- by Owen Morton
Those of you who know how my mind works will probably already have realised that this article isn’t going to focus on the books that were the Chronicles of Narnia. Remember, this website doesn’t discuss things that are actually good (apart from Buffy, and even that not very often), and the books were really quite good. They were, admittedly, Christian propaganda, and heavily disguised Christian propaganda at that, which is of course the worst kind. But despite that failing, I think it has to be said that they were good children’s books: they told an exciting story, which is really all you need.
They were so good, in fact, that in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, the BBC decided to go to the trouble of dramatising some of them as a Sunday evenings’ children’s programme. The BBC’s record in these Sunday night dramas was a little dubious, to tell the truth, because for the period that I watched them, they consisted of three series’ of Narnia, two series’ of something called ‘Merlin of the Crystal Caves’, which was just deeply dreadful, and also a couple of series of the Borrowers. The latter of these, actually, wasn’t too bad, as far as I remember. It starred Ian Holm, who I really quite like as an actor. The day they get him on Buffy, the greatest TV show ever, will be the greatest day in the history of television. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely to ever happen, given that I believe Buffy only has one more episode to show ever, and then it’s finished.
Anyway, we’ve got off track. As usual. What we’re going to talk about today is, of course, the BBC series of Narnia, and how it was treated. Obviously, I’m not going to be complimentary. I remember watching these things when I was little, and if it had remained purely in my memory, I’d always have thought they were good, and thus I’d have never had to write this article. Sadly, or happily, depending on how you look at it, a couple of Christmases ago, I received on video the complete set of BBC dramatisations of the Chronicles of Narnia. I’ll admit, I’ve only watched The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe and Prince Caspian on my videos, but I think I can safely assess The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair on the basis of these two. When I was insulting them, my dad told me that I had to look at them in the context of the time they were made. Okay, that excuses the dodgy special effects, but the acting? No. And anyway, looking at things in the context of their own time is much less fun. Does anyone now assess He-Man in the context of its own time? Well … okay, yes, they do, but only because it was rubbish then too.
So, without further ado, here is my discussion of the BBC dramatisations of the Chronicles of Narnia!
We don’t really need to go through the storylines, partly because I’m going to assume you know them (if you don’t, go away and find them out, by reading the books NOT watching the programme), and partly because they’re actually lifted pretty faithfully from the books, so there’s nothing too stupid in them anyway. Essentially, in The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, four children, Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy are evacuated from London just before the Blitz and have to stay with an old man in the countryside. In his house they find a magical passage into a land of ice and snow, which is called Narnia, and is under the domination of an evil witch. They all assist Aslan the Lion (who is basically Jesus, but you don’t notice that if you’re less than about fifteen years old) in destroying the witch and restoring Narnia to peace. The four children then become the Kings and Queens of Narnia and rule over the land for many years, before accidentally all stumbling back through the passage into the old man’s house, to find themselves children again.
Okay! So, where do we start? Well, let’s first consider the four children. They are among the worst actors I have ever seen. I know I say that a lot, but I reserve a special place in my List Of Things I Despise for child actors, because, to this day, I have never come across one I don’t think should be shot on sight, apart from those for whom I have reserved an even worse fate (the girl who plays Naomi Wildman on Star Trek: Voyager, for example), details of which I’d probably better not go into in the interests of keeping me at liberty. Lucy especially is a really poor actress. Okay, she probably is only about eight years old, but out of the hundreds of eight year old girls they must have had going for this role, was this one really the best they could find? She probably actually only seems worse because she’s got a bigger part, but still, perception is everything. In parts this is unwatchably bad. Sadly, I can’t remember any particular examples, since it has been about a year since I watched these videos, though I seem to recall the scene in which Edmund pretended he didn’t know about Narnia and thus made Lucy look really stupid in front of Peter and Susan was a really poor example of acting on Lucy’s part.
Next, I’m going to have a go at the special effects. They were really bad as well. In the scenes where the Witch starts gathering all her evil forces to her, she calls up some ghosts and ghouls and suchlike. These ghosts are very, VERY obviously cartoons superimposed over the live action. It looks extremely surreal but, regrettably, not very good. I must express disbelief at two things: firstly, that the BBC executives who gave this thing the green light actually accepted that these ghosts were the best they could do, and secondly, that at the time, these ghosts clearly passed me by and I must have accepted them as quite good, because otherwise little memory bells would have gone off in my head when I saw them again – but this didn’t happen.
The costumes were really bad too. Aslan, being a lion, was of course two men in a pantomime lion costume, which wouldn’t have been too bad if it hadn’t been patently obvious that it would such. You could actually see the join where the front half fitted into the back. The beavers – imaginatively called Mr. And Mrs. Beaver, even in the book – looked like nothing at all, except were perhaps vaguely reminiscent of very furry gorillas. What was even more sad in the case of the beavers was that the director of this atrocity, evidently realising that the actors looked like some indeterminate but very furry beast, thought that the best way to make them look more like beavers would be to have them holding her hands in front of them, angled downwards, for the entirety of the production. I really don’t know why this was thought to be effective. It simply gave the characters the impression of being completely demented – though perhaps they did want to convey this impression, since the beaver costumes did come equipped with fixed inane grins.
And I’m going to stop here, because on thinking about it, it’s true that all I ever do is complain. I suddenly feel like an extremely sad person who can’t do anything himself, so all he does is level criticisms at everything anyone else tries to achieve. And it’s not a very nice feeling, actually. I shouldn’t imagine it’ll stop me doing future website articles, but right now, I just don’t feel like it’s something I should be doing.