The Lost Lost World

I'm reading the book The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. It's not about running. It's a book by Alan Sillitoe about the bleak working class life in Nottingham, England; published in 1959. It's not about radio. (It's not about music either, though Sillitoe has inspired both The Smiths and the Arctic Monkeys.) My copy is a very crumbly Signet paperback which may not survive this reading. It's not about radio. But there was a passing reference which is relevant to our on-going radio theme here:

"The governor would have a fit if he could see me sliding down the bank because I could break my neck or ankle, but I can't not do it because its the only risk I take and the only excitement I ever get , flying flat out like one of them pterodactyls from the 'Lost World' I once heard on the wireless..."

This seemed to be a reference from life. Alan Sillitoe, having been born in 1928 could have heard the Lost World on the BBC either as a youth or an adult, or both. The reference even contextualizes the time and place of the novel.But which broadcast was he referring to?

The Lost World was written by Arthur Conan Doyle and first published in 1912, [LINK]. So it wasn't new, but already becoming a classic when Sillitoe was a young man. The Lost World has been translated into a radio drama many times. Ever popular, "Lost Worlds" have become their own sub-genre of science fiction. Because of that timeline, we have the interesting question of which version Sillitoe was referring to. Sillitoe would have been about sixteen in 1944, the same age as the fictional protagonist Colin Smith. For that reason I favor the first two broadcast versions, and generally the 1944 BBC broadcast. Sillitoe would have been 21 for the 1949 version and already on a military pension in France recovering from tuberculosis.

I've collated multiple sources which describe various radio versions of the Lost World, those include: the Conan Doyle website, and the books Carbon Dates by Donald F. Glut, and  Dinosaurs by the Decades by Randy Moore. The sources all reference different but largely overlapping catalogs of the different radio adaptations. The three  that predate the Sillitoe book are from 1938, 1944 and 1949. That first 1938 radio script of Lost World was written by the playright Mervyn Mills and broadcast by the BBC as six, 45-minute episodes from 2 November, 1938 on Wednesday. (Mills also wrote the pulp novel Long Haul.) 

Title	Episodes	Station/Release	Year	Link
The Lost World	6	BBC	1938	N/A
The Lost World	6	BBC	1944	N/A
The Lost World	6	BBC Light Programme	1949	N/A
The Lost World	5	BBC	1952	N/A
The Lost World	1	BBC	1958	N/A
Dinosaurs!	4	MGM/Leo the Lion Records	1966	LINK
The Lost World	3	BBC Radio 4 Classic Serial)	1975	LINK
The Lost World	1	BBC1 (BBC for Schools)	1975	LINK
The Lost World	3	(RNZ) Radio New Zealand	1980	N/A
The Lost World	3	Audio book & VHS	1997	LINK
The Lost World	2	BBC Radio 4 Classic Serial	2011	LINK

In 1944 BBC Secretary Peggy Wells wrote a six, 25-minute episode version, which was broadcast live in April and May that year. Wells contributions to radio are under-appreciated, she adapted world by Noel Coward, H.E. Bates, A.A. Milne, Jane Austen, Graham Greene, Hugh Williams, Thomas Anstey Guthrie and she also contributed works to the program Saturday Night Theater plays on BBC into the 1970s. There is no complete source for her contributions though she appears multiple times in the book Women Writers Dramatized by H. Philip Bolton. She started at the BBC before 1945, and by the 1970s her name literally appeared in the BBC Handbook. More here.  

That 1944 version was a dramatic reading starring Carr as the sole narrator, playing the part of all characters. Carr is better known today as a writer of detective novels. Born in the US in 1906, he relocated to England in the 1930s. There became an author, and in addition to his 52 detective novels, also wrote radio plays. His scripts appeared in the Suspense series, and other works for the BBC. In the 1940s he even hosted the series Murder by Experts, which was broadcast on WOR for the Mutual network. More here.

Carr was a genuine fan of Doyle. In 1945 he wrote radio adaptions for two other Doyle tales: The Adventure of the Speckled Band, and Silver Blaze. Later in 1948, Doyle's son, Adrian granted Carr access to family papers so that he could write an official biography of Arthur Conan Doyle published in 1949: The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. 

Peggy Wells revised her 1944 script in 1949 for producer Ayton Whitaker for a live October broadcast on the BBC Light Programme. The cast included with narrator Richard Williams, and actors: Abraham Sofaer, Ivor Barnard, Lewis Stringer, Cyril Gardiner.  In 1952 an adaptation by John Keir Cross was broadcast in five 20-minute episodes. (He was the author of Angry Planet) More here. According to Robert Lewis Taylor, writing for the New Yorker in 1951, [SOURCE] Adrian Doyle specifically requested that John Dickson Carr act in an advisory capacity for the1944 radio adaptation. Carr's biography, The Man who Explained Miracles, by Douglas Greene does not credit Whitaker or Wells leading to some dubious attribution in secondary sources.

