What is it with the Beeb and Blyton? After years of snubbing her work, claiming she was a 'second rater' and 'lacked literary value', they decide to make a TV movie of her life which seemed nothing more than a stitch up 40 years after her death. OK, there is something more than unpleasant about some of her work, particularly her sexist and racist language (in the Three Golliwogs book my sisters had the Three Golliwogs were called Golly, Woggie and Nigger - and that was the 1960s!)

But she was very much a product of her racist and sexist upper middle class Edwardian, English upbringing and given that her output was prolific (over 6000 words a day for decades) it's easy to understand why some of her work varied in quality. For the most part, The Famous Five is glorious escapist stuff that children's dreams are made of and as for Noddy it's delightful pre-school entertainment. And these are just two examples from a stable that also included The Secret Seven, Malory Towers, The Wishing Chair and much, much more.

Watching Helena Bonham Carter play Enid Blyton though you would have thought she ate children, not wrote for them. Bonham Carter played the part brilliantly it has to be said but the leaden, two dimensional script made Blyton seem like an absolute monster of near Josef Fritzl proportions. Sure she probably wasn't the nicest of people, full of prejudice (as we have already seen) and hang ups about her own father who left the family home to shack up with another woman when she was a young girl.

But are we really meant to believe she completely ignored her own children leaving them to play upstairs with the Nanny, preferring at one point to pick up her dog rather than her crying baby from a cot. Then cruelly shipping the kids off to boarding school (the younger one played by the girl from Outnumbered) just so she could embark an affair with another man in her Knightsbridge love nest while her cuckolded husband was in charge of the Surrey homeguard.

In one scene she even boasts of having six different publishers just so she can get round war time paper rations to illustrate how little she cared about the war effort. In another she fails to recognise her brother who comes round to her palatial Beaconsfield home, Green Hedges, to tell her their mother has died. "She has been dead to me for years," Blyton coldly replies.

Sure she was probably an intensely driven woman who wanted to be loved by fans (what writer, performer, musician etc. doesn't) but was she really so, so evil and self-centred? Probably not. While Helena Bonham Carter seemed to relish the 'Cruella Da Ville' part, everyone else in the production, it seemed - including Denis Lawson who played her strong second husband Kenneth Darrell Waters - were reduced to little more than little lap dogs, quaking in her wake.