TV Review: Enid

By Sian Brewis

The old saying that you should never judge a book by its cover certainly seems to apply to Enid Blyton. I'd been expecting Enid (BBC 4, 9pm) to show the children's author as all jolly hockey sticks, surrounded by laughing children, fun and adventure.

Instead this was less Malory Towers, more Mommie Dearest – the film which portrayed screen legend Joan Crawford as a raving psycho with a gossamer-like grasp on reality.

Lindsay Shapero's splendid story is a confection: sweet and delicious looking, but with a centre as sour as a week's worth of old lemons.

The tone is set early on. Enid, being driven home from a BBC interview, notices her chauffeur cough. "This is the third cold you have had this month," she says, icily. "One more and I'll have you replaced."

It's a tour de force performance from Helena Bonham Carter, whose Enid is a woman tortured by daddy issues and who has a habit of rewriting everything in her life which displeases her.

"Fresh starts are always marvellous, darling," she tells daughter Imogen, just after informing her that she's ditching first husband Hugh (Matthew Macfadyen) to marry her lover and she won't see her dad again. There's lashings and lashings of choice scenes: Enid merrily typing away telling readers all about how naughty her dog had been that day, as out of the window we see Hugh burying the poor creature; banishing her daughters upstairs while she plays perfect mother with young fans ; putting her Noddy doll in front of pictures of her family.

There's even a bunny boiler gag. Hugh comes home from the war to see daughter Imogen stroking a little rabbit. "We had another one, but Mummy and Uncle Kenneth ate it for dinner," she says, sadly.

The smart script captures the children's heartbreak of having a mother who claims to understand children but ignores her own; of a wife obsessed with having the perfect life.

Hugh's soon sneaking glasses of gin in the back garden and having spectacular rows: "The only reason your fans adore you is because they don't actually know you!" he shouts before striding out.

The only jarring note in her prim and proper tweed armour are startlingly bright tights. My old school head teacher used to stride about in bright green tights with shiny patent stilettos.

She was devastatingly efficient and had a look specially reserved for pupils she did not approve of, which could curdle milk at five paces.

Bonham Carter's Enid is much the same. Frostier than a weekend in the Arctic, she's nothing like your childhood image of the author of the Magic Faraway Tree.