Just William (2010)

Just William wins best drama children's BAFTA

BBC series Just William was named best drama at this year's BAFTA Children's Awards, with Horrible Histories being presented the prize for best comedy.

Just William up for three Children's BAFTA awards

BBC drama Just William has been nominated for three prizes at this year's BAFTA Children's Awards, including a nod for its writer Simon Nye.

BBC has no plans for more 'Just William'

The BBC has reportedly decided to not commission a second series of Just William.

Giving the job of the titular outlaw to Outnumbered's Daniel Roche, who basically already is William Brown in everything but name, was a stroke of casting genius. He has the perfect naughty face for hiding in bushes, firing a bow and arrow, and he just was William when he stomped around the Botts' garden with a sullen expression and a pair of fairy wings, while Violet Elizabeth commanded him to "kith me or I'll cwy".

Simon Nye's charming mini-series set the story of the middle-class Brown family and the nouveau riche Botts in the Fifties and Martin Jarvis's voiceover was as gentle as William was roughy-toughy.

One gripe. The gender politics are unbelievably retrograde. Girls are fluffy, silly, emotionally manipulative nightmares. Boys are outdoorsy, inquisitive bullies. As Outnumbered has taught us, boys and girls can be all things. And they are equally annoying.

The importance of seizing life's windows of opportunity was not lost on the team behind the Beeb's other post-Christmas winner [aside from Toast], Just William. Not that it would have taken a casting director of genius to realise that Daniel Roche - the 11-year-old actor who played Ben in Outnumbered - was born to play William Brown, Richmal Crompton's schoolboy anti-hero.

With his natural curls and even more natural scowl, Roche brought Brown to life as no other child actor has before. But what really elevated Simon (Men Behaving Badly) Nye's adaptation were the moments inbetween young William's adventures and the painstaking attention to detail of its early 1950s period setting.

With an adult cast including Rebecca Front and Daniel Ryan as the long-suffering senior Browns, and Warren Clarke and Caroline Quentin as the nouveau riche Botts, Nye's four episodes - perhaps taking inspiration from The Simpsons - fully appreciated that there was room here for all the characters to manoeuvre. There were storylines involving William's sister Ethel, subplots based around the staff at William's school, visits from members of the extended Brown family and, of course, the sthpectacularly sthpoilt Violet Elizabeth.

The sharpness of the script was evident from episode one, in which William's brother Robert, newly obsessed with Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones, had this exchange with his mother: Robert [mumbling]: "I need to go somewhere." Mrs Brown [not looking up]: "If you're passing the shop could you buy a loaf of bread?" Robert: "No, I need to escape. I'm going to join a biker gang." Mrs Brown: "Righto. Maybe you should borrow Mr Nuttley's motorbike and see if you like it first."

Who of us brought up in the stifling atmosphere of the suburbs will not have had a similar early life exchange, in which a burning passion is reduced, with a seen-it-all-sigh, to the status of hobby?

Thus, while Toast and Just William were both unashamedly nostalgic, both also carried off the crucial trick of ringing true to a 21st-century audience. Good writing, fine acting and a past (unlike the foreign country of Upstairs, Downstairs) that we can all remember and relate to.

It's not too much to ask for is it? And especially at a time of year when, for many of us, the televison screen is the window of opportunity in the corner of all of our living-rooms.

A man watches an episode of Outnumbered, sees Daniel Roche as the ruthlessly logical, constitutionally yet unmaliciously troublesome middle child Ben and thinks: "You know, there hasn't been a decent adaptation of the Just William stories for over 30 years. Bring me that eight-year-old boy and his agent."

Just William: The Sweet Little Girl in White (BBC1) was the first adaptation by Simon Nye of four of the hundreds of stories Richmal Crompton wrote about her hero. Aimed at William's own age demographic, it was half an hour long, went out at lunchtime and delivered a quick, charming romp through an adventure that encompassed all the most important elements of the Brown universe - the Outlaws, Jumble, woodland trespass, irate gamekeepers, eventual triumph over adult adversaries and the resplendent presence of Violet Elizabeth Bott. No one, of course, who has seen Bonnie Langford's incarnation (or indeed Bonnie Langford, full stop) can ever truly expunge the memory, but Isabella Blake-Thomas's version was probably quite thrillingly terrifying enough for this mollycoddled age.

