Upper Fourth at Malory Towers by Enid Blyton

We also know that people from African and Caribbean descent have been here for a very long time.” Lawrence points out that Blyton’s originals are dodgy when it comes to representation: “I’ve met people who were at boarding school whose parents sent them from overseas in the 40s and 50s. Narinder Dhami’s story centres on an Indian pupil called Sunita, while Patrice Lawrence portrays Marietta, a mixed-race girl. New Class At Malory Towers, the collection of new stories, also updates Blyton’s all-white cast. And while it’s early days for the BBC adaptation, commissioning editor Amy Buscombe says “casting will be as representative as you’d expect for a modern CBBC production.”

“These stories are to be enjoyed by everyone and, for that to make sense, the young people in the audience need to be able to see themselves onstage,” she says. Rice’s production features BAME and non-binary trans actors in the lead roles.

In contrast, the new wave of Malory Towers adaptations is resoundingly diverse. It would be preposterous, however, to suggest that such feminism caters for an audience beyond posh white girls. “It’s such an empowering picture of girlhood for young people today. “I love how uninterested in traditional ideas of femininity the characters are,” she says. Rice points out that the all-female character list means it aces the Bechdel test, which measures the representation of women in works of art.

Indeed, the stage production is billed as “the original ‘Girl Power’ story”. But with Malory Towers’s emphasis on women’s potential, it arguably chimes with current conversations around gender. Lucy Mangan, journalist and author of one of the new stories, can also spot a political resonance: “The books are set in a stable, unchanging, enclosed, safe little world – which we all hanker for at some time or another, and I suspect more than ever now that everything seems to be going to hell in a handcart.”īlyton is hardly a common source of feminist inspiration. “We want to look into faces not of rage and bitterness but of hope and truth, like Greta Thunberg and all the brave young climate change activists,” she says. For Rice, this means Malory Towers is imbued with hope and goodwill – attitudes useful in the current political climate. The series was written between 19, when Clement Attlee’s Labour government was nursing the country back to health after the war. The second book in Enid Blyton’s Malory towers series, written in 1947.

Upper Fourth at Malory Towers by Enid Blyton