FWIW, I remember on the Talking Beasts episode about the BBC radio dramas that they add a lot of bridging material, for lack of a better word, like at the beginning of Prince Caspian, we hear the professor telling the Pevensies that he once went to Narnia and at the beginning of The Silver Chair, we hear a conversation between Eustace, Edmund and Lucy. So that's another argument in favor of listening to them in order. They're apparently trying to keep some kind of narrative going from one installment to another. 

I was wondering what the approximate length was of the BBC radio version of Narnia, The Focus on the Family Narnia is on 19 CD’s (about 19 hours long) according to the advertisement on Amazon. My CD’s from the 1990’s edition are in seven separate sets, one for each drama, but they are also nineteen in all.   If the BBC radio dramas are shorter they may have less material from the books.  But of course a shorter version can be just as good as a longer ones if the acting and story adaptation are done properly. I tend to like longer movie and audio versions of books, although it is usually necessary to shorten the story for adaptation. 

@narnian78 The BBC version is on 14 CDs — two per story — so I assume each radio play is somewhat shorter than the corresponding one from FOTF. It'll be interesting to find out how much material is left out or shortened. It may be partly because the BBC production uses much less narration, so presumably there aren't as many long descriptive passages included. Those can be good for setting the scene and filling in details that it wouldn't work to have the actual characters describing or talking about, but they can also hold up the story a bit if the narrator cuts in too often and goes on too long. I am finding the narration in FOTF MN (which I'm listening to at the moment) a little intrusive at times, but I haven't yet heard the BBC version to compare. I'll post more when I have!

@courtenay 

Does the BBC version have Douglas Gresham introduce each drama like Focus on the Family?  I like his voice and wish he had narrated the dramas, although the narrator was fine for me. How is the sound quality?  If they are CD’s they would probably sound better than downloads. I kept my old stereo from the 1980’s because I liked the sound quality of CD’s and vinyl much better than any compressed computer files. The best soundscape experience of audiobooks is very important to me just as it is for music.   🙂

@narnian78 I haven't listened to any of the BBC adaptations yet, so can't yet comment on the sound quality! As far as I know, they don't feature Douglas Gresham (at least, he isn't credited in the cast list) — although as he's the one in charge of Lewis's estate, I would guess he gave the official permission for the radio adaptation to be produced. I haven't seen any indication of whether he was involved with the actual content, though.

I have listened to both the BBC Radio 4 and The Focus On The Family. I guess you can see it’s almost like a TV series without the visuals. 

They’re pretty close to the books though it does have changes and additions. 

Right, now I’ve listened to both radio play versions of The Magician’s Nephew and here are some thoughts on them!

First up, I must say that both productions were very well done overall — I hadn’t heard either of these before. (I have listened to some, but not all, of the FOTF plays previously, but that was a few years ago and I can’t remember many details of the ones I have heard, other than LWW, which I listened to recently.) Both stick really closely to the original book, with only minimal cuts — mainly of long descriptions that aren’t necessary to the plot — and no outright changes. In fact, in many ways, they’re quite similar, more so on the whole than I thought they would be.

Since I’d heard that the BBC productions make less use of a narrator than the FOTF ones, I was surprised to find that in fact they’re almost equal on that score. In this case, the narrator in the BBC play (as has been mentioned here before) is Digory as an adult, i.e. the Professor, and he does come into it quite often. I get the impression that that’s the way all the BBC adaptations are done, with one or more of the actual characters in the story serving as narrator. In this production, it did come across as a bit odd a few times early on when it alternated between adult Digory’s voice recounting his adventure in the past tense, and young Digory’s voice describing what’s happening in front of him. However, I soon got used to that and didn’t mind it, as overall it worked pretty well. 

I felt the BBC generally had the better balance between using the narrator and using dialogue between characters (or internal monologue) to tell the story. The FOTF plays all have the same narrator — Paul Scofield, credited as “The Storyteller” — and while he does a good job, there were a few times when I found him a bit intrusive, at points when the scene could easily have been relayed through the characters speaking and that would have made it more engaging to listen to. 

