The Daily Telegraph - Features
Five go to Hell: the ultraviolent director behind the BBC’s Enid Blyton reboot
Nicolas Winding Refn has made some of the darkest films and TV of recent years – so why is the BBC entrusting him with The Famous Five? By Alexander Larman
Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series has acquired a reputation – since the first book, Five on a Treasure Island, was published in 1942 – for being the most wholesome family entertainment imaginable. Each of the novels revolved around four children – Julian, Anne, Dick and George – and their dog Timmy, all of whom got involved in mild scrapes in an unchanging English countryside, where modern technology or war were never mentioned and where the characters were held in a permanent pre-pubescence.
Although the books have previously been filmed by companies such as the Children’s Film Foundation and in an animated version by the Disney Channel, there has never before been a big-budget, high-profile BBC adaptation. Now, at last, there is. But the truly jaw-dropping, sanity-questioning decision that the BBC has made is to hire as the show’s creator and executive producer none other than the dark lord of contemporary television and cinema: the Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn.
It is exceptionally unlikely that the projected audience for the Famous Five television series will know anything of Winding Refn’s work, which is probably just as well. Even watching a few moments of his ultraviolent films such as Only God Forgives and Valhalla Rising, or his recent streaming shows Copenhagen Cowboy and Too Old to Die Young, is enough to traumatise most fully grown adults, let alone impressionable young children. Witness, for example: Tom Hardy graphically beating and bludgeoning virtually every character he comes into contact with; Ryan Gosling rooting about in his late mother’s abdomen; or Mads Mikkelsen slaughtering untold Norsemen.
Yet it has been decided by the Blyton estate and the BBC that the man who depicted Gosling stamping a thug’s head into a pulp in a lift in Drive is the ideal man to capture these halcyon days of innocence and play. As Patricia Hidalgo, director of BBC children’s programmes, said: “Bringing these books to life with a new reimagining of The Famous Five is a real treat for BBC audiences and a celebration of British heritage.”
Winding Refn is a man noted both for his uncompromising attitude towards his highly personal filmmaking and for unremitting candour about his disagreements with the people who fund his projects. Yet he appears to have softened, if his statement about his latest project is any measure. “All my life, I’ve fought vigorously to remain a child with a lust for adventure,” he said. “By reimagining The Famous Five, I am preserving that notion by bringing these iconic stories to life for a progressive new audience, instilling the undefinable allure and enchantment of childhood for current and future generations to come.”
It is difficult not to believe that the director is not speaking with his tongue firmly in his cheek. Despite the excellence of many of his earlier projects, few would describe Winding Refn’s incredibly violent, deeply misanthropic work as exhibiting many playful or childish qualities. He excels instead in depicting extreme states of mind, where brutality goes hand in hand with something near-existential. This is not something that one can imagine being the case for the adventurers of Kirrin Island.
Winding Refn does at least have form when it comes to adapting much-loved British authors. In 2007, after he made his
psychological crime thriller Fear X, his production company Jang Go Star was forced into bankruptcy by its commercial failure. The director, therefore, accepted the first paid work that he was offered, which turned out to be an adaptation of the final Miss Marple novel, Nemesis. As he candidly said in one interview: “I was broke as hell. I’d gone bankrupt and owed my bank £1 million.”
He dismissed it – and another Marple film that he asked for his name to be removed from the credits – as nothing other than hack work, done alongside “people I maybe didn’t respect”. Since then, he has only made violent, disturbing work; until now, that is.
It remains unclear as to whether the BBC has conducted even the most basic due diligence on Winding Refn, and whether this is likely to cause horrendous problems further down the line. In an interview with The Guardian in 2013, when Only God Forgives was released, he declared that his work was “like pornography” and that “I’m a pornographer. I make films about what arouses me. What I want to see. Very rarely to understand why I want to see it and I’ve learnt not to become obsessed with that part of it”.
This attitude has served him reasonably well to date, although the Hollywood breakthrough that seemed to beckon after the critical and commercial success of the excellent Drive never materialised. Instead, he has turned his attention towards long-form streaming series, which went badly in the case of the spy series Too Old to Die Young (leading him to very publicly denounced the show’s financiers Amazon) and better when it came to last year’s Copenhagen Cowboy (a hypnotically demented saga of human trafficking and superpowers, made for Netflix).
Perhaps the opportunity to take on what will presumably be an unchallenging and lucrative assignment has temporarily overruled Winding Refn’s lifelong desire to be an uncompromising enfant terrible? It seems unlikely that there will be scenes of ritualistic violence directed towards Timmy the dog, or George having his eyes removed in unsparing close-up. Yet the director promises that the show will be “progressive”. His definition of the term might be rather different from that of the BBC’s.
Still, it is not as if the Famous Five series is entirely
In Bronson, Tom Hardy graphically bludgeons almost every character he encounters
uncomplicated, either. There has been criticism for decades about the books’ basic prose style, uncomplicated plots and rudimentary characterisation – Blyton claimed that the average novel took her a week, and the only question one can ask is “As long as that?”
The books were “sensitively revised” in 2010, with Blyton’s slang unimaginatively updated, and by 2016, Anne McNeil, the publishing director of Hodder who had implemented the changes, confessed: “The feedback we have had six years on shows that the love for The Famous Five remains intact, and changing mother to mummy, pullover to jumper, was not required.” But today a different kind of sensitivity is at play, and many libraries now only have the updated versions of the books on display. Should one wish to borrow the originals, expect “an informal warning system to remind customers of the language contained within the old edition”. Given the persistent accusations that have been levelled at both the author and her work of snobbery, racism, sexism and virtually every other vice known to man, adapting her work now seems like less wholesome family entertainment and more an act of witty provocation.
Perhaps this, then, is what has attracted Winding Refn to these popular but – let us be frank – dated and tame books. The opportunity to take his “progressive” adaptation of The Famous Five and turn it into something original and surprising is not one that any true provocateur could pass up.
And perhaps Blyton herself might have approved of the potential to push the envelope. Helena Bonham Carter, who played the author in a 2009 biopic, described her as “a complete workaholic, an achievement junkie and an extremely canny businesswoman”. One can only believe that the writer would have assumed that all publicity was good publicity.
It remains to be seen whether the 90-minute films (which have already begun shooting) end up being pleasantly watchable or something altogether more interesting. But only the very complacent would look at a director this iconoclastic and think him a safe pair of hands for contemporary children’s entertainment. In Five on a Treasure Island, Julian sighs: “It wasn’t a bit of good fighting grown-ups. They could do exactly as they liked.” Much the same could be said of the new custodian of Blyton’s legacy. He will, indeed, do exactly as he likes.