ENID Blyton playing tennis in the nude - golly, what a whizz way for a grown-up to spend the hols! Perhaps Aunt Fanny and Uncle Quentin played in the mixed doubles but Secret Lives: Enid Blyton didn't say. Still, it did try jolly hard to solve The Mystery of Ms Prim `n' Proper. Enid, it appears, was a hard case, a ruthless scrooge and cheat who wrote poison pen letters between penning children's books and playing strip tennis.
Bad enough that in the 1960s, Noddy, the Blyton character encountered first by most of her readers, was branded a racist. Noddy, whose pointed hat gave away his KKK inclinations, had an attitude towards golliwogs. But that it would seem, was small beer compared with the attitude of Ms Blyton towards all creatures great and small. Husbands, employees, children and animals suffered as she created her posh little monsters, who, invariably, outwitted common-as-muck smugglers before celebrating with a tuck `n' ginger-beer bash.
So, Enid was a snob. Well, like the economically poor, the emotionally poor will always be around. But Secret Lives cast Blyton as a darker creature altogether. Her class bigotry has been well recognised, but her treatment of her first husband - Hugh Pollock - the publisher who made her, displayed a venom that would chill Alexis Colby.
Having decided to ditch Pollock, Blyton made sure that he would never see their children again. Later, she wrote vicious letters to Pollock's new wife, Ida Crowe. Pollock, it seems, was fond of the drink - hard to blame him - so Blyton let fly. She had been having affairs behind his back and sought, it appears, to justify her behaviour to herself. Naughty Enid was a very wicked girl.
Pollock suspected that Naughty Enid, whose favourite plot device was, of course, the discovery of a secret passage, was bisexual: He knew she was carrying on with a philistine surgeon ("nothing of cultural value interested him," said literary agent George Greenfield) and he suspected that she was involved in a lesbian affair with Dorothy Richards, a maternity nurse. Enid and Dot used to lock themselves in the bathroom for protracted periods. Pollock would fume and get tanked up.
Mind you, Enid's two daughters had contrasting views of Mummy. The elder, Gillian Baverstock, said: "For me, she was a very good mother". The younger, Imogen Smallwood, "always, felt in the way". Blyton's gardener, Dick Hughes, supported Imogen. He claimed that Naughty Enid disliked children and animals, adding that she was also as tight as a duck's behind.
He was ill once and confined to bed.
Blyton sent him a bunch of bananas. When he received his wages, he found that the cost of the bananas had been deducted. Still, Dick has had his revenge: it was he who revealed the nude tennis at Elfin Cottage and Green Hedges, two of Naughty Enid's fairytale, happy-families homes. Then there was the cheating at bridge.
The Grand Hotel in Swanage was Blyton's favourite holiday spot. According to proprietor Rufus Stimpson, Enid and her second hubby - the philistine surgeon Kenneth Darryl Waters - used a signalling system. When Rufus and his Mummy cracked the system and were able to beat Naughty Enid and Uncouth Ken, the author refused to play any more. And so it went - one damning anecdote after another.
In recent weeks, Secret Lives has become the Albert Goldman of British television. Lord Beaverbrook (lecher, bully and political ignoramus) and Douglas "Tin Legs" Bader (show-off, bully, lousy pilot) have been given the treatment. But Enid Blyton, who fictionalised her own life as much as the lives of any of her characters, was really steamrollered. A ruthless, spiteful, bisexual cheat, who couldn't stand children or animals - how jolly beastly!
Still, mysteries remain. For all of Naughty Enid's naughtiness, huge numbers of children still love her books. Characteristically, her stories involve self-sufficient children and ineffectual adults and there's always a happy ending. It was suggested that Blyton's unhappy childhood - her father Thomas left her mother Theresa when Enid was 13 drove her towards a fictional world.
Perhaps it did. Theresa, it seems, always hated Enid. Thomas left to live with his mistress and was written out of family history. Enid did the same with Hugh Pollock. "You know, successful people often never forgive the ones that gave them the start," said George Greenfield. In a documentary of accusation, it was a more thoughtful contribution. Even if it doesn't quite solve the mystery, it's a wizard clue. But don't you just love the nude tennis?
IT'S hard to see how Liverpool dockers will ever forgive the Tories, New Labour or the new unions. Since September, 1995, 329 dockers have been out of work sacked for refusing to pass a picket line. Ken Loach, who made such films as Poor Cow, Kes and Family Life, directing his first full- length documentary for the BBC, told the story of the dockers in Modern Times: The Flickering Flame.
