I haven’t listened to the BBC radio version in its entirety, but I own the complete Focus on the Family Radio Theatre of Narnia and have heard the dramas many times. I think probably both versions are well worth your time since they have been acclaimed by many listeners who love them. The BBC version is shorter according to the reviews that I have read, but if it is a more condensed version that may not be all bad. It does have Sylvester McCoy as Reepicheep, which Dr. Who fans may enjoy.  In the Focus on the Family version Douglas Gresham introduces each of the seven dramas. The Radio Theatre is the closest and most accurate adaptation of the seven books that was ever made and that includes all of the movie and television versions. 🙂

@narnian78 I've listened to both versions streaming on the web (I don't own either set... maybe I will at some point).

The casting in both are pretty good... portraying the characters from their own perspective.

I think even fans of the Hobbit film trilogy would enjoy the BBC Radio 4 adaptation, because Sylvester McCoy is Radagast (I had no idea until I saw it listed on IMBD).

Camilla Power, who voiced Lucy in the BBC Radio 4, also plays Jill in the BBC TV series of The Silver Chair.

Aslan is probably one of the hardest characters to get right. David Suchet has a powerful voice... and Stephen Thorne, who voiced him in the BBC Radio 4, also voiced him in the animated adaptation of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe.

Victor Spinetti, who voiced Shift in the Focus on the Family, also voiced Mr. Tumnus in the animated The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Fairly recently, I saw Stash Kirkbride, who voices Rishda in the Focus on the Family, interviewed on a Youtube video... how he's been involved in Norfolk Theatre in England.

As you've said, the Focus on the Family follows the books more closely. Though they've added some stuff... like in Voyage of the Dawn Treader, where Caspian and his men are at the Lone Islands, they've added where Governor Gumpas was talking with his sectarary... in The Last Battle, where Tirian and Jewel give themselves up to the Calormenes, they added dialogue.

Very interesting to read this thread! I have the complete Focus on the Family series on CD, but haven't managed to listen to them all yet... I don't have much time to listen to audiobooks / dramas and I've only quite recently settled down after a major move across the country and have had a lot of other things on my plate. (I also have some other audiobooks that a friend has recently lent me, so I need to get through those so I can give them back!!) But I'm hoping to get back to them in the coming months.

I haven't ever listened to the BBC Radio 4 versions, but I should see if I can get hold of them too — it would be very interesting to compare them directly, when/if I have time. But I've seen comments from a number of NarniaWebbers now that the FOTF versions are the closest to the books overall, which tends to be the thing that matters most to me. 

Interesting that Stephen Thorne plays Aslan in the BBC Radio series. I didn't find him that impressive in the 1978 animated version of LWW, but maybe that's just because visually, that version made Aslan look something like one of the robot lions from Voltron with the hairdo of a 1970s rock star!! I think David Suchet, on the other hand, occasionally hams up Aslan's voice a bit too much on the loud-and-exciting speeches, but when he needs to give Aslan more depth and emotion and poignancy, he really nails it.

I will probably post here again once I've got both the radio versions and have managed to listen to them!!  

@courtenay Maybe because 70's animation wasn't as advanced as they are today. I think in the 60's and 70's, xerox was used a lot in animation (dry photo copy). As the 80's and 90's moved in, more computer animation was used.

Posted by: @jasminetarkheena

As the 80's and 90's moved in, more computer animation was used.

Mostly '90s for that. There were some very primitive attempts at digital animation in the BBC TV series of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but it didn't look very convincing (even at the time — I was in primary school when they were first shown on TV!) and they notably didn't try that again in the other three stories they adapted. It wasn't until the mid-'90s that we got the first full-length computer-animated film (Toy Story — very big deal at the time), and quite a few more years before digital animation became so photo-realistic that it could be used for entire films that look almost as if they were filmed live, not animated (like the remakes of The Jungle Book and The Lion King).

As for the LWW adaptation, I don't think it was a matter of hand-drawn animation being less advanced in the 1970s than later — if you look at some of Disney's best offerings from the 1940s and '50s (Bambi, for example), the sheer artistry of them is incredible. It most likely comes down to money — the company that produced LWW presumably didn't have the budget to pay the kinds of artists Disney was able to afford!  

An audio version will leave everything visual to the imagination of the listener, which isn’t all bad. There aren’t that many radio plays around anymore because the visual portion attracts those who are attracted to technology, and that’s what most people want now.  Besides the BBC radio and Focus on the Family there are other audiobooks offered by Big Finish (mostly Dr. Who). But I don’t think these audio dramas make a lot of money for the voice actors or the companies that released them. They are aren’t considered high technology like today’s movies.  But that isn’t so important to people who listen to them. 🙂

Since we already have a thread dedicated to Narnia Radio and Audio Adaptations, please continue any discussions about different Narnia audio adaptations there. Thanks!