Ted Lasso star James Lance finds fantasy in the Famous Five

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Enid Blyton published her first Famous Five novel, Five on a Treasure Island, in 1944. Generations have since thrilled to the doings of Julian, Dick, George, Anne and Timmy the Dog. The 21-book series still sells around 2 million copies a year, which might make you wonder why they aren’t the basis for a cinematic universe franchise big enough to make Spiderman shrivel back into his web.

In fact, although they have been adapted for television and film in Britain and Germany, the stories seem to resist being lifted from the page.

The Famous Five are back.Credit: Stan

Set in an English countryside unmarked by motorways, they feature children innocent of the joys of computer games who thrill to adventurous hikes, picnics with lashings of ginger beer and catching criminals, a bunch of shifty louts who are easily outsmarted by posh children on a break from boarding schools. These are books, in other words, totally weatherproofed against modernisation. Certainly, nobody would have expected that the latest adaptation – three full-length features shot for streaming – would be the work of a director who once described himself as “a pornographer”.

Danish-American Nicolas Winding Refn’s consistently confronting films include the grimy Pusher series – shot in Copenhagen and starring Mads Mikkelsen – and Drive, which starred Ryan Gosling and several bucketloads of blood. Even saying Refn’s name in the same sentence as Enid Blyton’s sounds like a Monty Python joke. “My jaw dropped,” admits James Lance, who plays eccentric scientist Uncle Quentin, remembering the day the offer arrived with Refn’s name on it.

‘Every day I would walk on set thinking ‘I can’t believe I am hanging out with the Famous Five!‘.’

“I was lucky enough to work with Nicholas years ago on Bronson – and that experience was very un-PG. The way Nicholas works is extraordinary.” For example, there was the day he decided to reshoot an emotionally fraught scene, which had already taken a day, but with both characters naked. It was a daring decision, not least because they were on a tight schedule. “So there’s that spirit of adventure and creativity, of being not afraid to say, ‘You know what, we’re going to go down this tunnel,’ ” he says. “It may seem like an incongruous connection between Nicholas and Enid Blyton, but I think when you’ve seen the show, you know it works quite harmoniously.”

There is no question of Uncle Quentin getting his kit off, even for a dip in the sea just below Kirrin Cottage, but Refn has certainly revamped the Five’s dynamics. Cross-dressing girl George doesn’t insist on being treated like a boy or wearing boys’ clothes, emerging instead as a free spirit and a natural leader. Julian is more reticent, no longer the priggish boss of the gang, and amenable Dick has been transformed into a Harry Potter-like swot. Anne still needs looking after, but only because she is younger than the others rather than because she’s a girl. They also face a very different kind of villain in Game of Thrones alumnus Jack Gleeson’s Wentworth, an effete madman who wants to rule the world.

James Lance as Uncle Quentin and Ann Akinjirin as Aunt Fanny in The Famous Five.Credit: Stan

Uncle Quentin has also changed. In Five Go to Treasure Island, he was introduced as an irascible, disagreeable genius who, appallingly, in Blyton’s Fido-friendly world, didn’t want a dog in the house. Lance plays him as an eccentric boffin, his dubious parenting choices excused by a newly invented tragic back-story.

“I read some of the original books just to see how the written character comes across,” he says. “As you say, he’s sort of emotionally shut off and quite severe. But my way in was to think: is he really like that? One of the things I love about the books is that they’re really very much from the point of view of the children, so I think those books look at Uncle Quentin from down here.” He flattens his hand at the height of a 10-year-old head. “I think that was my way in, as a parent.”

Lance came to this most English of stories after spending three years as Trent Crimm, sports journalist and scourge of the locker room, in the hit Apple TV+ series Ted Lasso. That role brought him a Primetime Emmy nomination and skipped him up several rungs of fame. Both outcomes shock and delight him.

“It’s the most wonderful thing to be stopped in the street by some saying ‘I just have to thank you: that series changed my life,’ ” he says. “Honestly, it was pure joy, every atom of that experience. And I was very lucky to step on to another set and for that to be magic as well. There’s a wonderful element to being an actor, if you’re lucky enough to be working, which is a little bit like time travel. I mean, every day I would walk on set thinking, ‘I can’t believe I am hanging out with the Famous Five!’”

Refn brings his customary visual extravagance to the new plotlines he has invented: a magic fountain that offers hallucinatory visions of the future, mystical associations between Kirrin Island and the Knights Templar and the discovery of a treasure vault worthy of Indiana Jones. What he doesn’t do – the fatal mistake – is try to modernise the Famous Five. The time is effectively fudged, in fact, until we see a steam train chuffing from Cornwall to London and realise this is sometime before World War II. Or is it?

“I’d say it was around 1939, but George wears Converse and Jack Gleeson’s haircut is certainly not of that time,” says Lance. “And it’s like that right the way across the production. I think it’s evocative of moments when you think of your childhood; the detail is dependent on how you remember it and it might not be completely accurate, but it’s accurate in terms of its resonance.”

The same goes for Blyton’s arch language: nobody begins a sentence with “I say!” or describes a cream tea as “smashing”, but they don’t use modern slang either. That’s what makes it live, still on Enid Blyton’s terms. “If it were a complete cookie-cutter lift from the book, it would become a period piece,” says Lance. “But really, it’s a fantasy.”

The Famous Five is on Stan.

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