The Castle Of Adventure (Adventure Series)

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Bill Cunningham: An important member (holding the rank of inspector) of an unspecified secret service force (possibly based upon the British Secret Intelligence Service). His most prominent bodily feature is his half-bald head. He meets the children upon their very first adventure and makes regular appearances in the series from that point on. Mostly the children get tangled up in adventures which are connected with Bill's work at the time and end up solving them for him. Bill takes the foursome on a trip to a Scottish island to help them recover from measles. But amongst the islands, they stumble upon a sinister plot; Bill disappears, and the children are left alone to find out where he is, what is going on and how they will escape.

Originally, the series was supposed to end after this episode, but under the great demand of dedicated fans, Blyton wrote two more episodes: According to the Index Translationum, Blyton was the fifth most popular author in the world in 2007, coming after Lenin but ahead of Shakespeare. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2021-01-04 13:01:51 Boxid IA40027709 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier urn:lcp:castleofadventur0000blyt_y9s7:lcpdf:393304de-3d73-4186-b2c8-2d0d760ae34e Foldoutcount 0 Identifier castleofadventur0000blyt_y9s7 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t74v6j56m Invoice 1652 Isbn 9781447205241Recovering from a very bad flu, the four children and their family make a river trip in the Middle East. But there is another reason for this choice of destination: Bill has been asked to watch a crook named Raya Uma. The children soon find another adventure revolving around a magnificent buried city filled with treasure beyond imagination. I just have to make comment on bill smugs. I remember him in The ship of adventure. A slightly odd character who makes himself quite comfortable in the house the children are staying in even though no one is there. He seems so hugely unconcerned about the children’s welfare it made me laugh a lot.🤣

Dinah Mannering: Philip's younger sister of about twelve at the beginning of the series. Like her brother, she has a tuft of hair standing up atop her head, but she shares neither his gift in attracting, nor his love for, animals, especially the small creeping types (mice, insects, snakes etc.). Temperamental as she is, she often finds herself the target of her brother's teasing, but otherwise she is quite level-headed, tough, intelligent and grown-up for her age. The actors fitted the characters perfectly in most cases, and again, where they didn't (such as Tassie) it seemed an improvement or just as good as the original, considering the times. The film has been very gently and effectively modernised (though is more than a decade old now), yet cleverly manages to remain true to the book at the same time.The Castle of Adventure was a children's live-action serial based on the book by Enid Blyton. [2] It ran for 8 half-hour episodes from 19 April – 7 June 1990, produced by TVS Films and shown on CITV. The star-studded cast included Susan George, Gareth Hunt and Brian Blessed. The children were played by Rosie Marcel, Richard Hanson, Hugo Guthrie, Bethany Greenwood and Eileen Hawkes. Lionel Augustus and Edward Francis (who was the producer of all episodes) were the writers. Terry Marcel, Rosie's father was the director. The plot of the series closely followed that of the novel, but the setting was updated to the time of its production. The series was filmed on location and at Saltwood Castle in Saltwood, Kent. This is got to be one of my favourite Enid Blyton books. I really like most of the Adventure series, But this is my favourite one of all of them. Edward Francis told The Guardian at the time of its broadcast [3] that "Dinah takes the initiative far more. She confronts and debates things in a modern way. And there is more parity in the children's relationship with their widowed mother than in the original; she's less formal and disciplinarian". Three years later, [4] commenting on the updates which had seen an anti-tank device and the SAS included in the storyline, Anna Home (former head of children's programmes at the BBC who had been at TVS earlier in the 1980s) mentioned that Blyton "suffer(ed) from being neither truly period nor modern; it is difficult for writers and actors to know whether to retain the language and accent of the period or try to update it", and suggested that the dramatisation had not been "particularly successful".

If Is actually almost scary in parts. Maybe it’s because I’m looking at them from an adult perspective now, the mess the kids are in, the creeping sense of danger earlier in the book, the slightly claustrophobic feelings. Very good. Very well written. I love all books by Enid Blyton. I first read this book about 35 years ago. I still love it 35 years hence. The adventures the four children had in the castle on the hill have engrossed my sister and me for a long time. The boldness of the children to explore things on their own, the courage to enter a castle which looked scary and overgrown, and their adventurous spirt all fascinated me as a child and still do. I loved the character of Philip because I am an animal lover myself. My only disappointment is that my daughters do not appreciate Enid Blyton's style of writing as much as I did at their age. They tell me they can't relate to things written in her books and perhaps its true. For those were the good old days , Terrestrial repeats of the series were unknown once it was aired. However, a year later, a video was released, although some scenes were edited out, and it aired on The Children's Channel after TVS had lost its ITV franchise. Along with TVS' other programmes, it has been kept off the DVD market for complicated legal reasons, but is available on YouTube. Unlike the intriguing hook of the first book in the series, The Castle of Adventure seems to start out like a lot of Five Find-Outer and Famous Five books, where a couple of the children are waiting impatiently for the hols to begin. In this case, Dinah and Lucy-Ann provide a decidedly transparent infodump for the readers' benefit: "One more day and then the hols begin," said red-haired Lucy-Ann. "It's a good thing there's only one day between our breaking-up days... " And Dinah says, "I wonder what this place is like, that Mother has taken for the hols. I'll get out her letter and read it again." And Lucy-Ann reads the letter again and says, "Yes, it's a place called Spring Cottage... " And so on.The stories show the four children off on their own, discovering and solving mysteries without much adult assistance. Although the publication dates span a decade, Blyton reportedly wrote each of the novels in less than a week. All in all, this is a very good successor to The Island of Adventure, although perhaps not quite as good. And I found it a little coincidental that the children happened to run into Bill Smugs, who happened to be after the same men the children had spotted at the castle. But this is a minor quibble. And the ending of this book – the thunderstorm, and the destruction! – is superb, even more exciting than the ending of the previous book!