RICHARD KAY: What will Harry and Meghan say about Netflix’s £500m for ‘Roald the Rotten’?

For a writer whose books explored the dark, macabre side of the human condition, the irony is exquisite.

Netflix, the streaming giant whose bottomless pockets have helped keep Prince Harry and Meghan afloat in Californian luxury, has secured a deal for the entire catalogue of Roald Dahl’s books.

The contrast between the woke, right-on world of the oh-so-politically-correct Sussexes and an author whose prejudiced and unpleasant personality flaws are impossible to ignore, are remarkable.

The astonishing contract, said to be ‘a little over £500 million’, provides the streaming giant with rights to titles such as The BFG, Charlie And The Chocolate Factory and Danny The Champion Of The World. It also illustrates the brutal reality of commercial expediency.

This extraordinary windfall for the Dahl family — his granddaughter is the model Sophie Dahl — represents one of the most lucrative literary franchises since the Harry Potter stories.

Certainly, it is the largest acquisition in Netflix’s history and hands it a back catalogue of books that have sold close to 300 million copies globally.

Netflix, the streaming giant whose bottomless pockets have helped keep Prince Harry and Meghan afloat in Californian luxury, has secured a deal for the entire catalogue of Roald Dahl’s books

It will also enable the company to further exploit the Dahl archive through film and other spin-offs, as well as some lucrative merchandising opportunities.

The deal does not just encompass the hugely popular children’s titles but those lesser-known and more sinister adult stories that featured in the long-running ITV series Tales Of The Unexpected.

For behind the brilliant novels that over the decades have caught the imagination of children with their suspense and adventure was a hugely complex individual possessing some downright rotten characteristics.

Three years ago it was revealed that the Royal Mint decided against honouring his achievements because of the dark side of his character.

The suggestion that Dahl’s image should be used was first mooted in 2014 but secretly rejected by a Bank of England sub-committee because of the writer’s anti-Semitic views.

A cursory look at some of his most popular fiction and you will find something to offend almost everyone. In the 60 years since the publication of James And The Giant Peach, for example, it has been lambasted for its racist content.

The contrast between the woke, right-on world of the oh-so-politically-correct Sussexes and Dahl, an author whose prejudiced and unpleasant personality flaws are impossible to ignore, are remarkable

The contrast between the woke, right-on world of the oh-so-politically-correct Sussexes and Dahl, an author whose prejudiced and unpleasant personality flaws are impossible to ignore, are remarkable

A grasshopper character in one passage declares: ‘I’d rather be fried alive and eaten by a Mexican.’

The Oompa-Loompas, in Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, were originally depicted as African pygmies. But after a series of exchanges with Eleanor Cameron, a white children’s author who objected to the racist content, Dahl agreed to revise the book.

In the 1974 edition, Oompa-Loompas became long-haired, rosy-cheeked and white, hailing from the island of Loompaland. (Dahl’s widow revealed in 2017 that the original Charlie was intended to be a black child.)

But what then of the malevolent imagination that comes through in the content of Dahl’s stories for grown-ups?

In the short story Lamb To The Slaughter, Mary Maloney, a pregnant young woman, kills her husband Patrick with a frozen lamb leg.

To conceal the crime she serves the lamb as dinner before calling the police. They question her, search the house and surrounding area for the murder weapon.

The Oompa-Loompas, in Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, were originally depicted as African pygmies. But after a series of exchanges with Eleanor Cameron, a white children's author who objected to the racist content, Dahl agreed to revise the book.

The Oompa-Loompas, in Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, were originally depicted as African pygmies. But after a series of exchanges with Eleanor Cameron, a white children’s author who objected to the racist content, Dahl agreed to revise the book.

And after their fruitless search, the officers realise that no one has turned off the oven. Pregnant Mary serves up the policemen the now cooked leg of lamb.

Nothing illustrates Dahl’s grisly obsessions than Switch Bitch, a collection of adult short stories, originally published in Playboy between 1965 and 1974. In each story, a major act of cunning, cruelty or hedonism underpins the sexuality.

One of the main characters is Uncle Oswald, a male fantasy figure described as ‘the greatest fornicator of all time’.

In the first story, Oswald is stranded in Cairo and spends the night with a Syrian businessman and his wife and daughter. A midnight liaison occurs and Oswald has to figure out who he actually spent the night with.

In another story, two men spend the night with the other’s wife, without either woman realising.

Today, there is something uncomfortable about such provocative nastiness. Which makes the Netflix deal in the era of cancel culture all the more extraordinary.

Quite how some of its supporters will view a deal to further enrich the family of a man who not only was quite open about his prejudices but also his attitude towards women remains to be seen.

