I’ve just watched the latest Batman film, The Dark Knight, and it is very far removed from the original television show I used to watch as a boy. For instance, instead of biffing and kapowing his way through the tracing-paper plot in a body-hugging supersuit, our hero is a brooding and complicated character, tortured by inner demons, a sense of his own worthlessness and perhaps a touch of shame about what he and Robin used to get up to in the bath together back in the Sixties.

In short, Batman has become what film marketing people call “dark” or “gritty”, and we see a similar problem with today’s James Bond, who has lost the one-liners and the gadgets and become “brooding” and “complicated”.

It’s the same story with the plot. In Quantum of Solace I was left utterly bewildered by what on earth he was up to half the time. Was Mathis a goodie or a baddie? I have no idea, and if I have no idea, what chance is there for the small boys whose fascination with 007 has kept the brand alive for so long?

Even the car chase was impossible to follow. It was designed to be the longest, and best, in all of movie history, but what we actually saw in the cinema was a savagely edited facsimile. Why was it cut down? Presumably so they could shoehorn in more shots of Daniel Craig smouldering. And deeper insights into his inner being.

In the olden days, Bond would get some orders from M and then embark on a series of fights, interspersed with some light sexual intercourse, until eventually the baddie and his entire operation exploded. It was as easy to understand as a boiled egg. But today, we’re told, 007 is more in keeping with the character from the original books. We have to be told this, of course, because no one has ever actually read one.

Frankly I wish he’d just get back to the days when he headbutted Curt Jurgens in the face, blew up Donald Pleasence’s volcano and went to bed with Barbara Bach.

It’s easy to see what’s going on here. After a character has been around for 40 years, the people who created him become bored with blowing up Pinewood every two years. So they start to employ directors and actors who want to explore the hero’s roots and his motivation.

Which means that instead of getting Superman to fly about and make the world go backwards, they ask what being a superhero does to a man’s soul. Can he ever love someone? Can he ever be at peace? Does he ever develop a deity complex because there is simply no answer to the eternal question: why me? Oh, for God’s sake. Just kick Lex Luthor in the wedding veg and let’s have another explosion.

Depth of character is fine in a film such as Shadowlands, but it is emphatically not fine in Die Hard or Bond or Batman, which have endured precisely because, in an action film, lead characters have to be shallow. We don’t want to know why they never go out without a machinegun, just so long as they use it as often as possible.

Taking a cartoon character seriously is going to kill the golden goose in much the same way that the appeal of a real goose would be lost if you looked at the life it led, and the goslings it reared, before it was shot in the head and buried in gravy. And that’s why I am extremely alarmed to hear that after an 80-year pause Winnie-the-Pooh is making a comeback.

Yup. The people who manage the estate of the author AA Milne and the artist EH Shepard have allowed a publisher to commission a new book called Return to the Hundred Acre Wood, and while I’m sure it will sell jolly well and make lots of money, I fear that it will be impossible to rekindle the magic.

First of all, AA Milne – unlike most people who shorten their byline this way – was an exceptional writer: of that there can be no doubt. And while I don’t doubt for a moment that the new author, David Benedictus, is an exceptional writer as well, it would be impossible to expect that he’d get the tone exactly right. And a Pooh story that’s off by even 5% may as well be Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

What makes Pooh engage even today – apart from the genius of the writing and the joy of the illustrations – is that the stories are so exquisitely simple. It was Eeyore’s birthday. Pooh felt he should have a present. Piglet – surely the most unpleasant character in fiction since Judas Iscariot – decided to get there first so he’d be credited with the idea. He fell over. The present exploded. He got his comeuppance. The end.

And there’s the second problem. It is hard nowadays to get away with something so elemental. We’d have to know why Eeyore was so miserable all the time, and inevitably that would lead us to his upbringing on a sink beach in Blackpool. Then we’d be invited to explore why Piglet is such a nasty piece of work. Perhaps it has something to do with his height. Maybe he’s bitter and nasty because he has SPS – short pig syndrome. Maybe there could be a lesson here, as there seems to be in all children’s literature, about the effects of bullying.

Speaking of which: Christopher Robin. Way, way too white. He’d have to be Somalian and the forest to which he escapes with his friends would have to be a park full of dog dirt in Hackney. I bet there are meetings going on today in which someone at the publisher is wondering whether Winnie-the-Pooh ought really to be a black bear called Winston-the-Pooh. Maybe the next book could be called Pooh: Dark Knight of Solace.

Pooh, Batman and Bond have endured because they were brilliant ideas. And what I wish is that the custodians of these good ideas would refrain from meddling. Where possible, stick to the original concept. And where it isn’t possible because, say, the author was everything and the author is dead, move on and come up with a new brilliant idea.

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