Giving up booze, going gluten free: Enid Blyton's Famous Five get all grown up

Cripes! 'The Famous Five' turn 75 in May. Rather than a nostalgic revisit of their adventures, they've been given a delirious reboot by comic writer Bruno Vincent, with the Enid Blyton estate's blessing.

The friends are all grown up now and it's lashings of champagne cocktails rather than ginger beer, and instead of chasing spies and smugglers they're navigating such millennial challenges as Brexit, clean eating and Dry January.

In Five Go Gluten Free Anne is given a spiralizer and serves up flabby "courgetti" to her horrified mates; they gamely munch on nut and seed power balls while secretly longing for a pint and a bag of pork scratchings.

Five Go On A Strategy Away Day finds them immersed in the corporate claptrap of "incentivising", building "cohesiveness" and creating "outcomes". Things go downhill when they discover - in a lovely meta fashion - that they're sharing the workshop with The Secret Seven, who are clearly out to get them.

Timmy the dog gets fed up when Five Give Up The Booze - they're too depressed to give him a decent walk, so he keeps dragging in papsaks of wine to tempt them. Tensions break out around Brexit when George nails her colours to the mast as a Remainer, and Julian stands as a Brexiteer.

In Five Go Parenting the friends are literally left holding the baby of their noxious cousin Rupert Kirrin and his East European mail-order bride. Dick shows some facility for multitasking with the baby strapped to his chest while Anne is snubbed by the yummy mummies at a swimming lesson. And then they make the mistake of looking up symptoms on Dr Google.

Original Famous Five illustrations are used with snappy new captions throughout the series. Clever and splutteringly funny, Vincent was careful to respect what are essentially a generation's childhood memories. "I'd never write 'Five Go To A Sex Club'," he told one interviewer. He's planning another in the series: Five Help Gran With Her Computer, after a maddening experience of his own.

• Enid Blyton For Grown Ups are published by Quercus Books, R175.

•This article was originally published in The Times.