Pinky-winky Doodle-doodle Dum-dumm type of names and a lot of pixies".

'Enid' is broadcast on BBC4, Monday November 16 at 9pm

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I remember Enid Blyton's series 'The Island of Adventure', 'The Sea of Adventure', and so on - I read them in primary school and loved them. Later I looked on them as models of tight plotting and tight dialogue, written exactly in tune with the target audience. The reason the B******t B*****d Club hate her is that her work is a monument of traditional values and common sense. She is quintessentially hearty - English in fact. But are miserablist multiculturalists. Enid Blyton goes with their worldview like rotten fish goes with chips, they cannot stomach her.

Posted by michael jose at 11:29am on November 16, 2009

Since when did the extreme feminist BBC have any interest in exposing mothers who deny children and fathers access to each other as monsters? Isn't it more likely that the feminists who run this politicised organisation, despise Blyton's work because she consistently portrays girls as girls and boys as boys, with the different (unacceptable to the Beeb) genders posessing either feminine or masculine traits according to mother nature's rules? Enid Blighton was the exact opposite of what media feminists try selling little children in their topsy turvey world of gender reversal. The girls are all thrusting, hyper-assertive go-getters to the point of being aggressively macho and the boys are continually 'put right' by the girls, or depicted meekly following these young feminists, who are usually portrayed as being nature's dominant leaders. Whenever I have landed on BBC children's programmes when bunny hopping the channels, it always seems that if there are two teams competing against each other in a children's programme the boys are usually smaller and obviously younger than the girls or alternatively outnumbered. Having seen the BBC's gender stereotyping in soap operas, I have always assumed this is in order that girls can be shown as both physically dominant and comparitively more intelligent too. Don't take my word for it, watch these programmes and you'll notice. If the BBC have treated Enid Blyton as 'persona non-existent' all these years, then perhaps parents should try stopping their children watching these socially engineered propaganda programmes and let their children have a more natural childhood instead.

Posted by Jerome Peter at 1:06pm on November 16, 2009

Wow! its amazing how any subject at all can draw angry fire from the hate-filled anti-feminists lurking in the bushes waiting for an opportunity to vent. What a shame men are so downtrodden nowadays, and women are so dominant in the boardrooms and cabinets of power, how they earn so much more than men and thus can add financial power to their personal power which has enabled them to bully and intimidate men for so long. To return to the subject in hand however, I have loved many of her stories and so have my children, but I think the BBC's dismissive attitude to her (especially as we are talking about a time long before feminism made any impact on society) is due to the deceptive simplicity and lack of pretension in her stories which many adults cant live with.

Posted by Hilary Easton at 1:49pm on November 16, 2009

Anti-feminist, moi? Feminazi crass drivel spite and lies requires opposition at all levels, in all forums, in all times and places. Equality? Equality of what? Height, weight, shape, shoe size, strength, cutting edge mathematical ability (name ONE famous female mathematician...), Nobel prize winners, software engineers, or entrepreneurship? Do you, woman-at-large, want to be saved from a burning building by a fireMAN or a fireperson? Get real, grow up. You can't be equal, no-one can. It doesn't MEAN anything. You can only be equal IN SOME WAY, like height, weight, shoe size... And do you seriously want to live in world where we are all EQUAL LIKE CLONES? And men can SHOUT louder too. Get a brain.

Posted by michael jose at 2:45pm on November 16, 2009

Well, how on earth did she think she could get on at the BBC? She wasn't male, and she hadn't even been to a Public School! The daughter of a tradesman, apparently. Then, as now, it's only Eton boys who rise to the top - Big-Ears simply didn't have the right Old School Tie, y'see! Pip-pip! Tally-ho! Play up, St Trinians!

Posted by Neil McGowan at 8:12pm on November 16, 2009

Dear Michael, just thought I'd serve up not ONE but TWO (OMG!) female mathematicians of note: Maria Gaetana Agnesi - wrote the first book introducing integral and differential calculus; and Ada Lovelace - recognized to have written the symbols and codes according to the rules for Charles Babbage's early mechanical computer. So I don't think you need to be worried about women demanding equality, the ones I know wouldn't sink to your level.

Posted by Joffy at 2:27pm on November 17, 2009