Timmy will be played by a border collie. Wrong. Just so wrong.

[PretzelKnot]

According to Wikipedia, Timmy will be played by a border collie in the new BBC Famous Five adaptation.

This is outrageous. I know some of the 80s editions of the books had Timmy on their cover as a border collie but he’s not. He’s a huge, fearsome, loyal protective mongrel who can hold back a bunch of bad guys in a tunnel allowing the kids to escape. Border collies are lovely and highly intelligent but no border collie could hold back a tunnel full of armed bad guys.

Here is the original description of Timmy-

“They sat up and looked to see what Timothy was like. They saw no
fisher-boy—but instead a big brown mongrel dog with an absurdly long
tail and a big wide mouth that really seemed to grin! He was bounding
all round George, mad with delight. She came running down to them.

‘This is Timothy,’ she said. ‘Don’t you think he is simply perfect?’

As a dog, Timothy was far from perfect. He was the wrong shape, his head
was too big, his ears were too pricked, his tail was too long and it was
quite impossible to say what kind of a dog he was supposed to be. But he
was such a mad, friendly, clumsy, laughable creature that every one of
the children adored him at once.”

Border collies already get a lot of glory in movies and TV shows. Now they are stealing a mongrel’s chance to shine.

I thought he WAS a border collie! Therefore I can't see him any anything else!

I think you might be thinking of the Secret Seven or the 5 Find Outers.

You're saying Border Collies are behind this ?

@Theredjellybean Dick is one of the few (only?) occasions I can think of where a child character in Blyton who throws a punch a villain and "gives thanks he learned boxing at school" (Five have plenty of fun)

I hated the Secret Seven. The girls always got left behind which never happened in any of the other series.

Yes, they were all characterised as particularly weedy and mainly ignored, apart from the make the official number up to 7, which sounded cooler, and to make the tea. Even Jack's annoying sister Suzy was painted as quite wet and hopeless.

IMHO, this is exactly why George presented the way that she did: she never rejected actually being female (never asked to be called 'he' etc.), but she outright refused to be burdened with the inferiority baggage that was routinely assigned to girls of her time. She was a pioneer.

Yes, justice for Dick. He wasn't a dweeb!

@MrsPelligrinoPetrichor I think I was thinking of Peter and Jane books (after a quick google trip down memory lane!).

So he is a mongrel 🥰 All is now right.

Except for George... what has George got on her feet?????? I agree there's a Time Machine here somewhere...

I also don’t get how George is dressed in modern clothes and the others aren’t. Maybe she is from our time and Uncle Quentin invented a Time Machine and she got sent back.

That's the only rational explanation that I can think of

Even with the oft-recycled plots, Blyton was remarkably prolific for her time. Many of the other series of the era were written under pen names by multiple writers, but everything bearing her name was indeed her own work.

But it's not a border collie anyway

What has she got round her wrist? She looks like she’s just come back from a festival

Anne’s shoes don’t look very practical for clambering over rocks

Yes, I was going to say this. They are going to have a whole bunch of dogs and they need them to be easy to train and look alike.

Even the greatest dog, once it gets to the eleventh take, will get fed up.

That dog looks a bit more Timmy to me than the 70s version. Only I imagined him to be bigger, like an Alsatian size. But not a bad effort.

Who cares, it's just a dog. Blyton's works are adapted and changed all the time, for instance the "Mr Golly" character has been eradicated to suit the present climate. This is no different, the book has one sort of dog and this show has a different one maybe. Things get changed all the time especially when books are turned into TV programmes or films.

And as if George would wear a pink blouse with what looks like a flowery pattern on it 😳

@kierenthecommunity Following her second marriage and into the 1950s her husband got more involved in the business side of her work and the company they formed had a heavy focus on money making (more from the board members other than EB) - I suspect this was one of the reasons for the many extra famous five books etc as they were money spinners. The company was also formed as Blyton had has a mess up in the 1940s and substantially underpaid tax which of course has to be paid.

Anyone who is interested in Enid Blyton I thoroughly recommend three books:

1.) Biography of EB by Barbara Stoney

2.) Enid Blyton by George Greenfield (her agent in the later part of her career)

3.) A childhood at Green Hedges by Imogen Smallwood (her second daughter)

Well, in my mind, he was an Irish Wolfhound 😄 🤣

Where on earth did I get that from, I wonder 🤔

There was a TV adaptation of hound of the Baskervilles out around the same time as one of the famous five TV series.

The only time I have been bitten by a dog It was a border collie.
On a separate occasion a BC followed me and my dog growling (it was in farm land and was usually tied up)
So I reckon they could take on bad guys.

We’ve recently re read that one and they were mean (in our opinion) before the thieving was apparent - they bullied the child of the pair and their sickly dog as well. Although when I read the books as a child I didn’t pick up on any of that and thought they were all marvellous!

DC have confirmed to me that they were “jerks” but accept it was how things were at the time. They really enjoy the books.

Labs are lovely but they aren’t a patch on a border collie, nothing like as clever and handsome

I suppose they could go the other way and have Tiger Dan played by a real tiger!

What's the betting that Nobby will become Robbie?

Five go off in a Caravan was the first FF book I read. What a banger to start with!

Tiger Dan was a great villain. Nobby’s poor dogs got poisoned by him. I was so relieved when they pulled through.

CGI chimpanzee?

This very easy for a border collie to perform the role they’re so clever

Bet it's a timeslip/back to the future one.

George went to a re-enactment festival like Goodwood and entered a tent staffed by a old hippy woman/ageing New Age traveller with crystals and whatnots and grumbled to the dog about how she's fed up of always having to be answerable to social media and text messages and societal expectations and she wishes that she could be somewhere where none of that mattered.

And then she walks out of the tent to find herself being assumed to be a boy not from round these parts.

Tiger Dan was a great villain.

Oooh, Brian Glover in the 70s adaptation terrified me!