"Yippee!" cried George, knocking back lashings of ginger beer as she threw off her gym slip and climbed into her shorts. "Lots and lots of nice people aged 25 to 54 say the stories about us were the books they most enjoyed when they were children like us."

"Woof-woof," said Timmy.

"Super!" said Julian. "Let's go to Kirrin Island and solve a mystery involving some roughs."

"I'll pack some spam sandwiches and pop," said Anne.

"That popular music person Madonna says she has never heard of us but I don't care - we still have lots of friends even though the last of our 21 adventures was published in 1963," Julian chipped in, adding a historical footnote.

A previous poll about Enid Blyton showed that although Harry Potter was the children's bedtime favourite, the Famous Five remained top of the adults' charts.

The latest survey, commissioned by Cartoon Network and the Prince of Wales Arts and Kids Foundation for a story-telling festival next month, suggests that nothing much has changed. While the kids go into agonies in anticipation of the latest work from JK Rowling, and film-makers fill cinema screens across the world with Tolkien's orcs, mature readers cling happily to their love of the plainly written tales, which began in 1942 with Five on a Treasure Island.

To be fair, Tolkien makes two appearances, with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, in the latest grown-up top 10. But so does Blyton: the Famous Five are at number one, with the Secret Seven at number four.

Other favourites include The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Treasure Island, Black Beauty and Wind in the Willows.

In less relaxed times, some parents, teachers and librarians took a dim view of Enid Blyton and tried to steer children away from her books, with their predictable plots and stunted vocabulary.

But they continue to be read, with more tolerant adults arguing that anything that gets children reading must be good - an argument now also used in favour of Harry Potter.

Academics have also come to Blyton's defence. David Rudd, the author of a major study, challenges the old charge that she is liable to poison children's minds with an uncomfortable blend of sexism and patriarchy.

He argues that Blyton dramatises the power relationship between the sexes and succeeds in debating sexism in ways that are comprehensible to children.

"In an age of drug abuse and video nasties, Enid Blyton seems so anodyne. Her writing has no metaphors and very few adjectives," Dr Rudd said in a Guardian interview.

"She provides a very bare frame into which children import their fantasies. The books are like open, post-modern texts to which readers are invited to bring much of themselves."

He places the books in the oral tradition with fairy tales, ballads and even Homeric narrative.

Blyton originally intended to write just six Five books, but, faced with demands from her readers, she produced a dozen - and kept going. German children fell for the Funf Freunde in a big way and French youngsters wished they could be members of the Club des Cinq.

By the time the last adventure, Five Are Together Again, was published, 6m books about the group had been published. Forty years on, they are still selling.

Blyton always acknowledged that the tomboy George was based on a "real person, now grown up".

Much later she admitted that that person was herself.