The Enid Blyton Society

In which case Georgina, I guess you wouldn't have enjoyed, the bit in yesterday's Daily Telegraph with the title Five Go Big Brother where our intrepid heroes found a secret tunnel into the Big Brother house!!

Best wishes
Tony

Absolutely Tony!
Big brother is bad enough without defacing the traditional image of the famous five in the process

I didn't watch this but remember seeing it years ago. The only bit I remember was early on in the film when Anne says 'Do be careful, George, I've just dusted there'.......I think she is refering to a piece of grass where George has walked over! So true of Anne, I thought.

I think Five go mad in Dorset is great. It got such good reviews that they then followed it up with Mescalin. Not as good, and has quite a few cheap innuendos. But it does have some good lines.

In addition to that quoted by Comerscroft, other notable quotes from Dorset were "You really will make a proper housewife Anne" and various "You're so grown up" references to Julian. But there were lots more...

Both shows are on YouTube if anyone is interested.

I watched them both the other day, and amused myself by trying to count/list the references to incidents, characters or other references to the various FF books.

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Split from another thread.

I watched "Five Go Mad In Dorset" on 4-On-Demand over Christmas. I couldn't find a thread for it but this one seemed to be the most appropriate. Indeed, I'm almost hesitant to raise the subject. Maybe it is taboo; anathema, as the sin of witchcraft on here ?

Obviously it is strictly for those of adult age, given the nature of the humour. I must say though that I found it pretty funny. Knowing the works that they parodied, it was impossible not to laugh along and recognise - sometimes with a wince - certain points ripe for satire.

I saw it when it was first shown in the 1980's. At the time I'd only stopped reading Enid a couple of years beforehand so it was as 'wrongly familiar' then as it is now. I wondered what others on here made of it?

I like both "Five Go Mad In Dorset" and the sequel. I watched them both again just before Christmas myself funnily enough. They were obviously very familiar with the books and capture a lot of the essence of what makes the 'Famous Five' so resonant. I think there's a fair bit of affection mixed in with the biting parody.

On the other hand they do have a lot to answer for. They are responsible for instilling a particular image of Blyton's work in the minds of the general British public. They also popularised the myth that Blyton's books are full of middle class characters, forever looking down on foreigners and the poor. And of course they've ensured that the phrase "lashings of ginger beer" will indelibly be linked to Enid, in the same way Marie Antoinette will always be linked with "let them eat cake".

walter raleigh wrote: On the other hand they do have a lot to answer for. They are responsible for instilling a particular image of Blyton's work in the minds of the general British public. They also popularised the myth that Blyton's books are full of middle class characters, forever looking down on foreigners and the poor. And of course they've ensured that the phrase "lashings of ginger beer" will indelibly be linked to Enid, in the same way Marie Antoinette will always be linked with "let them eat cake".

Rather like the Darts & Drinking sketch on Not The Nine O'Clock News that reflected so badly on the game of darts. The professional body had to clean up it's act after that.

Peter Richardson wrote a third Famous Five Comic Strip film called 'Five Go To Hell' back in the 80s. I've no idea how much of this ended up in the (woeful) Five Go To Rehab.

To be fair, they should've only shown Five go mad in Dorset & forgot about the others! The first was fresh, the second was so-so, & the less said about the last one the better!

I agree number 6. They should have stuck to just the first one for me.

I saw 'Five Go Mad In Dorset' when it was first transmitted and thought it was hilarious, quite apart from its role in retrospect as the first appearance of leading TV comedy figures like Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders and Alexei Sayle. It was cleverly done, and had genuine lines taken from, I think, 'Five Get Into Trouble' plus take-offs of Enid story 'tropes' like mysterious gypsies, Julian lecturing people, George being stroppy, villains talking about their plans in loud voices without checking there was anyone within earshot, and the Five having no difficulty in fidnign the entrance to a secret passage. I presume 'Toby' the rich brat was a take-off of Richard Thurlow Kent, and his 'I'm so rich I don't have to be polite' attitude when the Five told him off for not saying 'please' in the sweetshop was a good 'hit' at Richard's and their attitude. (In the book, Julian tells Richard not to ride Dick's bicycle in the middle of the road or 'any other errand-boy tricks').The only jarring note was the odd implication that Enid had anti-Semitic characters, when Anne says Toby's kidnapping 'serves him right for being Jewish' - unlike the other parodies, I could not see where this came from and thought it uncalled-for and implicitly possibly a bit dangerous if viewers thought that meant there was any anti-Semitism in Enid's books.

The eventual sequel, 'Five Go Mad on Mescalin', was to my mind vastly inferior, especially as I could not easily tell which book was being satirised; it was more of a general 'tilt' at Enid than a precise parody, not least with the implication that the Five and their like would have preferred the Nazis to Communists as they were less 'common'. It seemed to me that less trouble had been taken with the script, and it was 'playing to the gallery' of what the 'right on' young audience might expect. After that I gave up on the Comic Strip satires. I think that the 'Uncle Quentin' joke was however taken up by Richard Curtis, with whom Dawn French and her then husband Lenny Henry had worked a lot; hence the 'Uncle Quentin' running a 1960s pirate radio ship in 'The Boat That Rocked'?

The early Comic Strip films certainly had a very good quality to them and were beautifully filmed. I believe that 35mm film was used, very expensive indeed. I too agree that the spoofing of the Famous Five worked only once with Five Go Mad in Dorset. To return to this with Five Go Mad on Mescalin did not really work so well. Am I correct in mentioning that this was the very first item to be shown on Channel 4 when it first commenced broadcasting in 1982? I recall my father "de-tuning" this channel from the family TV due to the swearing in the soap opera Brookside!

Petermax wrote:Am I correct in mentioning that this was the very first item to be shown on Channel 4 when it first commenced broadcasting in 1982?

I believe that Countdown was the first programme to be shown on Channel 4 but that Five Go Mad in Dorset was shown on launch night.

In Five go Mad in Dorset, they overhear the villains saying "Blah Blah Blah secret plans Blah Blah atom bomb", except the actor actually does say "Blah Blah". I read someone somewhere else on the internet saying that there is actually a book where Enid wrote "blah blah blah" for an overheard conversation like this. Can anyone tell me which book that was? Maybe a different author entirely?