It’s also a lot more conventional, and perhaps even a little trite, to do a radio play in that way, with a traditional “third-person omniscient” narrator filling us in on details but not participating in the actual story, the same way the books themselves (and most novels in general!) are written. I’d say the BBC adaptation gets more points for creativity in this regard, as I felt that having Digory telling his own story drew me in a bit more and made it all feel more real, like these things genuinely did happen to someone who’s now telling us about them, and it’s not “just” a story, so to speak.

Listening to the two adaptations back-to-back, I found it very interesting to compare what they each included and left out. The BBC version is shorter, as we’ve already noted, but most of the abridgements — most of them — were very neatly done and were mainly cutting out things that aren’t essential to the story. That’s true of both versions, and in fact this made the story flow a bit better in a few places in both. And in some cases, lines I really love were included in the FOTF version and not in the BBC, and in some cases the other way around!

Now it’s late at night where I am, and I don’t want this post to go on too long, so I will post my further thoughts on the two radio versions of MN in another day or two. (I do realise that in this forum, we can’t do two consecutive posts in the one thread until at least 24 hours later!) I’ll give some more specific comparisons between the two and note some things that really worked (for me, at least) and some things that really didn’t, especially with regard to the voice acting and some other effects. I will just say that while both versions had some major good points and some significant downsides, in this case at least there was one I definitely preferred over the other in many ways. But more on that later…  

Does the BBC radio version start with The Magician’s Nephew?  I was wondering if the dramas were numbered in chronological order. Perhaps they are also numbered that way in the new Focus on the Family set of CD’s and audiobooks. I bought my old CD’s of Focus on the Family in separate sets so I can listen to them in any order that I wish. But I guess it doesn’t really matter that much with recordings since you can choose the individual dramas in any order.  I would think the newer sets in recent editions would have different packaging from those in the 1990’s, but probably the CD’s are the same for both of the dramas. 

Posted by: @narnian78

Does the BBC radio version start with The Magician’s Nephew?  I was wondering if the dramas were numbered in chronological order. Perhaps they are also numbered that way in the new Focus on the Family set of CD’s and audiobooks. I bought my old CD’s of Focus on the Family in separate sets so I can listen to them in any order that I wish. But I guess it doesn’t really matter that much with recordings since you can choose the individual dramas in any order.  I would think the newer sets in recent editions would have different packaging from those in the 1990’s, but probably the CD’s are the same for both of the dramas. 

Nope! BBC Radio 4 released LWW first.  

Posted by: @queencrunchytheweeb

Nope! BBC Radio 4 released LWW first.  

I'm sorry, but that's not correct. I have the complete CD set of the BBC Radio adaptations and they all have the original broadcast dates printed in the sleeve notes. The Magician's Nephew was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 14 January 1988. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was first broadcast on 18 February 1988. That's why I'm listening to them (and the FOTF adaptations too) in chronological order, not in the order in which the books were originally published.

Anyway, now back to the comparison of the two versions of MN!

One outstanding thing about the FOTF productions that I’ve already mentioned is, of course, having Douglas Gresham himself as the introducer (and closing commentator) for each one — something the BBC producers either weren’t able to arrange, or didn’t think to try. Here’s someone who knew “Jack” personally and looked up to him hugely, and who had the privilege of reading the Narnia stories as they were published and being able to talk to their author about them directly! I love the little reminiscences that he includes in his introductions, and of course he has a marvellous speaking voice for the radio (that was his actual career at one stage). I just wish they’d commissioned him as the narrator — I find his voice nicer to listen to than Paul Scofield’s — or, better still, as Aslan. More on Aslan later…

However, when it comes to the intro music used in each production, I really don’t think much of FOTF on that score (pun not originally intended, but there it is, so ha ha). To me it sounds loud, bombastic, glitzy and overdone; it’s not unpleasant, but it’s not actually interesting either. It just sounds like generic cliched cartoony fantasy-for-kids music, like something out of a probably low-budget imitation of the Magical World of Disney. It certainly doesn’t conjure up any scenes out of Narnia for me. Whereas the BBC’s intro music is quieter, much more understated, and with an intriguing and mysterious air, in a minor key with a medieval vibe. I still don’t find it overly exciting, but it does at least sound more credibly Narnia-ish. (For me as a 1980s Narnia fan, nothing has yet surpassed Geoffrey Burgon’s theme for the BBC TV series. But I should add, I also absolutely LOVE the Celtic-sounding theme tune used for the Talking Beasts podcasts here on NarniaWeb!)

