The 1981 BBC Lord of the Rings radio adaptation reviewed.

Obviously I heard this at the time as a teenager. But it’s been decades, and it took a prompt from a friend on Facebook to excavate this experience – the experience of the 1981 BBC radio dramatisation of Lord of the Rings.

First of all, there is the music by Stephen Oliver – which is magical. Stephen Oliver, uncle to the famous sardonic TV host John Oliver, was cruelly taken from us by the AIDS virus at the stupidly young age of 42. Oliver’s score consists of a main theme dominated by jagged chords which express the sheer effort of questing. It’s a theme expressive of hard fought time and space, something that reminds us that the joy of Tolkien involves descriptions of pages and pages about trudging about in the wilderness feeling cold and miserable. Oliver’s songs are also a joy, as careful and discrete orchestrations underscore the actual voices.

Brian Sibley, principal adaptor, is a Tolkien scholar of note and is the sort of person who knows everyone of of those “Books of Lost Tales” forwards, backwards and diagonally. His dramatisation keeps as much of Tolkien’s dialogue as possible. There are a few strategic edits. The whole drama begins with the torture of Gollum in Mordor – an event which the book leaves us to dimly imagine. As with the Bakshi and Jackson films, the hobbits escape the Shire straight to Bree, leaving out the detour through the Old Forest, the encounter with Tom Bombadil and the nightmarish Barrow Wights. Otherwise, this version is very faithful. There are a few odd moments. Instead of having the destruction of Isengard reported after the event by Merry and Pippin to Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli – we get a more direct dramatisation of the event which actually precedes the telling of the Battle of Helm’s Deep. What gets lost by this rearrangement is the sheer shock and wonderment experienced by the Helm’s Deep survivors when they see what Isengard has become. In a tiny change, the sceptical Rohirrim warrior who suspects that Gandalf has left Theoden in the lurch is Hama the doorwarden. In the book, Hama is a decent guy throughout, and dies heroically in battle. (Yes, it takes a certain kind of Tolkien fan to spot and object to that.)

The Battle of the Pelennor Fields is developed cleverly by singing the Rohan lay written in its wake and inserting battle dialogue in between its verses.

Perhaps the most notable decision made involves indulging the full proportionate pathos of the slow return home following the Destruction of the Ring. The goodbyes are given the full elongated treatment, and by the end of the drama we are left with a heightened sense of the individual tragedy that is Frodo’s. If you are not sobbing at the Grey Havens, you may be impervious to certain forms of drama.

There is a tendency not to want to work the narrator (Gerard Murphy) too hard, and to attempt to transfer some of the descriptions into dialogue. This strategy must presumably mark all efforts to turn novels into radio dramas? Sam (Bill Nighy) is rather awkwardly forced to narrate the process of his battle with Shelob in real time. In fact, radio drama serves to highlight the fact that Sam is, for two or three chapters, the most profoundly lonely character in the entire epic as Sam is forced to talk to himself for extended periods. It is, of course, a profoundly moving performance. I have some difficulty seeing Nighy’s face while hearing him.

This being radio, it’s a drama of seasoned voices rather than fresh faces. Certain familiar voices are worth noting. Jack May is King Theoden and since Jack May’s was the voice of Nelson Gabriel, it is hard to imagine a more familiar voice in a BBC radio context. He is a fairly haughty Theoden, whose friendship with Merry never quite rings true. Denethor, who is given rather cursory treatment in the Jackson movies, is given the far more hauntingly querulous voice of Peter Vaughan, who communicates the bitterness and grief of the character as effectively as you’d imagine. The perfectly named Marian Diamond realises Galadriel as a walking song. Stephen Thorne (whom three Doctors fought as Omega) is a suitably slow Treebeard. I have to say that the Nazgul don’t sound all that phantasmagoric, and the orcs don’t sound all that degraded. The orcs sound less like Millwall supporters and more like middle aged Spurs fans. Perhaps this dramatisation is comparatively weak on “evil”. Then there is John le Mesurier as a Bilbo who is perceptibly damaged by long ring ownership – who is exhausted by it and becomes intermittently somewhat nagging and demanding.

Ian Holm’s performance reminds us that Frodo was, after all, the eldest of the four hobbits. He’s in early middle age and demonstrates far more maturity certainly than Merry or Pippin. He becomes somewhat petulant by the time he reaches Mordor, and the snappish quality with which he treats Sam makes his final inability to cast aside the ring seem all the more plausible. Best of all is Holm’s Frodo when tired and wounded. Sorrowful resignation is a mood that Holm can accommodate with some confidence. This is a hobbit who has been hollowed out by unspeakable heaviness.

Peter Woodthorpe invented the Gollum voice as we know it. He just did. He voiced Gollum in the Bashki film and in this adaptation and Andy Serkis had no choice but to inherit and very slightly adapt it. Fun fact – Peter Woodthorpe also voiced “Pigsy” in the English version of the immortal Monkey!

The greatness of Michael Hordern as an actor seems clearer and clearer to me with every passing year. Nobody did inefficient patriarchy better than Hordern. He was the perfect Plautian senex and a wonderful Sir Anthony Absolute (I got to see that, I did!). But he was also a very great Lear. Anything that ruthlessly exposed the limited powers of the patriarch – was Hordern’s world. How does this suit Gandalf? I’ve been giving the matter some thought. Gandalf is not like other wizards you have known. He is not serene. He is not prophetic. You do not go and visit him – he comes to you. He bustles and is busy and when he is riding Shadowfax he regularly beats Middle Earth land speed records. And this bustling quality allows Hordern to be a very great Gandalf, he is someone who does not control events but who pursues them – who does not stand back and nod his head sagely but fights in the front row. Ian Mckellen’s Gandalf is little more than a plausible impression of Michael Hordern’s performance.

Above all, perhaps, there is the very great Robert Stephens as Aragorn. Acknowledged as the equal of the great hard-drinking hell-raisers of the 1960s like Richards Harris and Burton, he never quite gained the same cinematic prominence. In the 1980s, he re-emerged as a great stage talent. I never saw his Falstaff, but I saw him very close up as King Herod in Tony Harrison’s Mystery Cycle. The voice of Robert Stephens, a voice that seems capable of indicating every conceivable vowel and diphthong within each and every syllable – is unmistakeable – and perfect for depicting the strangely ageless indeterminacy of a Numenorean. (To impersonate Robert Stephens, imagine that every vowel is every vowel.) When you hear him for the first time in the Prancing Pony, he sounds rustic – and the rusticity of Strider remains a leitmotif that interrupts the steady majesty of King Elessar. He is a man of destiny and a man who lives many lives simultaneously.

So I will not wait another forty years before listening to this again. In fact, I’d better not.