Enid Blyton's Malory Towers looks at school days in an all girl boarding school in the Cornish coast after the second world war.
Darrell Rivers is the new girl who quickly makes friends and is eager to do well. She even gets invited to a midnight feast, a concept that only seems to exist in the world of Enid Blyton books.
The fly in the ointment is the other new girl, snobbish and proud Gwendoline Lacey who brushes her hair at least a hundred times. She has made herself unpopular when she tells tales, going to Matron when a mouse is found in the room.
The first episode is very much about these two contrasting characters. Gwendoline is upset that Darrell has written in a letter that she has made new friend and it is not her. She goes to taunt Darrell and gets pushed into the sea.
It is clear that Darrell can be quick tempered but she also will not stand for any nonsense from Gwendoline, she goes to the headmistress and owns up to what she has done.
A nice family drama made for school children, very much an updated old fashioned serial that the BBC used to broadcast in the 1970s and 80s.
Enid Blyton fell out of fashion in recent years and for good reasons. I used to read her books a lot as a kid and quickly realised that the villains tended to be those strange foreign types like gypsies.
The Comic Strip parodies of The Famous Five were really on target.