Other than the opening theme, though, neither production makes much use of music as a feature in itself, just as background — except in the creation of Narnia scene, of course, which I’ll also comment on later. Meanwhile, the background music in both these versions was not absolutely outstanding in either, but generally well done.

As I’ve already said, both productions followed the original book very closely, mostly taking the dialogue and descriptions directly from the text — often word-for-word, or with only minor changes to shorten it or make it flow better, and I’m guessing that will turn out to be the case in the adaptations of all the other stories. It’s a huge plus for both versions (if you’re a book purist, like me) and there were very few places where it wasn’t done well. In fact, I would say the scripting was pretty much equally good in both, EXCEPT for one major, major let-down, right near the end of the BBC version — the scene where Jadis tempts Digory to take the apple home for his mother instead of giving it to Aslan. It’s the single most wrenching emotional crisis in the entire Narnia series, and the FOTF version put nearly all of it in, word-for-word from the book. The BBC, to my utter dismay, cut nearly all of it out. Almost as soon as Jadis tells him that the apple would heal his mother, Digory lashes back with “Why are you so precious fond of my Mother all of a sudden? What’s it got to do with you? What’s your game?” (his final words to her in the book) and climbs straight back onto Fledge and leaves with Polly. Absolutely no indication of the terrible inward struggle he has in the book, and of Jadis’s nasty insinuations against Aslan and “what he does to everyone who listens to him”. One of Lewis’s most powerful and haunting scenes, reduced to virtually nothing. Bad show, Beeb.  

I’m wondering if it was time constraints that led to that scene being cut — in which case, I wish they’d trimmed out a few less important lines elsewhere and fitted this in — or if someone in the “top brass” was concerned about it being too upsetting for listeners who had lost a parent in real life, or who knows what else? They also cut out a fair bit of Aslan’s conversation with Digory after the tree grows, about how the apple Jadis ate will affect her and what would have happened if someone had taken the apple to protect Narnia without Aslan’s permission, which doesn’t affect the story nearly as badly as cutting out that dialogue between Jadis and Digory, but it was still unfortunate to lose it.

Then following on that, there was another cut I was rather sore over: when Aslan sends the children and Uncle Andrew back to our world at the end, the BBC just has him saying “Now, my children, home, home, HOME…” — and we cut straight back to the London street that they left from. That leaves out one of Lewis’s most beautiful and evocative descriptions, which the FOTF narrator reads almost word-for-word:

Both the children were looking up into the Lion’s face as he spoke these words. And all at once… the face seemed to be a sea of tossing gold in which they were floating, and such a sweetness and power rolled about them and over them and entered into them that they felt they had never really been happy or wise or good, or even alive and awake before. And the memory of that moment stayed with them always [...]

Apart from those, though — all near the end of the BBC production — there were no other places in either version where any cuts to the original story really stood out as a sad loss. Interestingly, too, both versions added a scene fairly early on where Digory speaks with his mother; in the book, we don’t see her “on stage” until Digory gives her the apple near the end. I would guess the idea was to give us more of a sense of Digory’s closeness to her and establish her more as a character, which is a good idea. The FOTF version has Digory go and take food to her just after Jadis goes on her rampage around London, following Aunt Letty’s comment about “fruit from the land of youth”; the BBC version adds a scene much earlier in the story, when Digory is telling Polly about hearing a yell from Uncle Andrew’s attic study the night before. There’s a flashback to this, with Digory’s mother apologising to him for “all this” and saying “You must be so tired of being stuck in London,” followed by bossy remarks from Aunt Letty. Not a bad idea in either case, but I felt FOTF did it more effectively — their added scene actually brought tears to my eyes for a few moments, as the actress playing Digory’s mother made her sound more desperately weak and ill than the BBC actress did. Other than that, neither production had any added material that really stood out.

