The Enid Blyton Society

Split from 'Crazy Writers'.

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I don't know whether to be pleased that it's not just Enid Blyton that gets mucked about with, or saddened that this sort of thing happens.

I saw this on BBC Breakfast this morning and my initial thought was, why can't people leave things as they are? As far as I'm concerned, there is nothing wrong with the original story. Cinderella is a timeless classic. It saddens me.

Oh yes, saw that this morning. A well-meaning exercise, I'm sure, but... I grew up with traditional fairy tales like Cinderella etc., as did most of us, and they never gave me the impression that my proper role was to sit around helplessly waiting for a prince to rescue me! In fact, in the 1980s and '90s when I was little, there were already occasional send-ups and rewrites of traditional tales, but written mainly to make kids laugh along with them, not to suggest that the more familiar versions were somehow bad or wrong. I certainly knew very well that they were "just stories" and they didn't have to dictate how I behaved or thought of myself! 25 or 30 years later, do they really think kids can't understand that any more and have to be protected from these terrible outdated fairy tales that will otherwise mess with their minds? I can think of far, far worse influences out there when it comes to ruining girls' self-esteem and giving boys the wrong idea of how to treat the opposite sex...

To be fair there are already countless versions of Cinderella. I mean the original has the Ugly Sisters cutting off their toes/heels to fit into the glass (or indeed fur) slippers.

Very true. We had an old edition (translated quite closely from the original German) of Grimm's Fairy Tales when I was little... Grimm is indeed the word. I'm not sure how far these well-meaning modern political correctifiers (is that a word? It is now) are aware that most traditional tales have already been heavily modified and sanitised over the centuries to suit changing tastes and ideas of what's suitable for children!!

Even as a child all those years ago, I wasn't quite sure whether Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother was locked in a cupboard to be freed at the end, gobbled up, or - I'm sure at least on one occasion - gobbled up but then freed at the end when a passing huntsman killed the wolf and cut open its stomach. It all depended on which version of the book I was reading!

Remember that the brothers Grimm themselves often did a bit of "cleanup" on these old folk tales. For example, they often changed cruel mothers to "stepmothers", because they thought this wouldn't be as horrific as a biological mother being cruel to their children.