Stage fright ... The BBC's adaptation of Ballet Shoes
"Drama school brats," is what you'd be forgiven for thinking, had you tuned into BBC1's Boxing Day adaptation of Noel Streatfeild's Ballet Shoes. And that's a great shame because Streatfeild's depression era tale of treading the boards at a tender age is a perceptive and determined work.
I have several gripes: Winifred came across as a horrid backstabber, not the talented, earnest but dowdy kid of the book. I loathed Posy-the-Precocious, a bitching Bonnie Langford, who hardly dances at all - she dances all the time in the book and it's her obsession with dance that makes her so interesting. But my real beef is that Heidi Thomas' adaptation got the one thing wrong that for me, as child and adult, is special about the book: the family.
I read Ballet Shoes as a kid in the 1970s and even though I was all flares-and-Multi-Coloured-Swap-Shop to Ballet Shoes' twin-sets-and-high-teas, I loved it. The three adopted Fossil sisters - Pauline, Petrova, and Posy - are very different with very different talents, and the story revolves around how they grow into and shape the world in which they find themselves. These kids are sturdy little individuals working out their own relations with those around them at the same time as dreaming about their futures and what they will be in the world. The oft-quoted line that sums this up is the birthday vow of 'We three Fossils vow to try and put our names in history books because it's our very own and nobody can say it's because of our grandfathers'.
The Fossils' self-determined destinies are key to the book and it is this that is fudged in the latest adaptation. For starters, Gum (Great Uncle Matthew) doesn't choose their surname - the girls do. They choose consciously to be each other's sisters. A minor point but essential to the tale, because part-and-parcel of deciding who you are is determining what relations you have with others. One thing I always adored (even as a kid) about Streatfeild's story is the matter-of-factness with which she cocks a snook at the nuclear family. This seems entirely natural in the book: the three girls arrive at the big house in Cromwell Road courtesy of an eccentric paleontologist, Gum, who collects first fossils and then babies he happens upon during various adventures. They are brought up by his great-niece Sylvia and her old nurse Nana, aided and abetted by the various lodgers they are obliged to take in to make ends meet. There is real joy in all of this. In recent years I've been tempted to dig out my old copy just to remind myself there was a time when a plethora of adults taking an interest in children not their own was seen as a positive thing and not greeted with out-and-out distrust. Gum may have huffed and puffed when the adoption papers were being prepared but today you doubt he'd have got past the first interview with social services.
In the book all of the characters, one way or the other, go towards making a family for the children, convincingly opening up so many different horizons and options that as a kid you longed to live in such a mad-cap house yourself. Dainty Theo Dane the dance teacher has - oh wonders of technology - a gramophone that they excitedly dance to, which in turn inspires Theo to persuade Madame Fidolia to take the girls as pupils at her stage school. Doctors Jakes and Smith give them their first taste of Shakespeare and help even theatrical dunce Petrova get audition pieces right. Dr Jakes' eleventh hour saving of Petrova's Midsummer Night's Dream nightmare plays second-fiddle to some mumsy advice from Sylvia in the latest screen version. This is because at the heart of the 2007 screen adaptation is a sense of absence that is simply defied - revelled in, even - in the 1936 book: the sense of what a proper family is.
Which brings me onto the nonsense of Mr Simpson. In the book Mr Simpson is a happily married chap who rents rooms with his wife in Cromwell Road. His main purpose is as the confidante of car and engine obsessed Petrova. They have cheerful chats together over engine maintenance about the daft terms used in ballet classes such as "battlements" (their misunderstanding of battement). In the screen adaptation he is a widower who mopes around and becomes Sylvia's love interest, tying up the tale into neat, nuclear family bliss when they finally marry. The whole business was teeth-grindingly tedious and for my money missed the pointe in more than one way.
