Eleanor & Alasdair Read That – Details, episodes & analysis

Eleanor and Alasdair read The Hobbit. J. R. R. Tolkien's 1937 novel is a millennial horror story about a guy who has to attend an unexpected party. It's also a children's fantasy classic, and the inspiration for three obscure art-house films. But is it good? Would Eleanor read it to her hypothetical child? Will Alasdair enjoy reading it for the first time? And is it really possible to tell the dwarves apart?

Putting the ginger in ginger beer, Eleanor and Alasdair read Five Go To Demon's Rocks by Enid Blyton. The Internet Famous Two join some posh children and a dog on an incredibly dangerous and wholly unsupervised adventure. Does Enid Blyton deserve her controversial reputation? Will the kids survive a week in an abandoned lighthouse? And are all working class people also smugglers?

Ha harr! Eleanor and Alasdair read Treasure Island by the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson, who is Scottish. Treasure Island is a tale of deadly danger and dubious male role models — basically like social media today. It's a very famous story, but is it actually good? Will Jim Hawkins's adventure buckle your swashes? And is fifteen men on a dead man's chest just good maritime fun? Or a health and safety nightmare?

Eleanor and Alasdair read The Tale of Peter Rabbit, the story of a semi-nude rabbit tormenting the Scotsman who killed his father. Beatrix Potter's first book was a world-wide smash hit, but is it actually good? And would it be improved by the addition of James Corden? Alasdair watched the movie, so you don't have to.

Content Warning: Eleanor calls Squirrel Nutkin a c***.

Eleanor and Alasdair read a Roald Dahl book about some absolutely horrid women. "Which one?" you quite reasonably ask. It's The Witches: a grotesquely funny revenge caper fuelled by 'stranger danger' anxiety. What do you do when a beloved children's author is a bit of a bigot? Which of Dahl's books scandalised nine-year-old Eleanor's schoolteacher? And exactly what accent was Anne Hathaway doing in the movie? Listen, and find out if The Witches really is a revolting classic or just a rotten stinker.

Content Warning: References to antisemitism, misogyny & fatphobia. And we do impressions of the actor Bill Paterson.

Sickly, spoiled and terrified of the outside world, Eleanor and Alasdair read The Secret Garden. Frances Hodgson Burnett's kidlit classic is the story of an obnoxious little girl who goes to Yorkshire on her gap year and really finds herself. Is the book an ode to the healing powers of nature? Or is it a hippy-fascist self-help tract? And which film adaptation is best — the one Eleanor watched as a kid, or the steampunk Mormon version?

Content Warning: References to ableism and British colonialism. And we inaccurately describe Yorkshire as "a big county" when it is, in fact, four counties.

Like a pair of creepy twins, Eleanor and Alasdair venture up Alderley Edge to meet the Wizard. We read The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, Alan Garner's 1960 folk horror classic. Is it too scary for kids, or just too scary for Alasdair? Did Eleanor really fall asleep at the end of the audiobook? And what, exactly, does a rustic Cheshire accent sound like?

We simply don't know.

We're all mad here. Specifically, Eleanor is mad about people saying Lewis Carroll wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland on drugs and Alasdair is mad about the Tim Burton film being rubbish. For this episode, we read Carroll's enormously influential 1865 novel, and we asked: do books actually need plots? Or will some 160 year-old puns do?

Content Warning: We make allusions to the controversy surrounding Carroll, without going into detail.

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Eleanor and Alasdair read The Story of Tracy Beaker. Jacqueline Wilson's 1991 hit has spawned numerous sequels and TV spin-offs, but Alasdair has missed out on all of them due to being a boy and man, in that order. The protagonist and narrator, Tracy Beaker, is an irrepressible kid in a care home and “the Millennial Holden Caulfield” (according to Eleanor).

Will Eleanor's childhood nostalgia survive re-reading the book? Will Alasdair “get narked” at the weirdly 1970s dialogue? And WHEN will we start a spin-off podcast called Bed-wet Buddies?

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The Railway Children is an Edwardian children's classic and health & safety nightmare. Edith "E" Nesbit's novel is packed with unforgettable characters, railway mishaps and an exiled Russian dissident who no one remembers. In this episode, recorded live at the Edinburgh Fringe, we learn that trespassing on a train line is OK, as long as you're a middle-class child.

Will the book withstand the edgy, late-night comedy of Eleanor and Alasdair? What will we learn about the inevitable triumph of international socialism? And exactly how sexy was Bernard Cribbins in the film?

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