The glory of William himself is impossible wholly to capture outside the books because so much of it comes from the contrast between Crompton's high style and William's relentless atavism, but the greatest danger is that he becomes in translation simply a naughty, cocksure boy - a danger not lessened by the borderline smugness of the pathologically confident young characters in Outnumbered. Thanks to what I suspect was a concerted effort by director, cast and crew, not excepting, of course, Roche himself, this was avoided, and William did not slip into generically slappable mischief-maker but remained the belligerent idealist of legend.

Clumsiness can be very funny indeed in the right hands, but there's something about badly simulated incompetence that kills comedy like a sledgehammer to the temple. There were a couple of notable examples yesterday, first in CBBC's new version of Just William (which featured a particularly egregious example of wobbly moped riding).

Just William was a good deal more bearable, coming with the recommendation of Daniel Roche in the title role (he also played the Williamesque younger son in Outnumbered), Simon Nye writing the script and Martin Jarvis doing the voiceover narration, as if they were knowingly passing the baton from one generation of Crompton interpreters to the next. The original stories, remarkably, spanned nearly 50 years of British social history, so you can pretty much take your pick of period. Here they have opted for the Fifties, which can certainly find textual sanction in the canon, but still feels slightly wrong. The world William inhabits - of irate gamekeepers and vicars and tea-parties - is solidly anchored in the Twenties, and begins to look a little hollow and unpersuasive when updated.

That's hardly likely to worry its target audience though, which Nye clearly feels may include a few nostalgic older viewers. The script, perfectly functional when the children were talking, seemed to perk up a little when they disappeared - even finding room for an amorous little exchange between Mr and Mrs Brown. The excellent Rebecca Front plays Mrs Brown and Caroline Quentin takes the role of Mrs Bott, salient here because it was the episode in which William first encounters Violet Elizabeth Bott, a simpering confection of tulle and ringlets with the lockjaw grip of a saltwater crocodile.

For an adult the laughs didn't come from the sight of angry gamekeepers stopped in their tracks by a muddy puddle they could easily step across (more ersatz incompetence), but the sound of Mrs Bott trying to get her aitches in the right place, or the attempted recovery of Mr Brown after he's precipitously answered "yes" to her question "Do I look like a panda?" "It's our favourite of all the bears," he adds placatingly.

Incidentally, I don't know why it's assumed that children have the interpretive equivalent of myopia when it comes to facial expressions, but - with a few honourable exceptions - all the acting here is wildly over-amplified, as it all too often is in comedies for children.

Outnumbered's bloodthirsty Ben is a William for our times, so the casting of actor Daniel Roche, so brilliant as the violence-obsessed middle child in the hit BBC1 sitcom, is perfect. The sublime Martin Jarvis, who is William to so many of us, thanks to his peerless readings of Richmal Crompton's tales on Radio 4, narrates a series of four stories (daily until New Year's Eve). Here William and the Outlaws first encounter insufferable Violet Elizabeth Bott, the be-ribboned, lisping brat who manipulates everyone with her threats to "thcweam and thcweam and thcweam until I'm thick". Warren Clarke and, particularly, Caroline Quentin have a whale of a time as Violet Elizabeth's vulgar, nouveau riche parents (dad is the Bott's Digestive Sauce magnate), while Rebecca Front and Daniel Ryan are sweetly forbearing as William's mum and dad. It's aimed at kids, but adults will have fun, too, if only as they look back fondly on a world where children could play outside for hours on end and the sun always seemed to shine.

Just William Review: Just Average

An old-fashioned and uneven Christmas offering, this television adaptation of Just William fails to live up to its hype as one of the Beeb's flagship festive programmes, largely hampered by its stifling obsession with nostalgia.

William Brown truly is the boy who never grew up. Created by writer Richmal Crompton in 1922, William has remained 11 years old ever since, infuriating his teachers, embarrassing his mother, and forever trying to shake off the attentions of his spoilt brat of a neighbour, Violet Elizabeth Bott. His antics have already been adapted for television several times over.

This new treatment, written by Men Behaving Badly creator Simon Nye, opts to set the Just William stories in the Fifties - just far back enough to feel like a magical distant world to today's technology-obsessed children. William is played with gusto by Outnumbered's Daniel Roche, but it's the casting of the adults that brings the whole thing to life, especially Rebecca Front (The Thick of It) as William's permanently flustered mother, and Warren Clarke in the pantomime villain role as local condiment magnate Mr Bott (yes, his product really is called Bott Sauce). In this first episode of four to be screened over consecutive lunchtimes, the Bott family has just moved house, with Mr Bott taking a dim view of William's gang using his woods as a base. So William plots his revenge...