Reading the books aloud, as an adult, I have been startled to find just how creepy he is. He wasn’t my favourite character in the books as a child (that honour went to Moon-Face, because he had the slippery-slip slide in his house), but I liked him. I have other issues with the Faraway Tree, not least the Saucepan Man.
But that’s just the modern update – and the film-makers at Neal Street Productions haven’t yet said if they will be going with Dick and Fanny, or Rick and Frannie. Dame Slap was a good character Dame Snap, not so much. There’s no way in the world I think children should be slapped, but nor do I think they should be locked in cages, à la Hansel and Gretel, forced to sleep in a cupboard under the stairs, à la Harry Potter, and I’m not even going to get into Goodnight, Mister Tom. And she doesn’t slap any more instead, she scolds. Not only have Jo, Bessie and Fanny been renamed Joe, Beth and Frannie, and cousin Dick cousin Rick (I hadn’t remembered there was a Dick and a Fanny in the Faraway Tree as well as the Famous Five – how odd), but Dame Slap is also no longer Dame Slap! She’s now Dame Snap, which makes little sense. Anticipating hours of fun, delighting in the fact that we were moving on from picture books, I cracked the series open with my daughter this summer, to be bemused, confused, and not a little disappointed by how they failed to live up to my recollections.
And I adored the Faraway Tree series, which occupies a special place in my childhood memories, as my dad would tell us not to be naughty, or we’d be sent to the Land of Dame Slap.īut, no. I remember them all so fondly: the Famous Five, even more so the Adventure series. I was an Enid Blyton obsessive when I was young. I f you had told me even six months ago that there was going to be a film of The Faraway Tree books, I would have been delighted.
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