TV preview: Enid | Storyville: Hi Society | Wonderland

Published on Friday 20 November 2009 18:05

ENID BBC4 Monday, 9pm STORYVILLE: HI SOCIETY BBC4 Tuesday, 9pm WONDERLAND BBC2 Thursday, 9.50pm

STRAIGHT after watching Enid, I marched into my kids' bedroom, itself a very Blytonesque act. I was sure I wouldn't find any of her children's fiction – classic cover: scamps in sandals on a clifftop, spying on smugglers down in the bay – but had to check. No child of mine was going to be exposed to such cruelty. Maybe there wasn't much cruelty in the books, and none directed at anyone in short trousers. Oh no, she saved the torture for her own kids.

I say "maybe" because I never read any Blyton when I was younger. My wife did and was shocked to discover, in Lindsay Shapero's fine dramatisation of the authoress's life, that she was a pretty terrible mother, lying to her daughters about her own mother (the woman wasn't dead), lying about the girls' father (he wasn't neglecting them), lying to him post-divorce to limit his access. She was the Fun Reduction Officer at the grand Blyton residence, Green Hedges, and was always bossing Gillian and Imogen around, ordering more blanket-stitching for the war effort, using boarding school as the ultimate threat.

In one chilling scene she played at parenting for the newsreel cameras: a quick game of tiddlywinks alongside the second Mr Blyton, just for show. Even more disturbingly, Gillian and Imogen were reduced to watching from the staircase while she basked in the adulation of an invited audience of Famous Five competition-winners treated to raspberry jelly and the obligatory lashings of ginger beer. Worse of all, she ate one of her daughters' pet rabbits, even though it had been christened Bunny Meat Ration No2. What a ratbag.

Helena Bonham Carter was Blyton, and seemed to capture perfectly all her ego, drive, ambition, ruthlessness and clammy fear that preceded impending moments of introspection, always averted ("I'm not a complete monster, am I?") Matthew Macfadyen and Denis Lawson as the husbands offered different degrees of bewilderment at the kind of woman who would rub her own brothers out of her life, even forgetting their names, though by that stage she was probably suffering from the onset of dementia. But maybe Ramona Marquez from Outnumbered stole the show as Immy, locking Blyton out of the car whisking her off to boarder-hell and, you'd like to think, slamming the door shut on that dreadful era when children were seen and not heard.

Early on in Hi Society – The Wonderful World Of Nicky Haslam, part of the Storyville season, the subject announced he wasn't a snob. By the end, however, the interior designer to the rich and famous was judging the following too "common" by half: champagne flutes, Christmas parties, non-Russians with Russian girlfriends, celebrity chefs, coloured bath-towels, pronouncing the last "e" in furore, drinking cappuccinos after 11, the Caribbean, art deco, suicide, scented candles, framed photographs of anyone non-Royal, St Tropez, bottled water, not knowing the words of hymns, David Walliams, relaxing, cufflinks, fur coats on men, three-quarter length trousers on anyone, tassled loafers, jetlag, wheat intolerance and "above all" loving your parents.

It's an incredible list (and not even complete), but then this was an incredible programme about an incredible man. That's incredible as in, what were the BBC thinking of? This was a hagiography to shame the Shopping Channel; amazing to think it transmitted on the same network that stuck the boot into Blyton. And incredible, re Haslam, as in: what, there are cushions out there costing 1,000 and it's this Danny La Rue doppelganger's job to "source" them and how's that proper paid employment anyway?

If money's no object and you want a throw to die for, you call Haslam. He's one of the Ponsonbys, wigged courtiers who used to serve Queen Victoria. Now Russian oligarchs and the like get him to dress their homes because, as Hannah Rothschild's commentary reminded us, wealth doesn't guarantee style any more than power equals taste. And, she could have added, some folk are just thick.

With a name like Rothschild, you imagine that 1,000 cushions are not beyond her. She's a friend of Haslam but didn't do him any real favours here. The black arts (or are they beige?) of interior design weren't properly explained. The wife of a Russian zillionaire, showing us round her palace, squealed: "Look, the toilet – it's completely Nicky." I just didn't get it. Too common, I guess.

But I did enjoy this anecdote from Vanity Fair editor Edward Graydon Carter: "Nicky and I were at an Oscars party and I said to him: 'Do you know, three men in this room have slept with Lana Turner and Ava Gardner: Kirk Douglas, George Hamilton and Artie Shaw.' Nicky, being Nicky, said: 'And I've slept with one of them.'"

Haslam normally does five parties a night. "It's tiring being him," gushed Rothschild. It's absolutely knackering watching him; afterwards I felt like I'd been smothered by a 1000 cushion – and a 2000 throw. With so much material obsession, and so little love in Enid, Wonderland was a treat: the story of Emma and Ben, who both have Down's syndrome, and their sweet contemplation of marriage. He was a big romantic and a crazy dancer; she provided the self-questioning the rest of my viewing lacked. He told her she was "gorgeous" at least 18 times but it didn't seem like too many.

• This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday on 22 November 2009.