And flickering it is. Back in 1969 Loach made The Big Flame, a drama set in Merseyside's docklands. Now the flame of labour's resistance to the ruthless demands of capital has almost gone out. Ominously, the media have almost totally ignored the dockers' story. It has been treated as a dinosaur of a dispute an anachronism from the 1970s - but its resolution will provide a key clue to the future of industrial relations, not just in Britain, but in many parts of the developed world.
The crux is a familiar one the employer, Mersey Docks and Harbour Company, wants to hire and fire as the work dictates; the dockers want job security for themselves and their families. It's about casualisation - known in Liverpool as "the evil". It's also about the castration of the unions, in particular the Thatcherite law which makes it legal for employers to sack workers who refuse to pass a picket.
The managing director of MDHC, Trevor Furlong, hauls in a £316,000-a-year salary. The dockers, when they are allowed work, make £4 an hour and get no holiday pay or sick pay for the first three months. They have tried, with some success, to internationalise the dispute. Dockers in 22 countries have supported their calls to hit back at Mersey Docks and Harbour Company.
After pressure from American longshoremen, the Atlantic Container Line has pulled out of Liverpool, resulting in £23 million being wiped off MDHC's stock market value. But at Blackpool, where the TUC was holding its annual conference, the dockers were treated as an embarrassment by New Labour's new suits. Falling between the projects of the New Right and the new New Left, they have been all but abandoned.
This was a moving documentary, not mawkishly sentimentalising of working- class people, many of whom have given 30 and more years to the Liverpool docks. It accepted that containerisation and roll-on/roll-off ferries had drastically reduced the need for docks manpower. It did not accept however, that the abolition, in 1989, of the National Dock Labour Scheme was moral.
So, Loach subtitled his documentary "a story of contemporary morality". Rightly so, for this was a programme which could have been polemical but didn't need to be so stark is the injustice. When North American unions are less cowed than British ones, something seismic has happened. The wife of one of the dockers said that, with no money and little food, she will go to bed for Christmas Day.
She, with other dockers' wives, had appealed to the wives of the directors of Mersey Docks and Harbour Company. But, she said, they would do nothing. They sat in their big homes like gangsters' molls." It was a bitter remark and questionable in its fairness, but it was memorable. In one sense it had the ring of inverted Blytonesque class bigotry. But it reminded us of the truth that in Britain (and Ireland) the wealthy have done best out of recent economic booms. For the dockers, the old Liverpool anthem about never walking alone rings very hollow now.
BACK on RTE, Peace Force: The Irish Army in Lebanon was an unusual mixture of PR and horror. The PR was ubiquitous but it's the horror that lingers. Film of the aftermath of Israel's bombing of Qana, in April of this year, was truly shocking. Surrounded by what was, in essence, a promo video, it was all the more gruesome. In one scene, a baby was found with three-quarters of its head blown away.
Listening to Army men's accounts of their experiences in Lebanon, it was clear that they found much, of the Israelis behaviour very questionable. Nobody quite declared that, the intent of Israel's aggression is to intimidate the UN. But the question was posed and viewers could draw their own conclusions. An array of disgusting weapons was put on view and certainly, the impression was given that while Lebanon might be a sunny posting, it's no cosy hole for a soldier.
Anyway, showing soldiers playing football, singing The Fields of Athenry and going on patrol, Peace Force was standard public relations. Never having fought a war, the Irish Army tends to focus its PR heavily on its UN peacekeeping role. That's fair enough and there is some national pride in the Army's overseas service. Still, a strong documentary on the wider role of the Irish Army remains to be made. Some hope of any independent film-maker getting access to that. Even Enid couldn't solve all mysteries.
FINALLY, Bad Ideas of the 20th Century. Mediaism. Oxford his tory professor and TV pundit Norman Stone decided to give the media a bit of a thrashing but, the media won. Poor Prof Stone didn't seem to recognise the irony of appearing on television to attack television. It's not that the inherent irony should have disbarred him ... but an acknowledgment of it, and of the fact that he was using a great deal of directorial tricks, would have given him much greater credibility.
As it was, Norman gave us less convincing versions of Neil Postman's arguments about the Orwellian/Huxleyean character of TV. "This Big Brother doesn't want to watch you - he wants you to watch him, said Norman. He went on to add that the media seeks to make all life a soap opera and showed us how Silvio Berlusconi used television, football and busty babes to become PM in Italy. "Silvio Berlusconi is the shape of kings to come," he said.
All of this is true, of course. But it's hardly profound and it's not the whole story. History (or physics, or microbiology, or classics) professors, who want to wander into the media and make pronouncements are welcome to do so. But it would help if they had something to say which hasn't been said thousands of times before. Same old story, I suppose - eminence in one area is encouraged to overspill to territory beyond its writ. This was a documentary of accusation which didn't have anything as fascinating as nude tennis. Boring, Norman. Boring.