The 1958 version is poorly documented. But the basic facts are known and documented on the BBC website. It was broadcast on Thursday January 2nd, 1958 at 5:00 PM on BBC Home Service Basic, on the program Children's Hour. Generally described as "excerpts" it was adapted by Marion MacWilliam and Ian G. Ball. The cast included: Olive Shapley as host, Hilda Lewis, Effie Morrison, Joan Fitzpatrick, Cuthbertson Leonard Maguire, David Webster and Eileen McCallum.

In 1975, Barry Campbell was commissioned to revise Peggy Wells' 1944 scripts and convert them into three, 55-minute episodes. But by then Well's 2nd episode script was already lost. It had to be creatively reconstructed before the broadcast. That versions cast included Francis de Wolff, Gerald Harper, Kevin McHugh, and Carleton Hobbs. Campbell adapted enough fiction into radio dramas that he has his own Discogs page.

I have also read that a second radio adaptation was released in 1975 as part of the "BBC for Schools" program which was not the same. The BBC Schools series aired from 1957 into 1983. But this specific broadcast does not seem to be well documented. Beyond being highly plausible, all I've found is a passing reference in an issue of Educational Television International magazine. 

The 1980 RNZ broadcast an adaptation produced by Peggy Wells and Barry Campbell. Peggy Wells would have to have been in her late 60s at this point in her career and without a doubt the most experienced adapter of the text. Campbell had revised the text only 5 years earlier for his version. The team up is interesting, clearly they knew each other from their time at the BBC. This version starred Terrence Cooper as Professor Challenger and was complete with incidental score and dinosaur audio effects. (Some sources incorrectly cite the broadcast date as 1982.) More here.

Terrence Cooper died in 1997 and likely missed the next popular adaptation aka the New Zealand version. This adaptation differs from the original version significantly. It was produced by The Alien Voices, a radio drama company and they performed live with a full team of foleys for sound effects. Alien Voices was founded by Star Trek actors Leonard Nimoy and John de Lancie. All the characters are played by actors from the Star Trek TV series. You can actually buy an audio book version of this one which I do recommend. 

The most recent version was on the BBC in 2011. That versions cast included Jamie Glover, Brian Robb Jonathan Forbes, Jasmine Hyde, Jane Whittenshaw, Nyasha Hatendi and Vinicius Salles. More here. Out of all those 11 versions, somewhat inexplicably the only one which was officially endorsed by the estate of Arthur Conan Doyle was the 1966 LP version (CH-1016) that came out in 1966 on MGM/ Leo the Lion records. It was narrated by Basil Rathbone. More here.

BBC Christmas Ghost Stories

It seems like an odd mix: the Christmas holiday and ghost stories. In America the holiday is awash in cloying animated cartoons and schmaltzy family-friendly movies. Our classic films are somehow even more cloying and schmaltzy despite the black and white format... But the British has had ghost stories in the Christmas radio broadcasts since at least 1923. [LINK]

But for decades in the UK, Christopher Lee sat there in front of a roaring fire reading the bone-chilling stories of  Montague R. James. [LINK] It all aired originally in the 1970s but continues to be re-run for the holidays. So here this British tradition seems incongruous. Perhaps it's those pagan Saturnalia origins of Christmas. More here. But on a website dedicated to James, they even notes:

 "Many of M.R. James's ghost stories were written to be read aloud as Christmas Eve entertainment to select gatherings of friends at Cambridge." 

So those M.R. James short stories, written largely before 1920... were intended for Christmas. Then there is A Christmas Carol, published in 1843 Perhaps this dates back quite a ways. "A Ghost Story for Christmas" is a strand of annual British short television films originally broadcast on BBC One between 1971 and 1978, and revived in 2005 on BBC Four. 

BBC Radio Scotland has separately aired Ghost Stories At Christmas. Alison Moore's ghost stories have been published in Best British Short Stories anthologies and broadcast on BBC Radio 4 Extra. [LINK] The New Stateman referred to all this gothic hubub as "Perfect for Brexit Christmas."

In 2016 they failed to air James, or Moore and the Express Newspaper wrote up a comment "Haunted Christmas: Bring back the tradition of Christmas ghost stories" Radio Editor Jane Anderson once wrote it’s not a proper Christmas without a ghost story. She was praising the program Between the Ears: The Shepherd which aired Christmas Eve at 9.15 PM on BBC Radio 3 in 2013. The Washington Post even commented on this cultural difference in 2014. [LINK] Derek Johnson pointed out Dickens again:

"Dickens was a strong supporter of the Christmas ghost story, reminiscing in his 1850 essay A Christmas Tree about childhood Christmases spent 'telling Winter Stories – Ghost Stories, or more shame for us – round the Christmas fire.' Dickens also encouraged other writers to produce Christmas ghost stories for the annual festive editions of his magazines Household Words and All the Year Round."

Johnson supposes that the split relates to Guy Fawkes Day. Halloween in England was never extensively celebrated and was supplanted by Guy Fawkes Night in the early 17th century. So in England the ghost stories remained connected to Xmas, and elsewhere in the Western world, they moved to Halloween.