I do have further comments to make on the voice acting for some of the major characters, and on the ways in which the creation of Narnia was portrayed in sound — all of which had the biggest impact on my overall verdict on the two productions. But that can go in another post. 

The voice acting, for me, made for the biggest overall difference between the two radio versions of MN. First up, I should say in both productions, the voices of Digory and Polly were done really well and I couldn’t fault them in either version or pick which I liked better. (They’re played by Nathaniel Tippiett and Jessica Fox in the FOTF production and by Simeon Pearl and Rowena Snaith in the BBC production.) There also wasn’t much to pick between the two narrators (Paul Scofield and Maurice Denham respectively); both do a great job. I found Maurice Denham’s voice a little nicer to listen to, but that’s just personal taste, nothing to do with the actual delivery.

Both actors playing Uncle Andrew also did well, although Richard Syms (FOTF) sounded somehow just a little too “normal” and conventional. Robert Eddison (BBC) was closer to how I’ve always imagined Uncle Andrew speaking — more noticeably slimy and creepy-sounding! But that also didn’t really affect my overall enjoyment of both productions.

There was a bigger difference between the actresses playing Jadis — and curiously, her name is pronounced Jah-dis in the FOTF version, but Jay-dis in the BBC. FOTF obviously had Douglas Gresham working with them, and of course he knew the author personally, so did he confirm to them how Jack himself pronounced it? And yet, I’ve always thought Jay-dis — sounding like “jade” — is the more logical pronunciation, because jade, as well as being a beautiful and quite hard gemstone, is also an old term for a beautiful but cold-hearted woman. And if there ever was one of those in children’s literature… 

Anyway, to me, the FOTF Jadis — Elizabeth Counsell — was one of the let-downs. Her voice to me just seems too high-pitched and affected for the part, without much real hardness and scariness in it. This is the woman who, as we very soon learn, had no qualms about destroying every living thing in her world with a single word; she needs some steel in her voice, surely. But Counsell to me, a lot of the time, comes across more like some upper-class Victorian Englishwoman who’s a little miffed because her tea isn’t hot enough and the butler hasn’t ironed the newspaper. The BBC Jadis, Rosemary Martin, was a good deal better. Still not quite as terrifying as I imagine Jadis speaking, but a lot further along that road and definitely more convincing to listen to.

Frank the Cabby had a credible Cockney accent in both versions; I felt the BBC one (Johne Hollis) sounded slightly more accurate than the FOTF (Peter Goodwright), but I will readily admit I am not an expert myself on traditional English accents and I can’t say for sure! They both handled the role really well, anyway.

What I did find jarring, though, is that the FOTF producers then decided that Strawberry, the former cab horse, when he becomes a Talking Beast, should speak with a Cockney accent as well. Seriously… that just made him sound ridiculous. (And he kept the same accent even after he was turned into Fledge.) On the other hand, the BBC’s Strawberry / Fledge had a really strange-sounding voice with an accent I couldn’t quite place, but it didn’t sound like the kind of voice I would expect to come from a Talking Horse. I really didn’t like either version.

Now probably THE greatest and most dramatic scene in this story — and perhaps in any of the Chronicles — is the creation of Narnia through Aslan’s song. Both productions had a reasonable balance of alternating between the narrator describing what’s happening (as usual, mostly straight out of the book) and the characters commenting on it. The big difference between the two was in the way the song itself was handled — and this is where FOTF had one of its big let-downs. The sound used for Aslan’s song in that version is certainly “lovely” (as Frank describes it), but the problem is that it doesn’t sound at all like a voice singing, not even a magical one. Along with having almost no audible low notes in it, it sounds, unfortunately, like typical 1990s ambient “easy listening” music produced on a synthesiser. Which it probably is.  

