Eric Leaver's Monday

THE MORALITY and anti-violence bandwagon that has got rolling in this country, fuelled by widespread adult angst over what to do about out-of-control kids, has, it seems, produced an export model destined for the American market - with Noddy and Big Ears in the front seat and the Famous Five also aboard.

For the characters created by Enid Blyton are to be let loose for the first time on children in the USA - in books and on telly - in the belief that their safe, clean and innocent qualities might be employed by parents over there as an edifying influence.

In short, they are taking on the likes of the Ninja Turtles and Power Rangers and all the other supposedly-brutalising forces of TV and cinema violence that are considered to turn children into anti-social brats. It is PC Plod versus Robocop in an away fixture.

And though one wishes good luck to these ambassadors of good behaviour and virtue, one cannot but consider that it will be an uphill job for them in many respects. Not the least of my doubts is that which asks what good the Blyton bunch might do in America when, having had at least a couple of generations' crack at spreading wholesome influence among youngsters in this country, they have not prevented us from being mucked up with brats of our own - to the extent that hardly a week goes by now without the teachers at some school or other threatening to down chalk unless one or more disruptive terror is expelled.

A more efficacious Blyton influence might be achieved, I think, if, instead of going on strike, teachers were all equipped with one of the thicker volumes of the author's nice Famous Five stories and allowed to wallop each nascent lout about the earhole with it as the first sign of him or her acting up or being inattentive.

But, of course, in these enlightened times, it would not be long before the sequel was that Five Are Hauled Before The European Court of Human Rights.

However, another concern I have about the export of migration of Miss Blyton's works to the States is the obstacles which rampant American political correctness and domestic concerns about neo-colonialism might place in the way of their being allowed to set an uplifting British example.

For has Big Ears not run into trouble over here already once on account of reference to his outsized lugholes being deemed to be upsetting to kiddies with bigger-than-average aural appendages? Over there, where political correctness is a full monty industry, he will probably have to have cosmetic surgery and go by the name of Normal Ears before he can begin his do-gooding. Similarly, Noddy will probably have to become O'Noddy in order to pacify the influential Irish-American lobby. At least two of the Secret Seven will have to be Hispanics for the sake of ethnic balance and O'Noddy's car will have to be swapped for a left-hand drive V8 Chevrolet pick-up truck with cow horns on the bonnet and a rack behind the seats for several pop-guns in order to stave off opposition from patriotic US interest groups like the Daughters of the American Revolution and the National Rifle Association.

Indeed, I see that already such tinkering with the Blyton works has begun, with parts of the text being Americanised to increase their appeal to US children. The Famous Five will, we are told, no longer employ plummy English interjections such as "Golly gosh!", but will say "Gee whizz!" instead. It won't be long, then, before they are wearing back-to-front baseball caps and gangsta baggies and greeting each other with "high five" hand-slaps.

And since someone over there has paid a fortune for the US publication rights to the Blyton stories - and they cost an incredible £13million in all - no-one, I think, is going to risk their investment through their moral influence being obscured by it being too British for American kids to understand.

We can, I think, then, look forward to Episode One of the televised doings in the US-version of Toyland getting the naughtiness-does-not-pay message across in somewhat different fashion when, in the opening clip, O'Noddy's Chevvy jumps a red light and FBI Special Agent Plod leaps from the kerb aiming a Magnum and shouts: "Freeze. butthead!" before pumping lead and triggering the obligatory exploding petrol-tank fireball that, by golly, no good kids' programme is allowed to omit.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.