Time moves on, and Violet Elizabeth's lack of a lisp will infuriate the purists, but this William is just so
Although he has become the epitome of an 11-year-old boy, William Brown is now almost 89: Richmal Crompton's first book about the scruffy scourge of girls was published in 1922. But, following a fortnight of school holidays and heavy snow, this story of the alpha naughty brat may have felt urgently topical in many households, making Christmas week a perfect time for the release of the latest BBC adaptation.
Unusually with a juvenile role, the show has been revived as a vehicle for a star actor. The 11-year-old Daniel Roche won award nominations and hero status among the pre-teen audience for his performance as the factually unreliable and relentlessly inquisitorial Ben in the BBC1 domestic comedy Outnumbered.
In many ways, Ben is a latterday William, although with readier access to violent images on the internet, and Roche turns out to be visually and vocally perfect. Whereas young performers often struggle to vary their expressions, Roche has a charades-grade ability to facialise confusion, fury, cunning, tactical sweetness. His askew school cap thrown off to reveal hand-scattered hair, he delivers his violent editorials against the opposite sex with a perfect grumpy gruffness that makes even funnier the scene in which he has to dance round with wings and wand in order to stop Violet Elizabeth Bott thcreaming and thcreaming until she's thick.
Or, in this version, sick. Purists will object that the female lead lacks her famous lisp. The mannerism was also absent from the last BBC television version, in 1995, with the producers claiming that they had simply forgotten to give the young actress the direction. It seemed an implausible explanation at the time and even less so now that the decision has been repeated. WikiLeaks will be on the look-out for an internal BBC memo warning that a lisping Violet Elizabeth might be offensive to children with speech difficulties.
There's reassurance, though, for fans who feared that the central outlaw himself might be sanitised: given an asbo or a metaphorical dose of Ritalin. This is recognisably the original William, even if he has chronologically moved on a little.
Crompton published her stories between 1922 and 1970, and, although William remained much the same age, Britain in the background did move on: the books released in the 1940s featured air raids and gas masks. From the evidence that William's brother, Robert, is obsessed with Marlon Brando in The Wild One, the writer Simon Nye seems to have set his TV version in the early 1950s. This is a sensible compromise between the William as first written, to whom telephones would be exotic, and an updated one, listening to his iPod.
William's most regular recent media address has been on Radio 4, a provenance acknowledged by the employment of the wireless narrator, Martin Jarvis, to provide the voiceovers for this show, which largely adopts the same tone of gentle nostalgia.
However, in line with British TV comedy's obsession with class difference, Nye points up the tension between the middle-class Browns and the nouveau riche Botts, whose fortune comes from a popular bottled sauce, and he gives William's parents a rather surprising double entendre turning on the word "screw", perhaps to remind us that he also wrote Men Behaving Badly.
The target audience for this Just William won't have seen that comedy but they will have seen The Simpsons, in which Bart is another recognisable descendant of the Brown boy. The gamble for the BBC ? which has given the four-parter an unglamorous lunchtime slot, albeit when the schools are off ? is whether William's mud-fights might seem old-fashioned alongside the sassy, multi-levelled adventures of Homer's kid. Might more grandparents than grandchildren be left in the room by the end of each episode?
The central performance, though, is a joy. Showing he is not one of those child stars who is luckily typecast once, Roche just is Just William.
Just William continues today at 12.20pm on BBC1
Lucy Mangan, G2, page 21
Work & careers Alex Reid Robert Schumann Blackpool Stephen Carr Stan Collymore
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