Then when the stars start singing, you really can’t hear much difference between them and the main “voice”, especially since the latter started out too high already and the stars’ "voices" are just slightly higher notes on the same electronic instrument(s). What’s more, after the first minute or two, there’s so much talking over the music, by both the narrator and the characters, that the creation “song” gets almost drowned out for the rest of the scene and doesn’t sound any different from most of the rest of the background music we hear throughout the production. A big anti-climax all round.

The BBC version, by contrast, uses an actual singer’s voice for this part — I don’t know whether it’s Stephen Thorne (voice of Aslan) or a professional singer, but possibly the latter — with the result that the creation song actually sounds like singing. In keeping with the book, there are “no words” and “hardly even a tune”, just “ah” sounds from a single voice shifting from note to note. This part could easily have sounded hokey, but I was soon amazed at how well it was done; I’m not kidding when I say it literally raised the hairs on my spine (good music has that effect on me). Unlike the FOTF effort, this actually made one feel that something wondrous and magical was happening, and I could all the more easily picture the creation of Narnia taking place as it was described.

At one stage — when Aslan creates the trees and plants — the song becomes more like humming, and that sounded less convincing, but it turns back into actual singing (similar to the first part, but quicker and more varied) as the animals are created. Overall, the effect was brilliant and something really special. The stars’ voices in this version were a bit vague — just high-pitched, shimmery sounds — but at least there was enough contrast between them and the voice of Aslan for them to stand out as something different.

One thing I couldn’t help noticing was that although the BBC’s version of the creation song didn’t have a “tune” as such, it was all done using a pentatonic scale. A good choice, as that scale is found in music from most cultures around the world and is thought to be one of the oldest forms of music, and many people find it has a kind of magical, mystical-sounding quality to it. (For anyone who doesn’t know what I’m talking about, just play up and down all the black keys of a piano and you’ll get a pentatonic scale. Incidentally, it’s the scale that’s used for the familiar tune for Amazing Grace, and also for the long solo violin passages in The Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughan Williams — one of my all-time favourite pieces of music. But I digress. )

There’s one more major contrast between the two productions — something that absolutely cemented which one I very much preferred overall — but I’ll put that in one more post!

@courtenay 

Did the BBC radio drama actually use The Lark Ascending in the The Magician’s Nephew?  I think they used Holst’s The Planets in Focus on the Family’s Voyage of the Dawn Treader as background music. Incidentally, I will be going to a concert in my area which features that piece of music.  Classical music does seem to work well with Narnia. The BBC TV series used something much like it with Geoffrey Burgon’s music and it worked very well. I think the genre is also very good for the atmosphere of an audio production. 🙂

Posted by: @narnian78

@courtenay 

Did the BBC radio drama actually use The Lark Ascending in the The Magician’s Nephew?  I think they used Holst’s The Planets in Focus on the Family’s Voyage of the Dawn Treader as background music. 

No, they didn't — I simply mentioned The Lark Ascending as an example of music that uses the same kind of scale (pentatonic) that the BBC version used for Aslan's creation song. I haven't heard that version of VDT yet, so I will listen out for the music when I do, as I'm familiar with Holst's The Planets as well.

Anyway, here are my last thoughts for the two radio plays of The Magician's Nephew...

One of the most vital things in any adaptation of Narnia — and for me at least, one of the biggest factors in how much I enjoy it (or not) over all — is how they portray Aslan. He’s the only character who features in all seven of the stories and he is far and away the most important. I don’t say that just because he’s my personal favourite character (although he is), but because of what — and who — Lewis meant to portray through him. 

Whether or not we in the audience are believers in God / Jesus or indeed in anything “religious” at all, Aslan needs to strike us as someone totally, magnificently awe-inspiring — someone we would be simultaneously afraid and thrilled to meet face to face. Peter in LWW, before he’s ever met Aslan, sums it up: “I’m longing to see him… even if I do feel frightened when it comes to the point.” Or in the even more famous words of Mr Beaver, just before that: “‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.” 

