Thomas the Tank Engine - Crypto-fascist?

Rod Liddle is an always refreshingly provocative essayist for The Spectator. As a parent he has these observations to offer based on the reading/viewing habits of his children. Agree with him or not, he can as easily make you chuckle as set your teeth on edge. These extracts are from an article, Thomas the Tank Engine is merciless and bigoted - that's why kids love it in the January 2, 2010 edition.

I can't agree with him on everything. I always enjoyed both Awdry (the original stories not the adaptations and video versions) and Blyton as a child and so did my kids. Still he has a refreshing way of putting things and I suspect his central point is close to the mark - children love moral clarity.

In this, the Revd Awdry is a little like that other whacko and bitter purveyor of dross to the kiddies, Enid Blyton: despised by parents, loathed by academics, adored by children. From the same generation, both writers were ultra-conservative, patrician and had no truck with changing mores or indeed literary artifice. Blyton at least allowed girls to intrude into the action in the Famous Five, whether as the perpetually simpering Anne or the scary proto-diesel dyke George, but it was Julian - en-route to the Bullingdon Club and the Tory front bench - who ran the show.

Attacks upon Blyton are not new, of course - I remember them vaguely from when I actually read her stuff, back in the mid-1960s. But the usual thing to say about her writing then was that while she was an appalling stylist and clearly possessed of the most reprehensible political sensibilities, she could tell a good story and it was this that the kids enjoyed, in spite of her ideological shortcomings.

Much the same has been said recently about Thomas the Tank Engine - but if you think about it, this is very hard to argue. There aren't really any stories in Thomas the Tank Engine apart from various engines being humiliated and punished as a consequence of their misdemeanours or their hubris. And that's the conclusion you should reach, I reckon, in both cases: the kids like these stories not in spite of the narrow conservatism of the writers, but precisely because of it. Children feel most comfortable in an ordered and clearly demarcated world, a world divided into hierarchies. They have a Manichean view of good and evil and they like to see the baddies get punished, preferably in a thoroughly unpleasant manner. They may also identify with gender stereotypes which conform to the roles they have already been assigned or, more controversially, have worked out for themselves from a very early age. Children, and especially little boys, are conservative, when they are not actually fascists.

The other story line that our children loved, incidental as it might have been, was the fact that in so many of the tales, the passengers had to get out and: clear the rails, dig out the tunnel, push the train, etc. Travelling was clearly a team effort in those days. Be sure to enjoy the originals rather than the contemporary take-offs.