Malory Towers series 2

[Aroundtheworldin80moves]

Didn't realise there was a new Series!
Currently watching with DDs.

Canadian collaboration.

I'm not sure I like discussing their weight tbh.

Having re-read MT and St Clare's over lockdown, it's probably not a bad thing it's been sanitised. Even the "good" characters and teachers in MT are really horrid by our standards ! St Clare's are much less snobby and fatist and generally bigoted!

@Aroundtheworldin80moves

Is a male teacher in a girls boarding school a feasible scenario? I thought they tended to be women.

We had male teachers at a girls' boarding school in the 60s. This is around 1948, isn't it?

@Kanaloa

It’s not the diversity I mind at all! I’m not that type of person. It’s more that if you were going to change the storylines and characters completely, it would have been better to make a new programme about new characters. It just seemed a bit odd to make a Malory towers adaptation and decide to change the characters and plots completely.

So things like Alicia being American - if I remember correctly she was quite disparaging of Zerelda the American character! Also I felt like Alicia was quite a lot nicer, while in the books she was very sharp which is how when her downfall comes about she learns to reign herself in.

I don't think they have changed everything completely. Most of the main characters are more or less as written by Blyton - Darrell is a good sort but has a temper, Mary Lou is very timid, Sally is dependable, Gwen is a raging snob and lazy with it, etc etc. And at least some of the storylines are the same, e.g. the one about persuading Mary Lou to be braver by getting her to rescue Darrell, and the saga around Gwen stamping on her pen.

However, I must admit I could well have done without all the ghost shenanigans in series 1, and though I'm at the beginning of series 2 I'm not enthralled by all the stuff about "Will Malory Towers close down?" Even without a spoiler I've worked out that the answer to that is: No.

I just realised I totally misgendered Bill sorry Bill. Merrylegs was always my fantasy pony name. I never got a horse. Wasn't it Thunder that Bill rode and Merrylegs was Clarissa's? God I'm over invested in these blooming books and imaginary horses - I loved them!

I think the arty pal of Irene was Belinda?

I might reread Second Form tonight.

Alicia is Canadian in the series. Although as she seems to spend all of the hols stuck at school with Matron and barely sees her family I am suprised she has retained her accent.
Yes no Belinda. She arrived in the second form in the books. They have given her art skills to Mary Lou instead. Bill and Clarissa should turn up next series.
There was a male teacher in the books. He taught music and he was the one who got done with the chalk.
It's a lovely series but a bit parallel world really. A male teacher in 1948 ish.... yes maybe. But lets face it. He wouldn't have been black !!

SPOILER ALERT

They've taken quite a few storylines and just tweaked them - like Ellen looking at the exam paper (quiz questions) or Gwen stealing instead of Daphne & Mary Lou doing the caricatures etc.
I'm still enjoying it - but I have read the books about 50 times.

I would have quite liked it if one of the boys from the nearby boys school had been Alicia's brother. Always spoken of (in the books) but never seen.

Loved the boys school uniform.

so pleased this has been made!!

Yes the boys uniform was a 1000 times better than those hideous unflattering orange frocks.
I hope next series is set in the winter term so they can wear their brown pinafore dresses (still ugly but anything had to be better than those dresses).

They seem to wear the cotton dresses all year round. I noticed daffs in one episode I watched recently, which presumably means it was around March.

I hope they make a book of this series. DDs loved the book based on last series. (Not the proper EB books).

F

I'm glad I spotted this thread. This will be my next binge watch. It is over 40 years since I read the books and don't really remember anything, but I really enjoyed the first series.

My daughter is thrilled! Not sure how I had missed this

Off to watch it now!

The economies with the cast in series 2 are beginning to grate on me. Important quiz against another school, but the team and the entire audience are all drawn from one dormitory? School play deemed central to the survival of the school, and all but one of the cast and crew are again from the same Year 2 dormitory? I'm sure they managed to be at least a bit more realistic in series 1.

@Platax Even in the books, North Tower was dominant. Betty was the only character of substance from another tower. There was once a mention of a girl in South Tower who was cast in the panto but was there even an East Tower? Maybe that's where the cool girls were, smoking and sneaking out to see boys after hours, and laughing at the goody two-shoes in the other towers who thought midnight feasts were the height of excitement!

Theres about ten girls in every dormitory. Which means there must be two forms per year...

All school stories focus on a handful of pupils...

Sure all stories focus on a handful of characters, but not to the extent that only those pupils ever seem to turn up to school events, or. take part in school plays, quizzes and games. Blyton herself certainly acknowledged other year groups, and indeed series 1 was better on the front.

Look at that quiz - supposedly a big event, grudge match of the year, and only three girls from the second year came to watch???

It's also fairly weird that, apart from French and games, the form teacher seems to take them for every subject. Even in the 30s when my mother was at school there were specialist subject teachers in secondary girls' schools.

I'm just glad they've not transposed it into a inner city suburb in the 21st century. It was always interesting to me as a 1970s baby reading it in the 1980s to get that post war perspective on how (posh) people behaved and thought, for better or worse. Made me understand my grandparents generation to some degree. None of whom were at boarding school I should add but my grans war diaries have similar idioms and turns of phrases and ways of looking at the world.

What kind of level is it aimed at? Does it work for the nostalgia? Or is it childish?

I enjoyed it (it is aimed at kids but I still liked it) but agree the cast is just too small. Matron acting as games teacher, and no other teachers apart from Mr Parker and the French teacher.
Also you would play lacrosse in the autumn / winter so not sure why they're wearing summer dresses!

I thought the small cast was because they'd have been filming during covid.
I'm half way through the second series and enjoying it more than the first series. The ghost stuff didn't appeal to me in the first one, but I'm sure it would have done when I was a kid. I loved the books in the late 70s/early 80s and dd1 cried when I finished reading MT to her as she'd enjoyed it so much.
I miss the brown and orange uniforms.