The new Doctor in Doctor Who has blond hair, blue eyes and a firm handshake, dresses in a splendid red coat and has an exciting catchphrase: ‘Hounds are running! Tally ho!’

No, not really. The new Doctor is so very much what you’d expect the new Doctor to be like that you can guess without my telling you. And it’s not that I think that Ncuti Gatwa is going to be bad as the Doctor. On the contrary, from what little I’ve glimpsed of him so far, he seems charismatic, energetic, and fun. But I do wish the BBC commissars responsible for the series would try to make their social programming agenda a bit less insultingly obvious.

Like all the best propaganda, Doctor Who is often gripping and visually enticing

‘It’s not aimed at you. It’s aimed at kids,’ you sometimes hear from (invariably adult) Whovians when you dare criticise their sacred cow. But that is exactly my objection. If it were for grown-ups it wouldn’t matter a jot. Unfortunately it is aimed at a much more vulnerable, impressionable audience whom not all parents may be keen to have indoctrinated.

Like all the best propaganda, Doctor Who is often gripping and visually enticing. Its 60th anniversary episode, ‘The Giggle’, was a spectacular reminder of how much its special effects have come on since the early days of wobbly sets, Blue Peter-style cardboard and sticky-back plastic monsters. The recreation of 1920s Soho, for example, and its visualisation of UNIT’s skyscraper HQ, with laser-gun platform, would not have disgraced a Hollywood blockbuster.

It also had a particularly fine, loveably hateful villain played by Neil Patrick Harris (Count Olaf from Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events). The Toymaker – a baddie revived from the William Hartnell era – did the kind of horrible, creepy things involving ventriloquist dummies, live humans transformed into helpless marionettes, malevolent doll babies, etc that will haunt its young viewers’ nightmares for years.

But that is as it should be. What bothers me far more is the effect it’s going to have on their politics. Here are some of the themes I noticed being bashed into the storyline with scriptwriter Russell T. Davies’s characteristic sledgehammer subtlety: women make the best scientists, programmers and commanders of military units; we need to think a lot more about disability; a Doctor as male, pale and stale as David Tennant’s is long overdue for retirement; no family barbecue is complete without at least one transgender person.

Doctor Who (BBC)

It really doesn’t have to be this way, though, as CBBC has unexpectedly demonstrated with its revamped Famous Five series. Sure, the character of George (Diaana Babnicova) has been reinvented as the product of a mixed-race marriage, a mite anachronistic for the 1930s rural Dorset setting. But the whole thing is so charming, stylish and idiosyncratic that you barely notice after the first five seconds: it feels faithfully old-fashioned but daringly modern. Even the bits that shouldn’t work, do, like the decision to give it a synthesiser soundtrack pitched somewhere between The Goonies and the score to an 1980s John Carpenter movie.

Presumably this reflects the original aesthetic of its Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn (best known for his cultish, violent action movie Drive). The colours – from the sea’s pellucid blues and the creams and browns of George’s sailing boat to the woollen dyes on the almost too period-perfect children’s outfits – are so crisp and supersaturated, the rustic locations so tweely, implausibly gorgeous, the cinematography (the steam-train journey to London, for example) so immaculate, it feels less like real life than an escapist, storybook version thereof.

This means, ingeniously, that Refn can remain absolutely faithful to the innocence of Enid Blyton’s original while transforming it into something dazzlingly contemporary. I loved the scene, for example, where George finds the corpse of a deep-sea diver washed up on the beach. Unperturbed, she saunters slowly home with her dog Timmy (Kip) when she bumps into her newly arrived cousins. After an initial face-off, she grudgingly decides to accept them. ‘Wanna see a dead body?’ she asks.

Though I haven’t read the book, I suspect that this adaptation has improved on it considerably by giving the lost treasure theme the Dan Brown treatment. Now it involves a decaying Templar castle, a grail-like chalice, and the lost tomb of William Marshall who is correctly identified by the Five’s brainbox, Dick (Kit Rakusen) as Britain’s greatest knight. And the baddie trying to get the gold before those pesky kids do is a properly scary Jack Gleeson (King Joffrey from Game of Thrones).

The Famous Five is that very rare and special thing: a TV show that both children and adults can thoroughly enjoy without either party feeling their interests have been compromised. And unlike the new Doctor Who, it comes with a social message that’s actually useful: ‘Give up your phones, kids. Don’t bother your parents, and head off into the sticks to make your own entertainment. That way true happiness lies!’

The Famous Five (CBBC)