let's hope they ditch the bits about being horrible to girls because they're fat and spotty.
Yes, it's actually hard to see how you can make an inoffensive modern update of a series of novels in which collective bullying is rife and often approved-of if done by the popular girls like Darrell, Sally, Irene, Belinda, Alicia and co to an outlier like Gwen.
I know everyone remembers the scene in the Fifth where the class encourages Maureen, the rather silly Gwen-lite new girl, to write songs and design costumes for the pantomime to laugh them to scorn publicly to 'teach her a lesson', or the way in which the entire class gathers at the windows to mock Gwen being sad when she parts from her family at the start of term, but I think that Belinda's publicly-displayed caricatures of whoever the harmless do-gooder (Catherine? the one who had to repeat a year because of illness) is are spectacularly nasty.
And the colour-blind casting of actresses of all races is going to sit oddly with a series in which xenophobia is rife Zerelda is a dumb airhead because she's American etc. If you include the very similar St Clare's, Carlotta is exotic and tempestuous because she's half-Spanish and from a circus, and Claudine is a habitual liar and cheat because she's French and needs to be taught 'English honour'. Not to mention the horrible ways in which nouveau riche girls are depicted, like the girl with the mother who overdresses for speech day and the 'roadhog' father who shock, horror -- drops his 'h's and pokes the head of the board of governors in the chest.
Obviously, no non-white girls attend Malory Towers the idea! but given Enid Blyton's depiction of non-white people in her other series, it's easy enough to imagine.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I adored them as a kid, but I don't see how you can modernise them without removing most of their content.