JOHN MACLEOD: Now even Janet and John have become victims of the PC jobsworths

Published: 21:10, 10 June 2026 | Updated: 21:13, 10 June 2026 First they came for Enid Blyton. I said nothing: it was 1979 and I had long outgrown her. Then they came for JK Rowling. I said nothing. I was not, after all, a bespectacled boy wizard. But now they have come for Janet and John… The very phrase is so hackneyed many assume it is actually a joke – or ‘meme,’ like Sharon and Tracey or Sid and Gladys – and that there was never such a twosome or even a text. The late Terry Wogan’s leering send-ups didn’t help. But now Janet and John, in the argot of the age, have been ‘cancelled’. Indicted, caged, slammed definitively behind the cell door of official politically-correct disapproval. The scene of the crime is the Black Country Living Museum, which lays on various immersive exhibitions about what it used to be like to live in, roughly, Crossroads Motel country. One has recently been added to expand the timeframe ‘into the post-Windrush decades’ and in the process someone’s beady little eye fell on the equally immersive exhibition of a typical 1960s public library. They subsequently decided to add a few trigger warnings, because that is what such jobsworths, handsomely salaried from all our taxes, increasingly do. Ian Fleming, Agatha Christie, even Angus Wilson and, no doubt, the adventures of Biggles have naturally copped it – but among those arraigned are Janet and John. Janet and John are characters in textbooks, which were used to teach children to read Who actually are real. Well, nearly. Characters in a series of textbooks, thought innovative and cutting-edge at the time, to teach children to read and which were issued between 1949 and 1951. In fact, they were an anglicised – well, I guess they would say anglized – version of American ‘readers’ called Alice and Jerry. ‘Jerry,’ only four years on from the war, would not have landed too well with British younglings still playing in the rubble. And I was among the last rake of children, during the Edward Heath regime and at Scotstoun Primary School, to lisp my way through them. I remember the first, with a custard-yellow cover, was bracingly titled, ‘Here We Go!’ Though Scottish journalism was yet to know what would hit it. Anyway – quoth the raven, ‘Nevermore!’ For the Black Country Living Museum has slapped an indictment on the frontispiece, rather like a parking ticket or the way they used to brand witches. ‘This book may include negative depiction of people or cultures, and outdated views,’ they pant. ‘These depictions were wrong then and are wrong now. Rather than remove the book, we want to acknowledge its existence and impact, learn from it, and spark conversation to make for a more inclusive future.’ Janet and John was of its era. Think Peter and Jane Go Shopping With Mummy. He’s a perky little chap in shorts and jumper who wants adventures. She’s a little lass in a brief floaty frock who prefers a domestic setting. To make things worse, they have a little dog in tow – and everyone, everywhere, is white, in a community of shops and lawns and cars which used to be all our normal but which cops, these days, no doubt think ‘very Brexity things’. My chief, shuddering recollection of Janet and John is how homesick one image of boats and floating seaweed made me feel for the West Highlands, from which months earlier I had been ripped – and the utter inanity of the narrative. The late Terry Wogan had millions of listeners in hysterics with his innuendo-filled version of the Janet and John children's stories Even the National Theatre, at its most avant-garde, would struggle with such existential anomie as, ‘“Look, Janet,” said John. “Look, John,” said Janet. Janet and John look. The dog looks. Janet, John and the dog look…’ Honest, more stuff happens in Waiting For Godot. The other 1971 memory that haunts me is my late father trying to help me with my Janet and John homework. He grew increasingly bewildered and angry. I grew confused and started crying. We were at entire cross-purposes and it was only this week – well, I guess the Black Country Living Museum has got to be good for something – I finally grasped why. The Janet and John primers were the first texts to teach children how to read by the ‘Look-and-Say’ system, our teachers – most of them, in hindsight, understandably rattling with Valium – trained to make us recognise words. Not bits of words. Not letters. Not – to get all technical with you – phonemes. ‘Come, little dog. You may look too. See, Janet. Here is something red. Can you see it?’ That nameless, unpersoned dog; such chauvinistic mansplaining… but, in fact, even as we laboured through such excitements on Duncan Avenue, Janet and John were already discredited texts falling fast from favour in teacher training circles. And not for the frocks. Look-and-Say does not work. Children were often left with lifelong pronunciation problems – I remember, at 15, a teacher gently pointing out that ‘misled’ does not actually rhyme with ‘stifled’ – or hit a ‘reading wall’ they never overcame. Not least as educational thinkers started in the Seventies to wrestle with issues like dyslexia, we sensibly returned to the order in which my father had been taught to read: a-b-c, bits and chunks – the building blocks. It’s called ‘synthetic phonics’ and, these days, is actually fun. Trigger warnings have been added to the Janet and John books Nevertheless, by December 1972 I was already reading voraciously, thanks to honest- to-goodness help in Sabbath lessons from my Sunday School teacher – the excellent Peggy MacDonald; I still bump into her at the Stornoway Tesco. And serene encouragement in the home, not least because in that Highland Presbyterian order family worship was held twice daily and we had to take turns reading the chapter, not to mention quickly finding the correct Minor Prophet in the Bible as my father rose to preach and eyes darted all the while to the three little heads in the manse pew. But it was only in Primary Four – upgraded to Jordanhill College School – that I was finally made to memorise the alphabet and, even today, my mother likes to recall my boyhood complaints of a sore stomatch or a nasty headaitch; some story I had heard that had left me intrigooed. Janet and John is still, I gather, a prized reader in the likes of Singapore and Malaysia. But how infinitely depressing that the textbooks are now damned in politically correct circles for precisely the wrong reasons. And – with the Prime Minister’s threats to social media, local council warfare on national flags, the realities of two-tier policing and so many folk in public life who cannot tell you what a woman is – there is that ongoing, uneasy sense that we are under a sort of military occupation. No comments have so far been submitted. Why not be the first to send us your thoughts, or debate this issue live on our message boards. By posting your comment you agree to our house rules. Do you want to automatically post your MailOnline comments to your Facebook Timeline? Your comment will be posted to MailOnline as usual. Do you want to automatically post your MailOnline comments to your Facebook Timeline? 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