Jolly good show! Stock up on the ham sandwiches and lashings of ginger beer – BBC4 has given the green light to a biopic of children's author Enid Blyton.
The corporation has confirmed that a single 90-minute drama charting the life of Blyton, creator of Noddy, the Famous Five, the Secret Seven and fantasies such as The Magic Faraway Tree will go into production shortly.
Carnival Film and Television will produce the drama, which is expected to air later this year or early next year. Producers are remaining tight-lipped on the casting.
BBC4 has enjoyed great success with one-off dramas on prominent British figures and the channel dominates the single drama category in this year's Royal Television Society awards, with two out of three nominations, for Margaret Thatcher – The Long Walk To Finchley and The Curse of Steptoe, about the stars of the sitcom, Wilfred Brambell and Harry H Corbett.
Carnival is run by former BBC drama executive Gareth Neame, who produced the drama series Harley Street and Whistleblowers for ITV, and its Blyton drama will follow those about Barbara Cartland, Mary Whitehouse and Fanny Cradock.
As with other recent BBC4 biopics such as those on the actor Kenneth Williams and the comedian Frankie Howerd, the Blyton drama is expected to focus on the bestselling author's troubled private life – which failed to resemble the jolly plots of her books.
This included her divorce from her first husband and how she suffered from the rows and the break-up of her parents.
"I think her approach to life was quite childlike and she could also sometimes be almost spiteful like a teenager," her daughter, Imogen Smallwood, said in a radio interview last year when discussing how the author was affected by her father abandoning his young family.
"[Blyton's biographer] Barbara Stoney suggested the trauma she suffered around about her 13th birthday was so huge that a lot of her emotional development just froze there and I think this is a very good way of looking at her," Smallwood said.
In Blyton's books, many of the characters were fatherless and in her 1989 biography of Blyton, Smallwood described her mother as an "emotionally crippled" woman.
The professional career of Blyton, once described as a "one-woman fiction machine", was hugely successful.
Born in 1897, Blyton's literary output was an estimated 800 books over roughly 40 years including books for very young children, such as Noddy.
But she is best known for her young readers' novels, where children embark on their own adventures with minimal adult help – such as the 21 Famous Five novels.
It was said that she wrote up to 10,000 words a day until she was afflicted with Alzheimer's Disease a few years before her death, aged 71, in 1968.
An estimated 400m copies of her books have been sold worldwide and she is the sixth most translated author in history.
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