The Lord of The Rings- as a book, on radio and as a movie

We are currently listening to the BBC radio adaptation of 'The Hobbit.' I had  the entire Hobbit and Lord of the Rings on CD as a Christmas present two years ago, and have not yet got round to listening to it. As I bought Carol a DAB radio with a CD player in it we decided to start listening. I remember listening to it when it was originally broadcast in 1968. Those were the days before cassette recorders, there was no way to record radio broadcasts, and even if there was, I doubt I would have still had the recording. I did have a reel-to-reel tape recorder, a Grundig, which I bought from a teacher at school. You could record programmes by putting the microphone in front of the radio's speaker and record that way, but it wouldn't have been very good as you'd get all sorts of extraneous noises recorded, if someone spoke at the same time as the programme being aired, or a car went past. I think, later on, I managed to be able to connect a lead somehow to the speaker and use the direct link into the tape recorder which was a good deal better. Today, or course, you can download an MP3 file from the broadcaster's website or record onto CD, but thankfully the BBC has had the good sense to release a good deal of their material onto CD. This complete recording has presumably been re-mastered digitally.

I've read 'The Hobbit' and 'The Lord of The Rings.' I have to admit to being something of a J.R.R. Fan. I had heard of 'The Hobbit' when I was at school, but never read it until I was a good deal older because I had considered it to be a children's novel. But I read it and loved it. It's got so much going for it. As if you didn't know, it's a sort of prequel to 'The Lord of The Rings.' A teacher was reading that when I was at school, so I knew about it. Being an avid reader for most of my life, I would read anything and everything I could lay my hands on. I think I have always had something or other to read for most of my life, a habit I began at school, where we were expected to have a book to read or to at least get something out of the library and have it to read if we had nothing else to do. I'm so glad to have had that habit. I originally had the paperback of 'The Hobbit' and later got the illustrated edition which was done by Alan Lee. He was the concept artist for the Peter Jackson adaptation of 'The Lord of The Rings.' His illustrations fit quite well with how I imagined the characters and the locations of Middle Earth might look like.

In about 1971 I went to work at the Liverpool Playhouse as an A.S.M. I took with me the complete paperback edition of the 'Lord of The Rings.' I bought it when I had gone to London with my brother Robert. I can't say I remember what we were doing in London at the time. I think he may have gone with me to an interview for a job. I would have been around 19-20 at the time I suppose. I read the book when I had a spare moment at the theatre, in the Green Room. It certainly made an impression on me. Like 'The Hobbit,' it has a journey (or two, or three, perhaps more.) at the heart of it. A quest. I think I got to really love the central characters, particularly Frodo (the nephew of Bilbo, who is the central character in 'The Hobbit.') He is flawed, like most of us. He gets scared on the way to dispose of The Ring (I won't spoil it for those who have yet to read and enjoy this magical tale.) He is reacquainted with Gollum, whom he first meets in 'The Hobbit.' A more devious and calculating character you won't find in any other book, but he's interesting and it's difficult to not feel a certain amount of sympathy for the little blighter. I have read the whole trilogy at least four more times. I think perhaps every decade (so I think a re-read is about due soon.) I had the three separate books, 'The Fellowship of The Ring,' 'The Two Towers' and 'The Return of The King.' I bought it through one of those book clubs you used to see advertised in magazines such as 'The Sunday Times' and 'The Telegraph.' You had to buy around 6 books for £5 or something, and then buy a further so many within your first year. I don't know what happened to those books. I've moved house so many times, no doubt they got left somewhere or other. Then, a good deal later, I bought the complete trilogy which came out with the Alan Lee illustrations. Again, from one of those book clubs. I think it was called The Softback Preview or something. You can see that I'm a bit of a book freak, so these book clubs were so tempting to me. Unfortunately the copy I had had a fault in it. Part-way through reading it, I discovered that there was a large part missing, one of the 'sets' of pages was missing. It was an expensive edition, selling full-price for around £50. I returned it and got a replacement. Again, another book that has been lost. More like mislaid, unfortunately. I will have to buy it again to read all over again.

Then in the 1980's the BBC did the remarkable Radio Four adaptation. I listened and loved it. It was later bought out on cassette. I was a member of the record library at Bedford Central Library and had the cassettes out to listen to. Then, much more recently, the whole set was published on the far more sophisticated CD system, along with 'The Hobbit.' I saw it for sale in 'The Works' in Milton Keynes and being sold for a ridiculously low price, something like £20. I'm not sure what it full price would have been. Probably around £100 I would imagine. I had it as a Christmas present for Christmas 2015. It has been sitting on our bookshelf ever since and hadn't been played until last night.

