Still, the people who wanted fairytales found the book, and some of them knew what it was, and liked it for being exactly that. One of those people was film-maker Matthew Vaughn.

I tend to be extremely protective when it comes to adaptations of my work, but I enjoyed the screenplay and I really like the film they made - which takes liberties with the plot all over the place. (I know I didn’t write a pirate captain performing a can-can in drag, for a start ...)

A star still falls, a boy still promises to bring it to his true love, there are still wicked witches and ghosts and lords (although the lords have now become princes.) They even gave the story an unabashedly happy ending, which is something people tend to do when they retell fairytales.