FORTY-one years after her death, children’s author Enid Blyton is to be the subject of a new, 90-minute drama on BBC4.

Those hoping for heaps of adulation and lashings of jolly anecdotes about the woman who wrote 800 books and made Purbeck her second home may be sadly disappointed, however.

Because the play will be made by the same team that produced dramas about Fanny Craddock, Barbara Cartland and Mary Whitehouse. None of those ladies were spared and neither, it is thought, will Blyton.

Indeed, if producers Carnival decide to allude to everything that has been said, written and rumoured about Blyton over the decades, then 90 minutes might not be enough.

There’s her early life, blighted, it’s claimed, by her father’s decision to abandon the family when she was 13.

There’s her deception of her ailing first husband, Hugh Pollock, who agreed to a divorce and was then forbidden to see his daughters ever again.

There’s the allegations of her affair with Kenneth Darrell Waters, the man she later married, who was described by George Greenfield, Blyton’s agent, as “one of the most stupid and philistine men I have met”.

There’s the claims made by Pollock’s second wife, Ida Crowe, that Blyton may have had a lesbian affair; according to Crowe, Pollock once found his wife locked in a bathroom with another woman.

Potentially most damaging of all are the persistent allegations that Blyton, the woman who sold an estimated 400 million children’s books, didn’t actually like children.

Her eldest daughter Gillian Baverstock loyally remembered a woman who was “a fair and loving mother, and a fascinating companion”.

Her youngest daughter, Imogen Smallwood, recalled a mother who complained at the noise her children made in their nursery and whose “childlike” approach to life frequently lead to her behaving like “a spoilt teenager”.

Add to this a corrosive mix of racism allegations (the “N word” was sprinkled freely in her books about gollies) and her rigid views on class and the position of women and the drama, which airs later this year, could prove explosive.

Certainly it is a long way from the idyllic picture she painted of children hurtling through the lanes of Dorset on their bikes, with only the next adventure to worry about.