There had been a movie version of 'The Lord of The Rings' made in the late 1970's. It was animated and wasn't very good. They attempted to cram two of the books into one movie. Not exactly memorable. I believe that 'The Hobbit' was done a similar way but I have never seen it. Then in around 1999 it was announced that a new trilogy was to be produced, by Peter Jackson, and using the latest computer technology and to be filmed in New Zealand. I was wary of this, as it's a beloved sequence of novels and it was likely to spoil the whole Middle Earth concept. But I saw it and wasn't disappointed. It was as near as perfect as you could make an adaptation of a novel. I'm talking of the first book, 'The Fellowship of The Ring.' I think it came out in 2001. The next year saw the second film, 'The Two Towers' and the following year 'The Return of The King.' Ian McKellen played Gandalf and was, to my way of thinking, almost born to play the part. He gave the character a certain gravitas and his voice a real power and authority the character required. Also, the C.G.I. animated Gollum almost equally perfect. When the character was on screen it was captivating. It was difficult to imagine him being created any other way.

After the success of the Lord of The Rings movies, it was inevitable that a movie version of 'The Hobbit' would be made. Apparently it wasn't so easy to acquire the rights to the book, but soon it was set up and made, with Ian McKellen reprising his role as Gandalf. The only problem I have with the whole idea of this project was when they decided to make three films out of the book. As it is no more than 250 pages long, I could not see how on earth you could possibly get three movies out of it. It only needed to be done as a single movie. No doubt, with the success of the 'Rings' trilogy, the accountants got hold of the thing and realised they could make more money out of three movies instead of just one. Leaving the audience 'wanting more' after parts one and two was too obvious. At the time of writing I have not seen these movies and I'm not sure I want to. Why on earth spin out the plot over around six hours of screen-time when it obviously only required around a third of the time?

Recent Reading . . . and some Writing . . . Part 1

I have quite a wide taste in what I enjoy reading. I've had a passion for good reading since I was quite a young age. When I was at school we were always supposed to have something to read, taken out of the school library or else bought from a local shop. Infant, it's a habit which I have continued to this day. I always have a book to read and once one is read I have another to read.  I read Arthur Ransome's "Swallows and Amazons" and the later books which featured the same characters. "We Didn't Mean To Go To Sea" which I believe was set in and around Essex, along the coast from where we used to go on holiday when I was a child, Frinton-On-Sea, Walton-On-Naze and all the little inlets along that stretch of coast. The characters were real to me, and the stories were good. I'm not sure whether children read them today. I think they were written in the 1920's and 30's so perhaps they wouldn't appeal to modern children, bought up with iPads, Gameboys, Nintendo etc. My father was a sailor and had yachts which were sailed along that bit of coast, around the Colne Estuary, Brightlingsea as well as Frinton (see earlier blog posts on our family holidays.) So a series of books featuring children who sailed was of interest to me, not that I was a sailor myself. My father put me off, to some extent, as he wasn't the most patient of people, when it came to his children in a boat he was sailing. When I went to work as a D.S.M. at Century Theatre in Keswick in the early 1970's they were in the process of making a film version of "Swallows and Amazons" on Lake Windermere, although I was too busy with the season of plays we were producing to be able to watch any of the filming, which was a real shame.

I got hooked on anything with a really good plot. I was a radio drama fan (something I doubt children of today can say.) Radio Four (or the good old Home Service it was named up until about 1967 when the B.B.C. introduced us to Radio 1, 2, 3 and 4. No doubt it was easier to give the stations numbers than to come up with any other name.) I think it's the fact that, with a radio adaptation, you have to use your imagination far wore than when it's done in a visual medium, such as film or television or even stage. For that I think Radio Four is quite unique. Where else can you get such a rich selection of drama? Nowhere I can think of. I got hooked on adaptations of novels, done as "Saturday Night Theatre" as well as a Sunday night adaptation of books as well as stage plays. It was through an adaptation of "Rebecca" by Daphne Du Maurier, that I discovered not only that novel, but all, or about all, her other novels, such as "Frenchman's Cove", "Jamaica Inn" as well as her later novels such as "The House On The Strand." Such an incredible author, how she could evoke a place, such as Cornwall where most of her earlier novels are set. "The House On The Strand" is a particularly clever piece of writing, and it worked so well as a radio piece and wouldn't work as a film or a television series (thankfully.) and knowing today's television it would be ruined. "Rebecca" is perhaps best known as being made into a film by Albert Hitchcock and starring Laurence Olivier as Max DeWinter. It has been adapted for television a couple of times, the first with Joanna David as "The Girl" and then much more recently with Charles Dance. More of Daphne DuMaurier's stories have  been made into films, most famously, another Hitchcock adaptation being "The Birds" as well as "Don't Look Now" with Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland and directed by Nicholas Roeg. It's a really scary film and, although a good 40-plus years old, well worth a view if you get a chance to see it. It's shown regularly on television although you could get it on DVD. I supposed DuMaurier would be considered a 'woman's novelist' and I suppose, when I first came across her, not having then read anything of hers, it would have put me off,  as I think I might have thought the novels to be sort of 'Mills and Boon-ish', but how wrong could I be, as her books are so well plotted and the characters so captivating, particularly "Rebecca" that I was soon hooked and had to read more of them.

