We (in the US) actually have a Noddy & Big Ears children’s book. I had no idea it wasn’t American, although I’d never heard of them otherwise. It’s certainly not my favorite among children’s books.
While we’re all enjoying a nostalgic glow, apart from loving the Famous Five and the Secret Seven, I used to actually cry with laughter reading the Jennings and Derbyshire books by Buckridge ?
Jennings! Holy crap, I had forgotten they existed.
Yes, I can honestly say that tears would run down my face I laughed so hard at those books. I was about 10 or so, IIRC.
In the UK, they filmed their own “Doc and Sprocket” sequences for Fraggle Rock where it was set in a lighthouse with the Captain. Conceptually, very similar to Portland Bill.
Hmmm…for that I remember enjoying Clifford B. Hicks’ Alvin Fernald series of books in elementary school. Kid inventor and his sister & friends outwitting various adults and their plots. Disney made a couple movies based on the stories.
Awww…looking him up in Wikipedia, I see he (Hicks) passed less than a year ago. 
But it goes the other way too–I grew up reading about Blue Peter, Norfolk jackets, The Water Babies, meat pies, and all sorts of mysterious British things that I had no idea what they were.
Oh totally! But this ought to be another thread. We have already hi-jacked this one from Noddy to Blyton in general.
Hey, I said “Put them in context.” If you want to discuss other Blytons, or other books/series/characters in general, have at it.
How can you not get what a meat pie is? It’s a pie; it has meat in it. The clue’s in the name!
Man, how the US exists without the deliciousness of steak-and-ale or chicken-and-mushroom pies, I’ll never know! Gorgeous!
Oh God, yes. Just looked them up, and there a couple written in the 1990s!! I read them in the 70s, wonder how they stand up today?
I know, but…meat? in a pie? How can that be? Oh, and pasties. What the heck are those? And Yorkshire pudding? Not to mention the weirdest thing of all, mint jelly. Oh, and suet, what the heck is that? Treacle?
Britain is full of weird food if you’re a California kid.
That’s OK. You eat weird shit to us. Not to mention the way you torture drinks by mixing them together like a kid with crayons and then giving them a cutesy name. Yuck! 
For the record, a steak and ale pie is delicious.
Where I grew up, meat was all that ever came in any pie, except for apple pies. And we called those meat pies “mince pies” because they were mince meat. Whereas in the UK mince pies are fruit, made specifically for Christmas.
So that, mixed with the US never even knowing meat pies hardly at all, completely bamboozled me.
Great. Now I’m hungry.
The other significant characters in Noddy are the Goblins. They’re the ones who cause all the trouble; they get away with a mild scolding most of the time even though some of the stuff they do really is extremely horrible. Even in the recent TV series, they’re actually a little bit scary.
Blyton’s stories were hugely popular and still are. Walk into any major bookshop in London and you’ll see racks of Blyton books. The Five-Find-Outers stories (aimed at kids from about 6 years old) are harder to find. My daughter, at 13, actually wants the Mallory Towers books to re-read for Christmas (hers got eaten by the dog). Sadly there are no Kindle editions, though there are Kindle editions of some new Mallory Towers stories written by someone else - they look OK.
There have been tons of other ‘updates’ of the Famous Five, too - like this Disney one.
The Faraway Tree series has been bowdlerised a lot, including changing the names of the characters Dick and Fanny. Some of the other series have been changed to a lesser extent, though you can find the originals easily enough too.
In real life in the UK you’ll often hear references to ‘lashings of Gingerbeer’ and ‘Five Go Mad in…’ and it’d be rare to find someone who didn’t know who the Famous Five or Noddy and Big-Ears were. Ruth Rendell probably never referenced who she was talking about because she’d have assumed her readers knew, and anyway it sounds clear from context that she was a children’s writer.
TheWiki article on Blyton is really well-done. Here’s some stats from it:
Blyton’s books have sold more than 600 million copies
In the decade from 2000 she was still in the Top Ten authors, selling 7,910,758 copies worth £31.2m in the UK alone.
More than a million Famous Five books are sold worldwide each year.
Her books have been translated into more than 90 different languages.
The Magic Faraway Tree was voted no. 66 in the BBC’s Big Read.
In the 2008 Costa Book Awards, Enid Blyton was voted the best-loved author, ahead of Roald Dahl, JK Rowling and Shakespeare.
753 titles credited to her over a 45 year career with an average of 16 titles published per year.
I’m pretty sure I’ve read every single one of those 753 books - she was kinda a hero of mine as a child. And I totally identified with George.
Good post.
The isms in Blyton’s stories are mostly not that bad (with the exception of the River of Adventure, set on the Nile with lots of horrid black people with alarmingly toothy smiles - I reread that a few years ago and was hard going) and it’s better to admit that those isms used to be so acceptable than to whitewash the past.
To confuse you even more, I recently learned that once upon a time, mincemeat pie was pretty much The American Pie. It had meat and dried fruit and, I expect, plenty of liquor. These days no one makes them, and ‘mince’ means fruit stuff you get in a jar that no one actually buys, but my grandfather used to like them.
American here, and I remember reading as many Adventure books as I could get from the library in the fourth grade. At least, I think they’re the same books. I remember Island of Adventure, though my strongest memory is from Castle of Adventure. The parrot kept repeating, “Musty, dusty, fusty.”
Aaah, I see.
oooh, I remembered a cute tangential Famous Five reference - the Housemartins’ Five Get Over Excited (a reference to such twee titles as “Five Have A Wonderful Time”)
OMG that’s horrible! Is there anything Disney can’t ruin?
And George had a kid, huh? Who woulda thunk it?
I’ve read a biography of Enid Blyton and seen a couple of telly programmes. By all accounts she was tomboyish all her life and put a lot of herself in George. Nonetheless she was married twice with two children from the first.
Blyton was deeply scarred by the breakdown of her parent’s marriage. After her father left the family home nothing was actually explained to young Enid and she was forbidden to mention her father’s absence to anyone (which meant no inviting friends home among other things). For the rest of her life she had great difficulty facing up to any kind of unpleasantness – the upside of which appears to be her great talent for writing escapism.
Mind you accounts of Blyton’s personality are contentious as two of the major sources, her daughters, have radically different views of their mother – the younger, Imogen claiming that she was about six before she finally realised that the woman in charge of handing out servant’s wages and children’s pocket money was her actual mother!
One of her books I would like to reread is the Land of Far Beyond, her take on Pilgrim’s Progress. This almost forgotten book from the 1940s features the journey of contemporary adults and children, who must carry the burdens of their sins on their backs, as they travel through an allegorical landscape full of temptations that cause many of them to fall by the wayside. It made a huge impression on me as a child and I wonder how it would appear to me now.