Jennings and Darbishire

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Another series of six episodes – simply named Jennings with David Schulten in the title role – aired on the BBC in 1966. Lieutenant General Sir Melville Merridew DSO MC Bart – retired general, the school's most distinguished alumnus, and frequent bestower of half-holidays.

An earnest, cautious and bespectacled young man, he is more fearful of getting into scrapes than his friend, but is generally drawn into Jennings’ schemes with the result that he receives his fair share of trouble. A significant amount of the humour in the book comes from Jennings’ tendency to take things literally, and this continues throughout the series. My copy was, once again, a 1980s updated version, with decimalised currency replacing the original, but strangely leaving a little casual racism. Aunt Angela gives Jennings a bicycle, which leads to a chain of events involving a runaway boat, PC Honeyball, and the Spanish Armada. Like Molesworth, Jennings and his friends attend a prep school, but Linbury Court, in Sussex, is more recognisable as a real school than St Custard’s.Teething troubles fail to deter the tenacious Jennings, and his next scoop involves digging into Mr Wilkins past – what will he uncover this time? Martin Winthrop Barlow) Pemberton-Oakes ( The Archbeako) – the headmaster, a classical scholar with a capacity to command immediate discipline and frequently long-winded in his speeches, although he generally remains reserved and softly spoken, and never hesitates to deliver praise when it is due. Their first mission, to recover a "stolen" sports cup, is the first of several bungled attempts to imitate super sleuth Sherlock Holmes.

The had unearthed the sensational story of how Atkinson had found a caterpillar in his cabbage; but as it had happened the term before last, they felt that this could hardly be headlined as late news. The Jennings books obeyed this rule even after the revolution in children’s literature that began in the 60s and is still continuing today.Jennings starts the term by getting himself wet and muddy yet again - in a ditch this time - but is lucky enough to be able to get his clothes dry-cleaned without either the masters or Matron finding out. Somehow this leads to trying to extract a parcel of fish from the chimney of Mr Wilkins’ study using a fishing line from the rooftop, the staging of a handwriting competition – for winning which Venables is given rather less than the promised double layer sponge cake – and the discovery of an astonishing fact about Mr Wilkins.