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.

You may reignite it if you read that fan fic. He’s a very considerate lover 😂

I don't want to share with Sally and Felicity, though (and I've had a threesome in my time, so it's them, not the situation.) Mind you, last partner was a public school boy, so perhaps even in my 50s, I never quite moved on.

My love life, as influenced by Enid...
<shudder>

Border collie, you can watch these free. I watched them again a few months ago, possibly on My5.

I loved FF, I wanted to be George. The 1970s tv was great, but even those stories deviated from the books hugely. I've now got the theme running through my head. The 90s version did get a little closer with special effects but lacked the impact of the 70s.

They should either stay like the books or do a completely different series. Surely, there has to be a similar premise but up to date book or written for TV scripts that can be filmed.

Sorry, but from what I've seen, they are projecting modern diversity into old stories.

Timmy was definitely a mongrel.

I get the point about multiple dogs for training purposes, but my dog is a mix of 4 breeds. Her siblings all look similar. She would be great on TV, so photogenic but a completely headstrong arse presumably getting trainers training less biddable dogs is more the issue. You rarely see the 'difficult' breeds on tv/ film acting.
#teammongrel

Most of the suspense and jeopardy will be completely non-existent now, if instead of hoping beyond hope that Timmy will have found a random passer-by and got the message out to come and rescue them from the cave where they're being held hostage, they can just whip out their phones and wait for the police to speed along to the precise What Three Words address that they've supplied, with regular progress updates all the way.

No, because in caves and on remote moors and in old houses with thick walls, they'd be bemoaning the lack of signal and having nowhere to charge it up. "Sorry Ju, don't know how to do that... I'll just check YouTube... oh."

And surely even the most stupid kidnappers would take their phones off them?

I agree, it's not as if there aren't experienced mongrel dog actors out there. Barley (who played Garrick in Poldark) would be perfect for Timmy.

(A Border Collie could definitely take on bad guys though)

That is a lovely dog. Problem is that Timmy is in virtually every scene so you’d need about five dogs exactly like this

You won’t be disappointed 😀