DICKENS ON THE AIR
HE BBC serial of Oliver Twist, skilfully and competently made as always, was yet vaguely disappointing. It may have been that I still had vivid memories of the film, and especially of Alec Guinness’s superb Fagin. But the main reason, it seems lo me, lay in the book itself. Where the conversation of Trollope’s characters, for example, is often dramatic, and can be transferred almost intact to the air, Dickens makes extraordinary demands of the visual and imaginative, and the speech is often subordinate. In the last instalment (heard from 1YC) the death of Bill Sykes became little more than a mutter and a squawk. Nor was it possible to transfer to the air the description of Fagin in the condemned cell ("One man could nat bear to sit there, eyeing him alone; and so the two kept watch together"). Instead, a suggestion of it was cleverly devised out of scraps of monologue and conversation; and the end of it gave us, for good measure, the tolling of the prison clock, the fall of the trap, and the dreadful rejoicing of the mob. Here at least the radio, unable to give us all the original, found some- thing of an effective substitute.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19530410.2.20.1
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 717, 10 April 1953, Page 10
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206DICKENS ON THE AIR New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 717, 10 April 1953, Page 10
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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