Microphones in Middle-earth...the BBC Lord of the Rings

[Brian Sibley]

Originally Posted by davem

I did like the way Celeborn was played by Simon Cadell (& that the BBC budget stretched to employing an actor, rather than, as with the movie, having to resort to a robot...), though you do half expect him to greet the Fellowship with an awkward 'Hi de Hi!'...... No, unfair. Cadell's performance was subtle & informed.

I was surprised to realise that Cadell had already been in Hi de Hi (1980) when he worked on Rings. But I agree his performance in a small role was strong - and he was at least a real presence, unlike the film.

Originally Posted by davem

Which brings me to a question about the 'bit players' - how much background were they given as to their characters, & what was happening? And how many of them were like Michael Hordern, with no real clue about what was happening? Marian Diamond's Galadriel has always been one of my favourite performances - I love her voice.

Yes, Marian's performance was excellent and she worked wonders in those few short scenes without any radiophonic tricksy stuff. My problem with the film is similar to the reaction I have when Gandalf becomes threatening at Bag End - it is just so unsubtle...

How much were the actors told? Not a great deal, I imagine - the time constraints in the recording sessions were pretty severe. Probably not much more than any actor in a soap opera is given about what is to happen to them. I seem to remember drawing up a list of characters and who they were and various reference books (there were fewer of them then!) were available.

But most of the actors would have been told who/what their character was and - since they didn't have all 26 scripts before the recordings began - would have learned their destiny as each new episode came to them.

Unless, of course, they had read the book...

Originally Posted by davem

Oh yes, were any of the actors fans of the story beforehand? I know Peter Woodthorpe said at Church House that he only read the parts of the book in which Gollum appeared & didn't really know the other events of the story.

I'm trying to remember... Ian Holm, I think, had already read the book and certainly read it in close detail while preparing for the role. David Collings (Legolas) was a devoted fan of the book and knew it well which was a great help in the Fellowship scenes. I'm sure some of the others had read it or seen the truncated Bakshi version. The time available and the fees paid would probably not have induced many who hadn't read the book to do so...

I remember reading, in John (Bilbo) Le Mesurier's posthumous biography, a letter written to a show-biz friend saying something to the effect that he was working on The Lord of the Rings for the BBC, didn't have the faintest idea what it was all about but that it was all very jolly because he was working with old friends like Hordern who also didn't seem to know what was going on...

Which is a bit like real life, I guess...

Originally Posted by davem

What else? No Amon Hen. I wonder why (of course, one always assumes 'time constraints' as the reason for cuts, but I do wonder whether anything got cut simply because there was no way of dramatising it effectively). However, I did think the scene between Boromir & Frodo was brialliantly done. Michael Graham Cox conveyed all the pain, confusion, & egotistic desire of Boromir perfectly, the sense of a man in a state of absolute hopelessness grasping at what he feels is his people's only chance for survival. MGC is often ignored in discussions of the series, but I think he is absolutely brilliant here.

Amon Hen was cut for several reasons: time (always a pressing factor); the necessity to have Frodo soliloquising on the Seat of Seeing - always a difficult thing to achieve on radio; and because the Eye imagery had featured so recently in the Mirror of Galadriel episode where it had similarly been described in a mini-Frodo-monologue...

[davem]

Originally Posted by Brian Sibley

Yes, Marian's performance was excellent and she worked wonders in those few short scenes without any radiophonic tricksy stuff. My problem with the film is similar to the reaction I have when Gandalf becomes threatening at Bag End - it is just so unsubtle...

I think Jackson & the writers too often fell into the old 'show, don't tell' trap - film has advantages over radio in that you can show things, but there's always the temptation to show too much - to 'shout' rather than just 'say'. Brian Rosbury described movie Galadriel as a 'screaming sea-green hell-hag' or somesuch. Once again, as with the Balrog, radio allows the listener to visualise the characters/events as they wish, & not to have a director impose an image on them. Galadriel should not go 'psycho' at that point - however good the sfx a director has may be.

