Another Christmas, another BBC adaptation of a Julia Donaldson story. This time it’s an animated version of Tiddler, the story of a little fish who is always late for school and who makes up tall stories to explain why. The tall stories get around the ocean and when Tiddler gets caught by a fishing boat and tossed back in the sea, he is able to find his way home to Miss Skate and her lesson by following his own stories. Aww. As the CBeebies storyteller observed, ‘What make us powerful is not how big we are but by what’s inside.’ A perfect parable for our day then.
The BBC is trying to imply Julia Donaldson goes with Christmas like the King’s Speech and carols from King’s
This will be the twelfth Julia Donaldson BBC adaptation for Christmas, based also on Axel Scheffler’s captivating drawings – the two being the Quentin Blake/Roald Dahl combo of our times.
Now, all respect to Julia D. She has produced two very good stories – The Gruffalo and The Gruffalo’s Child, which are funny and telling – an awful lot of perfectly pleasing stuff. She has also written some slightly trite but harmless things – the children’s book equivalent of the O blood group, universally acceptable. The morals are more or less along Tiddler lines: no matter how small, you too can make a difference (The Snail and the Whale being the prime example) or just be nice and it will pay off (The Witch on the Broom). There is no harm in any of this; children force-fed Julia Donaldson, as an awful lot are, won’t go around being beastly (the way Ursula le Guin complained her children turned out after they read Roald Dahl) and they will be exposed to very basic rhythm.
But it shows a little want of imagination, does it not, on the part of the BBC, that Julia Donaldson is their go-to children’s offer every single year. I mean, we’re on our twelfth and at the rate our author churns em out, the BBC will expire long before the fund of stories.
You can see why they go for her, of course. There’s nothing there to offend against contemporary pieties; she is very much of the diversity and inclusion way of thinking and very against racial prejudice (consider her Romeo and Juliet take, The Smeds and the Smoos). The heroes and heroines are quite often animals or other creatures, so all comers can identify with them. The morals are perfectly fine, accessible for multi-cultural classrooms. But can’t the wretched BBC think a little further?
There’s an awful lot of children’s literature out there which might make for a story. A nice, sad Hans Christian Anderson would make a lovely adaptation – The Little Match Girl perhaps. For retro appeal, there are quite a few Christmassy Just William stories. For the little ‘uns, it could resurrect the fabulously retro Milly Molly Mandy series. And for reading aloud, with Kenneth Graham illustrations as a backdrop, there is no more perfect piece of English Christmas prose than that bit in The Wind in the Willows where Mole comes home for Christmas…Dulce Domum. And for genuinely scary stories, pretty well anything by Leon Garfield.
Plainly the BBC is trying to inculcate the notion that Julia Donaldson goes with Christmas like the King’s Speech and carols from King’s. But I think at a dozen adaptations, we can now conclude that it has delighted us enough
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