Golding's daughter on 'terribly good' Lord of the Flies

The daughter of Lord of the Flies author, William Golding, said she believed the ongoing appeal of the book was that "it rings horribly true".

Judy Golding, speaking on the eve of a four-part BBC adaptation by Bristol's Jack Thorne, said she believed her father would have been happy with the series.

"I think he felt, once he'd written the book, that was it, and it was out there and to a certain extent, people must react to it as they see fit," she said.

Thorne said the story, published in 1954, about young boys stranded on an uninhabited island who descend into savagery, had left a "profound scar" on him when he first read it as a boy.

Golding, who grew up in Wiltshire, but now lives in Bristol, said her father had read to her and her brother "massively" as children, particularly The Coral Island by RM Ballantyne and Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons series.

"In both of them, I think it's fair to say, the children are extremely well-behaved," she told BBC Wiltshire.

"One day, he said to my mother after a marathon read, 'wouldn't it be a good idea to write something about how children really would behave' because, I suppose, he felt it wouldn't be like that," she said.

"It was only seven years after the end of the war [World War Two] when he wrote it.

"He said in opposition to people who said they couldn't believe [what the Nazis were capable of] that if he had been born in Germany, he would have been a Nazi.

"And he said 'there is a Nazi in all of us'," she added.

Thorne, who also wrote the Netflix series Adolescence which was influenced by Lord of the Flies, said he felt it was important to provide nuances to the phrase "toxic masculinity", which he does by telling the story from different perspectives.

"Particularly in episode two, when you spend time with Jack, you understand that this is not a story where you can make simple choices; it's not a story where you can make simple judgements.

"These guys [the child actors] were all between the ages of 10 and 12 and, I think, no one captures that moment quite like Golding.

"If we can capture that aspect of the book and show the detail in Golding's beautiful writing, then it felt like we could do a good job," he said.

Ike Talbot, who plays Simon, said it was interesting to draw a comparison between the Lord of the Flies and Adolescence.

"They show different time periods and different settings; the boys in the Lord of the Flies were raised in the 1950s, in a rich background," he said.

"The boy in Adolescence doesn't have that, but I think it's interesting to see how the two [stories] end up in a similar place."

Winston Sawyers, who plays Ralph, said: "We need to remember that they are kids and it sucks because I think the main message between these two shows is, like, they need some kind of guidance to keep them on the rails and help them grow into adults.

"They can't make adult decisions.

"When they're left alone, that's when terrible things happen," he added.

Speaking to the BBC in 1959, whilst still a teacher at Bishop Wordsworth's School in Salisbury, Golding said he chose schoolboys for his first novel because he wanted a subject out of his own experience and they were what he knew best.

Ultimately, however, he said he believed his novels were optimistic.

"If that optimism - which is obvious to me as the background of my books - if that optimism doesn't come out, then I ought to have conveyed it more explicitly, more vividly and more importantly," he said.

You can watch Lord of the Flies at 21:00 GMT on BBC One on Sunday 8 February or on iPlayer the same day.

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