I'm trying to remember... Ian Holm, I think, had already read the book and certainly read it in close detail while preparing for the role. David Collings (Legolas) was a devoted fan of the book and knew it well which was a great help in the Fellowship scenes.
I remember reading, in John (Bilbo) Le Mesurier's posthumous biography, a letter written to a show-biz friend saying something to the effect that he was working on The Lord of the Rings for the BBC, didn't have the faintest idea what it was all about but that it was all very jolly because he was working with old friends like Hordern who also didn't seem to know what was going on...

Hmm, you know, listening to the Church House recording, I got the feeling that David Collings was in the same position of not really knowing the story. I don't know why - of course, Peter Woodthorpe tended to take over the discussion a bit! Did you have Ian or David doing an 'Ian McKellan', wandering the studio with a copy of the book & making 'suggestions'?

More seriuously - how much of the recording was out of sequence - I think I heard Jane Morgan mention that the last few episodes at least we're recorded in order, but was there a lot of jumping around Bag End one day, Pelenor Fields the next, then Lothlorien the day after, etc...

I didn't realise that John Le Mesurier was in the same boat as Michael Hordern & didn't know what was going on - still, the magic of radio (or Middle-earth) worked in both cases.

Amon Hen was cut for several reasons: time (always a pressing factor); the necessity to have Frodo soliloquising on the Seat of Seeing - always a difficult thing to achieve on radio; and because the Eye imagery had featured so recently in the Mirror of Galadriel episode where it had similarly been described in a mini-Frodo-monologue...

I see what you mean - Frodo's vision on Amon Hen, with the armies massing for the coming war, is one of the scenes from the book that sticks in my mind most strongly, but I don't see that working as a soliloquy, & you can't keep using the narrator to describe what's happening. Was there a temptation to keep resorting to the narrator - I think you hit the right balance, but it must be tempting to avoid the soliloquites, (or giving poor Pippin all the obvious questions to ask!) by just having the narrator tell the listener what's happening? Were there points at which you struggled over when to use a soliloquy & when to use the narrator - in other words did you only use the narrator when you couldn't use a character, or were there points where you could have written a scenes for the characters, but chose to use the narrator instead? What I'm getting at is did you decide to have a narrator in the series because there were things you couldn't handle any other way - was he a last resort - or was he seen as another character whose role was essential to telling the story?

[Brian Sibley]

Originally Posted by davem

Hmm, you know, listening to the Church House recording, I got the feeling that David Collings was in the same position of not really knowing the story. I don't know why - of course, Peter Woodthorpe tended to take over the discussion a bit! Did you have Ian or David doing an 'Ian McKellan', wandering the studio with a copy of the book & making 'suggestions'?

Maybe my memory is at fault regarding Collings, but I thought he knew the book pretty well. Woodthorpe was a lovely man and a great actor, but he never found it easy to share the spotlight!

Originally Posted by davem

More seriously - how much of the recording was out of sequence - I think I heard Jane Morgan mention that the last few episodes at least we're recorded in order, but was there a lot of jumping around Bag End one day, Pelenor Fields the next, then Lothlorien the day after, etc...

Not sure where or when Jane said that - or why... To teh best of my recall, with a few exceptions (to accommodate actors who would otherwise have had to come in for one day in order to deliver a couple of lines) the series was recorded episode by episode following the schedule I illustrated a few posts ago...

However, once the Fellowship had been broken and we were following three or more strands of story, it would be usual to record, say, all the Frodo and Sam scenes and then the Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas scenes and then those with Merry Pippin and the orcs.

The only other reason why scenes might be recorded significantly out of order would be because there were a couple of hours when we had access to the RDC (Radio Drama Company) and they were needed for 'crowd' scenes such as the party at Bag End and the bar of The Prancing Pony.

Otherwise, the recording schedule was pretty tightly followed - a day and a half per episode, two days for difficult sequences.

Originally Posted by davem

I didn't realise that John Le Mesurier was in the same boat as Michael Hordern & didn't know what was going on - still, the magic of radio (or Middle-earth) worked in both cases.