I remember very well myself that right from when my mother first read LWW to me (I was still in kindergarten then), Aslan came across to me as somehow THE most amazing and wonderful character I had ever encountered in any story. I was raised in a totally non-religious family and barely knew anything about Jesus at that stage, but Lewis’s writing still had that effect on me. It only increased as I read the rest of the Chronicles a few years later — I was absolutely longing for Aslan to come into each story and was thrilled even when his name was mentioned — and I understood exactly what Lucy meant at the end of VDT when Aslan tells her she and Edmund will never come back to Narnia, and she replies, through tears: 

“It isn’t Narnia, you know… It’s you…. how can we live, never meeting you?” 

In short, if that quality of Aslan doesn’t come across at least reasonably well in an adaptation of Narnia, then basically the whole thing falls flat and loses the real point of what Lewis wanted these stories to mean and to do.

Out of all the actors I’ve heard as the voice of Aslan in screen and/or audio productions — Stephen Thorne, David Suchet, Ronald Pickup and Liam Neeson — I wouldn’t say any of them got the part absolutely perfect (which, to be fair, is a big ask and of course always rather subjective!). But some definitely come across more convincingly than others. And this is what I found to be the biggest (and most decisive) difference between these two radio adaptations.

Having listened to four out of the seven FOTF adaptations of the Chronicles some years ago (but not this one), I’d heard David Suchet as Aslan before and I already had quite a few reservations. On the lines where he speaks quietly and slowly and puts a lot of deep emotion into it, he generally does a good job. The rest of the time, though… 

(I should add right here that I have absolutely nothing against David Suchet personally — he is a truly talented actor, most famous for creating THE absolute definitive portrayal of Hercule Poirot, and he’s also an excellent presenter of documentaries on Christian history. It’s just that, especially after hearing this particular performance, I don’t think he was the best choice for the voice of Aslan.) 

One of the basic issues is that Suchet’s voice is relatively high-pitched for a man’s, which means that a lot of the time, even when his delivery of the lines is OK, it just does not sound like the kind of voice one would expect to come from a huge, magnificent, wild animal. There’s just no sense of depth and resonance and power in it most of the time. But then on top of that (and perhaps to compensate for the lack of a baritone, let alone bass, register?), he often seems to “ham it up” far too much — to deliver Aslan’s lines overly melodramatically, in a way that, for me at least, wrecks any sense of gravitas and makes it near impossible to take this character seriously.

One of the best (or worst) examples of this was on Aslan’s very first spoken words in this story, when he calls “Narnia, Narnia, Narnia, awake.” In both adaptations, each “Narnia” is louder and longer than the previous one, which makes dramatic sense. But in the FOTF version, Suchet also makes each one more high-pitched and much more sustained, until the third one comes out as a shriek of “NNNAAAAARRRNIIIAAAA!!!” — which, frankly, sounds like he’s screaming in intense pain, or at least straining hard to move something that just won’t budge. It’s ridiculous, honestly. On hearing that, I was left shaking my head, laughing incredulously, and doing my own imitations of it for the rest of the day.  

The same hopelessly overdone effect (though not as long and drawn-out) comes back just a few lines later, when Aslan is speaking to the newly created Talking Beasts: “I give you the STAAARS!!!” It just sounds so utterly silly and it reminded me a bit of Barbara Kellerman — the BBC TV series’ hilariously over-acting White Witch.

Even after that, though, there were so many other lines where the delivery was so jarring that it ruined the effect of the story for me. This stood out most of all in the part where Digory goes, with much trepidation, to speak with Aslan, and promptly finds himself pointed out as “the Boy who did it” and made to admit his fault in waking Jadis and bringing her into Narnia. Throughout this whole exchange in the FOTF version, Suchet’s voice as Aslan sounds nothing but over-dramatically outraged and nasty-tempered and snappish (and still too high-pitched for the part); the whole tone of it comes across as if he just wants to yell “HOW DARE YOU barge in and mess up my new world before I’d even finished creating it?!?!” 

