Enid Blyton - ridiculous

[JumpRope]

Dick and Fannie from The Magic Faraway Tree have been renamed Rick and Frannie.

I'm a bit pissed off. How ridiculous!

Well, books/plays/tv/movies are not intended as documentaries so I've never really had a problem when they invent a fictional Asian or African country or culture solely for the purposes of the plot.

For example, the early 1990s Australian tv series Embassy where "Raagan" is a fictional south east Asian Islamic republic ruled by a military strongman.

We had a few EB books at our school in the Caribbean in the 1980s. They were hugely popular. I don't think any of us caredrealised they were such brain-rotting sexist racist classist claptrap. We just liked the stories of a far away country in the olden days.

Shame we didn't have the benefit of some of the Thought Police here.

I also went on to read literature at a RG. Did a PGCE afterwards where we spent more time wanking on about the abhorrent themes in Dick and Jane and any pre-1968 children's books than we did actually learning how we could teach children to read.

VoK - it's a very long time since I read William and the Dictator, but from what I recall he and the "Nastys" tried to boycott the local sweet shop. They realized after a bit that they were the ones suffering as they couldn't get any sweets. EB may have had some strange ideas, but that story was if anything a demonstration of how stupid the boycotters were.

I noticed they've shortened/revised Bets' statement of admiration for Winston Churchill in modern editions of one of the Find-Outers books.