I realise it is slightly after the event to be blogging about a programme that went out on Boxing Day, but I can hold my peace no longer. Noel Streatfeild's Ballet Shoes is one of my top five favourite books, and like many fans of this classic tale, I awaited the BBC dramatisation with much excitement.

Comfortably settled on the sofa with a glass of Bailey's ("With A Hint of Creme Caramel"), things began to go wrong almost immediately, with the observation that Sylvia had been cast as a young vixen in the form of Emilia Fox. They went further downhill as Emma Watson proceeded to butcher the part of Pauline. I realise Emma Watson is a national treasure, the new Keira Knightly and the future face of Chanel, but whatever. She might have been good as Hermione Grainger, but in playing Pauline Fossil it is my humble opinion that her limitations as an actor were all too apparent.

And another thing (I always want to write these three words in a news column, but can't, for the simple reason that they are not a sentence. But on a blog, who cares?). For the life of me, and in common with all other Ballet Shoes fans, I'm sure, I do not understand why the writers had to invent new, and completely unnecessary, plotlines. It's a classic tale, for god's sake. What next: tampering with Shakespeare? God damn but those sonnets would read a lot better if they didn't rhyme. Although if Andrew Davies can tweak Jane Austen (cf the current BBC1 version of Sense & Sensibility), then I suppose poor Noel Streatfeild never stood a chance. Even so, imagine my horror when Mr Simpson, a happily married man in the book, who lodges with the Fossils at Cromwell Road with his WIFE, is redrawn not only as single but as falling in love and MARRYING Sylvia. What? Why? Was the book's ending not optimistic enough already? A travesty, I tell you.

Worst of all, though, was the implied dubious nature of Mr Simpson's relationship with Petrova. Petrova, who, in the book is an innocent young girl with a morbid fascination for cars and aeroplanes, enjoys a relationship with Mr Simpson which can only be described as fatherly. Not according to BBC1. For some reason, the young actress playing Petrova had been told she was Nabokov's Lolita, for if she batted her eyelashes, thrust her chest and smiled coyly at Simpson once, she did it a thousand times. It was enough to put me off my Bailey's, which curdled at the very thought of any flirtation between these two.

Sexed-up as the BBC version was, I'm hardly surprised that the bath scene with Emma Watson and the minx that played Petrova has ended up on youtube, alongside loads of salacious comments from what are no doubt sad and hideous middle-aged men.

Ballet Shoes is a girl's book, one of the most loved of all time. Why it was turned into a wank-fest for men I will never know. It would have sat beautifully on the Boxing Day schedule just as it was. The BBC should be ashamed of itself.