From The Guardian:
Enid Blyton's work was snubbed by the BBC for decades, it has been revealed. How could they resist?
Blyton died in 1968, and for a while it looked as if her work would die with her. So redolent of the 1940s and 50s were her books that the educationalists who held sway in the 1970s and 80s, echoing the disdain of their forerunners at the BBC, hated them. Noddy had long been dismissed as “the most egocentric, joyless, snivelling and pious anti-hero in the history of British fiction”, while a stage version of Noddy in Toyland was labelled racist.
But for better or worse, Blyton helped shape me. My generation (I was born in 1957) was saturated in her books. I hold no candle for the insipid Noddy, but The Secret Seven captivated the nine-year-old me, and The Famous Five thrilled me a couple of years later. Children of that age now, assailed by computers, are far more advanced, and you could knock a couple of years off those ages. But my bet is that these books still work for children, even though adults invariably consider them vapid. The psychologist Michael Woods once suggested why children and their parents never see eye to eye over Blyton: “She was really a child at heart, a person who never developed emotionally beyond the basic infantile level. She thought as a child, and she wrote as a child; of course the craft of an extremely competent adult writer is there, but the basic feeling is pre-adolescent.”
More here. (Note: For Bhaisab and Bhaijan who read the Enid Blyton books to Ga and me when we could not read and for Abbas to whom Ga and I read them in turn. We love the Famous Five!)