In the late 1960's Radio Four did a quite brilliant serialisation of the J.R.R. Tolkien novel "The Hobbit." It was done in eight episodes. I have recently managed to purchase this adaptation of a set of CD's from "The Works" in Milton Keynes. As a result of the radio adaptation I read the book and later on I discovered "The Lord of The Rings" (also adapted for B.B.C. Radio and part of the CD set.) I had it originally in a very thick paperback edition which I think I bought on a trip into London and took with me when I went to work as an A.S.M. at Liverpool Playhouse in the early 1970's. I read it every decade or so after that, and had it in three hard-bound editions, I think purchased from Book Club Associates and later I had an illustrated, one volume edition. So I know the trilogy very well and enjoyed the Peter Jackson movie trilogy which was pretty faithful to the original. At the time of writing this I haven't seen "The Hobbit." It seems unnecessary to me to make it into three films, because it's a relatively straightforward book. No doubt it was done for financial reasons, which seems a shame. I may eventually get round to viewing it on D.V.D.

Foggy and Gloomy

Walked to Netherfield along the Redway this morning. Been to buy milk in the Co-Op there and to post a letter. The trees have still got a lot of their leaves, and those are mostly a variety of browns, yellows and in between. Quite vivid. I have taken some photographs are the colours are stunning. No sun out this morning, as there's a thick fog, although by the time I set out to walk to Netherfield the visability had improved. 

We have recently bought a Samsung Galaxy tablet. We had a demonstration of these devices in the Milton Keynes Shopping Centre a week or two ago, and were most impressed by the performance. We then went to John Lewis and had a similar demonstration of the latest iPad, and afterwards came to the conclusion that the Samsung was the better of the two touch-screen tablets. Apple spends a fortune on advertising and publicity. You cannot turn around without there being something about their gadgetry, whether it's for the latest iPad, iPod or iPhone. I have always been an Apple fan and have used them since university, which is where I first used computers and have always used Apple computers (this is written on an iMac, although not the most up to date model, running the latest version of OSX.) But I have to say the Samsung is a very good machine and is perhaps better than the Apple iPad. You get a lot of software already loaded, such as Photoshop photo editing and word processing. There are plenty of apps that run on it, too, and a lot of them are free. It is wifi-connected, and it's relatively easy to set up. We had the thing up and running within minutes of opening the box when it arrived.

I am continuing with my novel. I have at last found a way of linking some of the story-elements together which I hadn't got previously. As I've said in an earlier post, the plotting and story-construction is probably the most important factor when writing something like this. Once you have it in place, the actual writing is surprisingly easy. Just getting something down on paper means you can sort of 'join up the dots' if you like, and the story takes shape accordingly. With so many 'plots' this is quite important. 

I am currently reading 'Les Miserables.' It is an extremely long book, around 1600 pages or so. A lot of different plots, and the construction is a real influence on my own novel. I have seen the stage musical, which I loved, and I'm really looking forward to the film which is due out around Christmas.  Makes you wonder, having read the novel, how on earth anyone would attempt an adaptation. I have seen the trailer, and, if the it's is anything to go by (some trailers don't do justice to the actual film.) the film should be very good. It would appear to have an 'epic' feel to it. The other film that I can't wait to see is 'The Hobbit' although I can't see how such a slight book can be made into three films. I really loved the 'Lord of The Rings' trilogy, perhaps the most faithful adaptation of a novel that I've seen. I have read this 4 times and each time I find something different in it which I didn't find in the previous reading. I just hope these new films come up to expectations. Again, the trailer would suggest that it's going to be very good.