Of course, at this stage in the story, Aslan does need to be stern with Digory, and Digory needs to recognise the wrong he has done and stop making excuses for it. But having Aslan speak in a way that sounds like nothing greater than a furiously indignant human being — one who apparently can’t keep his own temper under control — just diminishes both the impact of this scene and our impression of Aslan himself. If it had been done a lot more subtly, with him speaking in a much slower and deeper voice, quiet but with just a hint of menace in it, that would convey much more of a sense of Aslan’s sheer power and awesomeness, which unfortunately I found almost completely lacking in this adaptation.

(The book describes Aslan as “speaking very low and deep” at this point — and of course, when he first awakens Narnia, he does so in “the deepest, wildest voice they had ever heard” — but those cues seem to have been missed by whoever did the voice casting for FOTF.)

Stephen Thorne’s voice in the BBC version, by contrast, was excellent. Still not exactly how I (and possibly other Narnia fans) like to imagine Aslan speaking, but far more credible for the part — deep and resonant enough that when he spoke, I could definitely picture a huge Lion saying these words, which I honestly couldn’t throughout the FOTF version. And Thorne handles the full range of emotion needed for Aslan’s voice very well, without ever over-dramatising it — stern and powerful when needed, but also with humour at the right times, and real warmth, such as when Aslan declares that more evil will come of the Witch in the future, but “I will see to it that the worst falls upon myself.” The way Thorne delivered that particular line, there was a softening in his voice that conveyed the deep love that Aslan has for his creation. There were hardly any such beautiful subtleties in the other rendition.

Just one more specific scene I’ll comment on, as it also stood out as well done in one production and badly done to the point of ridiculousness in the other. When Aslan calls the Cabby’s wife out of our world into Narnia, we’re told in the book that he “uttered a long, single note; not very loud, but full of power.” In the BBC version, the same voice that was used in the excellent creation scene (whether it’s Stephen Thorne himself or a professional singer) sings a long, quite deep note, which then gets drawn out with some added sustaining and echoing effects, so it does sound reasonably like the call it’s meant to be. Whereas at this point in the FOTF version, David Suchet makes a bizarre and tuneless noise that I can only transcribe (inadequately) as something like “Mmmmm-woooooaaaahhh…” — which doesn’t sound like a call at all, let alone make us feel that, as the book tells us, “anyone who heard that call would want to obey it and (what’s more) would be able to obey it, no matter how many worlds and ages lay between.”  

So, to sum up at the end: both these audio dramas were well worth listening to and both very well done, in general, as adaptations of the original book, and both had plenty of things I really liked and some things I really didn’t. But to me, in the end, the only truly bad misstep the BBC production made was to cut out Digory’s inner struggle in the garden; everything else about that version was deeply enjoyable, especially the creation sequence. Whereas the FOTF version, I’m sorry to say, was not only less imaginative on the whole, but was hugely let down by the voice casting, and especially, overridingly, by the voice of Aslan. That for me ruined the credibility of what should otherwise have been an excellent effort.

My final overall ratings:

Focus on the Family: 6 out of 10

BBC Radio: 8.5 out of 10

I’m looking forward all the more now to listening to the rest of the stories in both versions and finding out how they come across!  

@courtenay 

I can’t say that I completely dislike David Suchet’s voice as Aslan. But he was certainly exaggerating the role.  He was overacting his voice, which can irritate people. Ronald Pickup and Liam Neeson were definitely more pleasant for listening.  I haven’t heard the BBC dramas so I cannot judge Stephen Thorne in the role.  I think Ron Moody was quite good as Puddleglum, although Tom Baker was the best. I think the people who chose the cast had some experience in making the selection and I think they would have known what they were doing. Maybe they could have read the books more carefully to understand the character of Aslan better. Or maybe David Suchet should have read more of C. S. Lewis to better understand the character he was playing.  But I am not the person who has the knowledge to criticize something like that. I am no expert, but I just know what I like and what I think could have been better. 🙂