I am expecting this to be shorter than my usual lengthy posts when it comes to books and TV adaptations that I have not liked. I can hear the collective sighs of relief already.

I think I had such low expectations of Peril on the Night Train and it was so consistently bad that I actually don’t really care that it was bad?

I also can’t be bothered re-watching even to fact-check so there’s that.

Spoilers ahead, and they’ll probably be more coherent than the spoilers in our live reaction post. Probably.

Five Go Adventuring Again

Despite the title and the fact that the programme barely resembled the second Famous Five book, it was obviously loosely based on it. The word loosely is doing some very heavy lifting here.

We can tell it’s supposed to be FGAA as Mr Roland is in it, but the similarities more or less end there. The first 25 minutes you could class as being loosely based on the book. Mr Roland is a holiday tutor (but he is not staying at Kirrin Cottage). George and Timmy get on the wrong side of Mr Roland, there’s a suggestion that someone could be after Quentin’s invention (rather than his formulae) and Mr Roland is caught sneaking around Kirrin Cottage in the night (though the children set a trap for him rather than Timmy going for him).

Even with those links to the book it’s not all that similar. The Sanders at Kirrin Farm are replaced by Mrs Sassoon and her boarding house. There is no scrap of parchment, no search for the via occulta.

There is an attempt throughout the episode to have a sense of George being against her cousins. In the book this is a clear and understandable rift brought about by her being set against Mr Roland while the others like him, on screen it makes less sense as it starts with her being wildly convinced that Mr Roland is a thief (rather than building from a general dislike) and then later is more to do with her liking someone and the others being suspicious, amongst other things.

And then at the thirty minute mark the book gets torn up as Mr Roland reveals he’s actually a secret agent trying to protect Quentin’s invention. I actually don’t mind that – it’s got a Blyton-feel to it as [spoiler alert?] she did the same with Mr King in The Rockingdown Mystery. When adapting a book for a TV series generally something is done differently, to make a fresh story or to allow for limitations in weather/locations/casting. What comes after that, though, is less forgivable.

The Night Train

Because of the title we were genuinely convinced that this was going to be based on Five Go Off to Camp and the spook train featured in that book. Given that they threw away most of the pages in Five on a Treasure Island when they adapted their first episode, it didn’t seem a wild idea that they’d then jump to book #7. And it sort of made sense, you could adapt Camp and include more of the train – having all Five kidnapped on it at one point.

Had they called this Peril on the Sleeper Train it would have sounded less like a spook-train and more like it actually is, the Caledonian Sleeper.

To explain how a train is involved at all (something we puzzled over in the first half hour), Mr Roland, aka Agent Keats insists that Quentin and his invention are taken somewhere safe. Fanny insists that they all go. Hence boarding a sleeper train where they would be trapped alongside any invention-stealing enemies that may also have bought tickets. So far, so good.

Red herrings will be served in the dining carriage

I will credit the writers that the mystery of who is after the invention is quite elaborate and complex. Perhaps too complicated at times for the target audience? There were many red herrings, lots of potential culprits (we even wondered if Roland/Keats was a double crosser and a baddie after all) and honestly I’m still not entirely sure who was working with who and why. Then again, Stef and I did talk through a lot of it, and I was then also typing everything we said and so my attention was not 100% focussed on the screen. Maybe children who were paying attention would have understood it just fine.

(I now realise I don’t know how all the baddies knew that Quentin et al would be on that train in the first place…)

There’s also the matter of the secret switch – where the invention and a humble typewriter are swapped over – but there had been half a dozen opportunities for this to have been done earlier in the story and when it finally happened it felt like an anti-climax.

[Spoiler alert!] Given the lack of resemblance to the book, having a female villain was a pleasant surprise, particularly as she was clearly very intelligent, calculating and cunning even if she was no match for the Five in the end.

A couple of tiny high points include Anne remarking on the wooden panelling on the train (a call-back to the 8 panels leading to the via occulta) and the mad gun/umbrella wielding scene at the end.

The characters

I just briefly want to touch on the characterisation of the Five, which was no better than it was in the first episode.

I can see they wanted to balance out who was in charge, who had the ideas etc, but given the lack of time we had to really get to know any of the children all this did was make them weaker.

Julian melted into the background as a follower, Dick didn’t do a whole lot either. Anne was annoying, smug, bossy and generally unlikeable, and George made a hash of most of the things she did.

Fanny and Quentin were OK but weren’t in it much – in fact they spend a portion of the episode in a drugged sleep, which is a different way of keeping them from interfering, I suppose!

Mr Roland was good, Ed Speelers did a creditable job as a jobsworth tutor you wouldn’t like to be lumbered with in the hols. Sadly he also succumbed to the drugged tea and therefore was missing from a big chunk of the episode which was a waste of his talents.

And there you have it. Not much over 1,000 words which is very restrained for me (though this is still somehow a shade longer than my review of The Curse of Kirrin Island). I will just end by saying the same thing I’ve said many times before – if this had been an all-new children’s adventure (present day or set in the past) it might have been quite enjoyable. But shoe-horning in an unrecognisable Famous Five and basing 1/3 of it loosely on a book before taking off in an entirely different direction just doesn’t work for me.