True!

Originally Posted by davem

I see what you mean - Frodo's vision on Amon Hen, with the armies massing for the coming war, is one of the scenes from the book that sticks in my mind most strongly, but I don't see that working as a soliloquy, & you can't keep using the narrator to describe what's happening. Was there a temptation to keep resorting to the narrator - I think you hit the right balance, but it must be tempting to avoid the soliloquies, (or giving poor Pippin all the obvious questions to ask!) by just having the narrator tell the listener what's happening? Were there points at which you struggled over when to use a soliloquy & when to use the narrator - in other words did you only use the narrator when you couldn't use a character, or were there points where you could have written a scenes for the characters, but chose to use the narrator instead? What I'm getting at is did you decide to have a narrator in the series because there were things you couldn't handle any other way - was he a last resort - or was he seen as another character whose role was essential to telling the story?

I think, now, that the remarks about the Narrator being another character which we made immediately after the series had been recorded, were probably something of a post-rationalisation.

The truth is that the radio style at the time was for someone to be telling the story (a character in the story or an authorial-voice-type Narrator); I don't think we ever thought of trying to do the story without a narrative voice and I'm pretty much certain that we primarily wanted to use that voice to get us as quickly as possible from A to B or to set a scene without having too many lines like "Look at those huge stone figures standing on either side of the river..."

Certainly I never consciously thought I was writing something specifically for the Narrator as a character - although Michael Bakewell has described writing a scene (the Balrog, perhaps?) for which, he said, he wrote a note in the script to the effect that even the Narrator should be astonished by this scene...

My initial choice was for Tolkien-like figure (authoritative, professorial) who would be telling you about his world. I later did something like that in my dramatisations of the Gormenghast books where the Narrator was 'The Artist' and whilst not sounding like Mervyn Peake was definitely intended to be the creative voice behind the stories...

I was, however, persuaded by that the argument (not that I actually had any choice in the matter!!) that it would be better to have a younger voice that could describe Middle-earth more in the style of a reporter describing a real place with real events.

I think it worked well, but if such a production were ever to be mounted today, the narrative device would be seen as too 'old fashioned' and it would probably be made without it. Narrator-less productions can be done: I did five of the seven Chronicles of Narnia in this way (the first two had a narrator), but it is difficult and sometimes the problems it creates and the loss to the richness of the story just aren't worth it!

By the way, we do seem to be having a very close-knit conversation on this list - considering how many people are apparently reading it!!

[davem]

I wouldn't be without Gerard Murphy's Narrator. I love his voice. In many ways he holds the whole thing together - however many storylines are running we always have Gerard's beautiful voice guiding us along. I honestly think that the narrator is vital & that the series would have been the poorer without him.

[Mithalwen]

He really conveys a sense of immediacy - narrators can sound far too "knowing" - which would of course have been a problem if one of the fellowship had been a narrator.

I was thinking about this partly in relation to a discussion elsewhere about the films, and unless you take a radically different approach to the material and lose the perspective of going through the story basically at hobbit level of knowledge (cf the difference between "TheQuest of Erebor" in UT and the Hobbit), you need a narrator who doesn't sound too omniscient.

I am sorry I have been so lacking in my contributions sinceI have so been enjoying my more focused re listenings. I am continually amazed at how much has been kept especially given the shortness of the original episodes and the consequent need to make allowances for new listeners.

I am also impressed that although I know the story so well I am still on tenterhooks at the dramatic moments and still moved.

This episode contains perhaps my favourite piece of dialogue which is given proper treatment - the "memory is not what the heart desires" . A good example of what for me makes this adaptation superior to the films. Yes this little sequence may not move the plot on but it tells so much about these characters - as characters, as representatives of their races and also gets to the heart of so much of the essence of the story. Courage is not enough nor is sacrifice. Gimli and Boromir are so confident of their strength that this moment of weakness make Gimli seem very human - for want of a more appropriate word.