The acquisition comes three years after the Dahl literary estate struck its first deal with Netflix to produce a number of animated series based on the author’s works which also include Boy and Fantastic Mr Fox.

There is no doubt that 31 years after his death, Dahl’s books remain potent bestsellers.

According to the writer’s grandson Luke Kelly, one of Dahl’s books is sold every 2.6 seconds, and the Roald Dahl Story Company, which manages his legacy, has plans in place for 19 TV shows, films, stage productions and live performances.

Despite this incredible bankability, it is hard to reconcile Netflix — which signed a deal to give a global platform to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex to make worthy documentaries — sharing its resources with the literary oeuvre of a man who spoke openly in interviews of his anti-Semitism.

Dahl once told the New Statesman magazine: ‘There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity. There’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up. Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on the [Jews] for no reason.’

These views didn’t just cause outrage but also consternation among his readers, notably in the U.S. There is no evidence that he ever changed his mind. Years after his death, his family issued an apology for these remarks.

But racism was not the only stain on his reputation. He was a philanderer and a bully, with a penchant for cruelty that came through in his prose.

His friend Noel Coward thought his books ‘brilliant and the imagination fabulous’, adding that ‘unfortunately there is in all of them an underlying streak of cruelty and macabre unpleasantness’.

Much the same could be said of the man. His first wife, Hollywood actress Patricia Neal, described him as rude, arrogant and belittling towards her throughout their marriage. She dubbed him ‘Roald the Rotten’.

His troubled daughter Tessa found him selfish and controlling, declaring: ‘Daddy gave joy to millions of children, but I was dying inside.’

Dahl’s own childhood was not easy. Born in 1916, he was three when his father died. At nine, he was sent to boarding school and hated it.

On the outbreak of World War II, he joined the RAF and crashed in the North African desert, sustaining ‘a monumental bash on the head’, as he put it, that would cause him pain for the rest of his life and may go some way to explaining some of his irritable character.

He turned the experience into his first foray into writing — a short story of heroism he called Shot Down Over Libya. By this time, he was in the U.S. as air-attaché at the British embassy.

Whether it was the blow to the head or the heady atmosphere of America, he turned from a shy young man into a lothario.

He bedded actresses such as Ginger Rogers, was seduced by heiress Clare Boothe Luce and seemed set on finding a rich woman to be an easy path through life.

According to one acquaintance, ‘he slept with everybody on the east and west coasts worth more than $50,000 a year’.

Oscar-winning Neal married him on the rebound from Clark Gable, but he treated her abominably, cheating on her with her closest friends, and attempted to lure the wealthy Gloria Vanderbilt into the marital bed with him while his wife was away.

Meanwhile, the couple’s son was badly injured when a taxi hit his pram, their eldest daughter died from measles aged seven, and Neal suffered a catastrophic stroke which put her in a coma for three weeks.

It left her disabled and with her face distorted, but she once overheard him tell the children with a sneer: ‘Mummy could do things if she only wanted to.’

He later began an affair with Felicity Crosland, and eventually divorced Neal to marry her.

His writing career had taken off, turning out pieces for Playboy that a critic described as ‘viciously pornographic and misogynistic’ and mystery stories such as Tales Of The Unexpected, which ran on TV between 1979 and 1988.

But it was his children’s stories, with their dark humour, fantasy world and unforgettable characters that catapulted him, at the age of 40, into the big time.

With a unique ability for seeing the world from a child’s point of view, he churned them out from the hut in the garden of his home in Buckinghamshire and they made him one of the world’s best known authors.

Success did not make him any nicer. He was so nasty that one of his American publishers dumped him because ‘you have behaved to us in a way that is unmatched in my experience for overbearingness and utter lack of civility’.

The publisher in question, Robert Gottlieb, was Jewish, which may have been a coincidence. His anti-Semitism continued.

In the 1970s, he was reported to have been ejected from a country club for screaming about the number of Jews dining in his presence.

He expressed his disgust at Zionism and Israel and claimed that the atrocities of the Israeli army in Lebanon were not being reported in the Press because the owners of newspapers were Jewish.

Many people remained unaware of Dahl’s views. The Jewish director Steven Spielberg told journalists he had no idea when he shot The BFG as a film. Even when he found out, he tried to shrug it off.

‘Dahl liked to say things he didn’t mean just to get a reaction,’ he said. Others would defend Dahl on the grounds that the views he expressed were not untypical of his generation.

Despite all this, he remained one of the greatest children’s storytellers of the 20th century. In 2003, four of his books were in the top 100 in The Big Read, a BBC survey to determine the ‘nation’s best-loved novel’.

Now, thanks to Netflix, his stories will reach an even wider audience. In their retelling, however, his unpleasantness will be gently skirted over.

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