I actually read the first four P.L. Travers Mary Poppins books when I was a child. (Were there more?) I have to say I found all of them sublime in their own and remarkablly entertaining in their own right. But I have to say I side with Disney in changing so much of what we got.

Let's be honest in the book Mary Poppins is cold, brutish and sardonic to practically everybody and behaves in such a way after the adventures happen that I could see a modern day readers thinking she's gaslighting the children. Travers may have been outraged but Disney was right. Julie Andrews' portayal is close to the spirit of Poppins but there's just enough softness in her that makes you love her.

I don't think today's children, if they were to read Travers books, would like them and I think Gen Z and millennials who couldn't get irony or subtlety if you hit them with it, would understand what they were reading. I was able to appreciate the wonder up to a very certain age but I know you have to look for it. Travers may not have been fine with the movie as the legacy of her work. But if this is the only record any child gets of it, I'm honestly fine with that.

And by the way, as to the biggest controversy of 1964, if Audrey Hepburn had been nominated for Best Actress in My Fair Lady, I would have given the prize the Oscar to Andrews anyway. It's not the lipsyncing; Hepburn's performance is a masterclass anyway. iT'S that you can imagine other people playing Eliza Doolittle sixty years later. Julie Andrews is Mary Poppons, full stop. It was one of the greatest film debuts in the history of cinema to that point and there have been very few equivalents in the last sixty years - Streisand in Funny Girl, Timothy Hutton in Ordinary People and Anna Paquin in The Piano are the most memorable ones The closest in recent years are probably Jennifer Quevashane Wallis in Beasts of the Southern Wild