When will the wokerati stop slaughtering classic literary works? Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, Enid Blyton and now Agatha Christie have all fallen victim to the sensitivity police.
No author is safe from the revisionists, not even Charles Dickens, judging by the latest BBC adaptation of Great Expectations by Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight.
Reading our TV critic Christopher Stevens’ brilliant review in yesterday’s Mail, it’s abundantly clear that this dismal production lives up to our worst expectations.
It features an opium-smoking Miss Havisham, a foul-mouthed Pip, and some light beating as Mrs. Joe – now named Sara, to avoid being seen as a mere possession of her husband – becomes a dominatrix. Not exactly ‘sensitive’ but completely in line with the current distorted artistic values.
But as drug use, a deluge of four-letter words, explicit sex scenes, and sadomasochism sail through the “best possible taste” barrier, many more innocent works are bowdlerized to appease the “diversity” brigade and plastered with trigger warnings. Talk about double standards.
English writer Dame Agatha Christie at work on a typewriter in March 1946 at her home in Greenway House, Devonshire
‘Every TV program seems like an exercise in ticking the boxes these days. No new drama is complete without the obligatory gay couple.
“It shouldn’t surprise me that Enid Blyton’s Famous Five now includes a Muslim, a lesbian, a single parent, an Afghan asylum seeker and a Jamaican homosexual in a wheelchair.
It was recently reported that Thomas The Tank Engine has also been updated, with the trains now all representing different ethnic identities. However, there’s no word on whether the Fat Controller has been slimmed down so as not to offend people with weight issues.
“And I’m especially looking forward to the next episode: Thomasina The Transgendered Tank Engine.”
No, I didn’t write that yesterday. Those words appeared in this column on April 19, 2016, nearly seven years to the day.
Since then, the trains in Thomas The Tank Engine have been renamed Ashima, from India, and Yong Bao, from China. The Fat Controller is now known as Sir Topham Hat, in deference to those who consider “fat-shaming” a hate crime. Thomas The Trans Engine can’t be far behind.
You couldn’t make it up, except me.
Ten years earlier, in June 2006, I wrote a parody of Noddy and Big Ears, inspired by dear old Keith Waterhouse, late in this parish, after he suggested it was only a matter of time before these two kids’ favorites became renamed Noddy and Socially. Challenged ears.
Christie and her husband Max EL Mallowan pose in the grounds of their home
Toytown had descended into chaos and the police turned a blind eye to the crime committed by members of the traveling gnome community who camped illegally in the town square.
The following year, I imagined Richmal Crompton’s Just William as a glue-sniffing, drug-dealing, Special Brew-swigging, Stanley Knife-slashing juvenile delinquent.
I wonder if he was the inspiration for Steven Knight’s brooding, unashamed new version of Pip. It’s not just Sir Topham Hat either. Roald Dahl’s Augustus Gloop is no longer fat, presumably because he has used the fashionable new slimming drug Wegovy.
How long before Charlie’s Chocolate Factory stops making candy and switches to vegan tofu?
Words like “crazy,” “crazy,” and “retarded” have been deleted, in case they upset people with mental health issues. Perhaps the craziest of them all, the Oompa-Loompas are now gender neutral.
And speaking of people with mental health issues, Dahl’s books have been sanitized by a sinister-sounding band of censors called “Inclusion Ambassadors,” who seem determined to exclude anything they deem offensive.
In one of the more absurd edits, the word “dark” is replaced with “mysterious” – because dark has connotations of race and skin color.
How barking crazy do you have to be to come to that conclusion?
Look, I can understand that language and attitudes change and nobody would use the original title of Christie’s And Then There Were None, first published in 1939, which contained the really hurtful and unpleasant N-word these days.
But that’s no excuse for butchery and revisionism. Censoring Dahl and Blyton has nothing to do with protecting children. It’s all about the hang-ups of feeble-minded adults who are under the spell of left-wing groupthink and are eager to advertise their own awakened credentials.
If they want literature to reflect their own worldview, they should write their own books. Not imposing their petty intolerance and bigotry on works by writers far greater than they could ever be.
The same goes for those who always agitate for a black James Bond. Why?
Fleming’s Bond is a character of his time, especially in the original novels, even though the film adaptations have always evolved to reflect modern views.
There are enough strong black heroes already, from Richard Roundtree’s private black dick John Shaft in 1971 to Idris Elba’s Luther today.
Elba, who made his name as Stringer Bell on HBO’s The Wire, recently cracked down on recurring rumors that he’ll replace Daniel Craig as the next 007.
Why would he want to play Bond? He already has his own franchise, which is currently being expanded worldwide by Netflix. And no one has suggested that Daniel Craig should be the next Luther. I was introduced to Christie at a young age by my paternal grandmother who read all of her novels over and over. There have been some wonderful portrayals of Miss Marple over the years, most recently Joan Hickson, Geraldine James and Julia McKenzie on TV.
(Come to think of it, Julia McKenzie also played Nanny Whip, the dominatrix in Blott On The Landscape. Maybe that’s where Steven Knight got the idea for his Mrs Joe.)
But the definitive Marple, in my opinion, has to be the magnificent Margaret Rutherford in the first four films of the 1960s.
Now that the books have been updated, we can no doubt expect the movies to be remade to reflect modern mores.
I’m particularly looking forward to Murder Most Woke, in which Mx Marple – who now defines as non-binary and is played by Suzy Eddie Izzard – investigates a suspicious death at St Mary Mead’s Gallop Hotel, which has been converted into a hostel for migrants illegally entering the Channel have been crossed. Her loyal companion Mr Stringer is played by Lenny Henry.
After a riot breaks out in the Gallop over the quality of the ethnically inappropriate food on the menu, the body of a Sudanese asylum seeker is discovered in the library.
Initially, the suspicion falls on a notorious Albanian trafficker who poses as a refugee and forces migrants into modern slavery. But Mx Marple soon unmasks the real killer as Detective Inspector Craddock, played by Vinnie Jones, a crooked cop with ties to the far right.
Following the critical acclaim of this latest incarnation of Marple, plans have been announced for a new Poirot movie, Murder On The Sexual Orientation Express.
Hercule Poirot is now Hermione Poirot, played by Sandra Oh, from Killing Eve, and starring Suzy Eddie Izzard, back by popular demand, as the cross-dressing Captain Hastings, after Idris Elba turned down the role.
They are called in to investigate the mysterious death in the buffet car of the Brighton Belle of a transgender activist, who was on his way to the seaside town to reason peacefully with a group of violent Terfs who were trying to prevent biologically male trans women from entering the ladies’ toilets at the end of the pier.
Bring on the non-binary Oompa-Loompas!