Shadow over Innsmouth BBC radio

[helrunar]

Looks as if Julian Simpson's Lovecraft Investigations series continued last month with The Shadow over Innsmouth. No doubt this bears a relationship to the original novella even more loosely far-flung than was the case with the two previous installments.

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08y46bf

I got really annoyed with this serial last year listening to The Whisperer in Darkness and haven't made up my mind whether or not to give this (presumably concluding) installment a shot.

H.

[helrunar]

THIS adaptation, a dramatic reading with beautiful music and soundscape/effects, read by Richard Coyle who starred in the all too brief series Strange several years ago (well worth checking out), is a classic.

www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFR1l06xPxanMn_na_PTmb7PLU4K3RJU8

H.

[Knygathin]

Dec 9, 2020 4:56:34 GMT helrunar said:

THIS adaptation, a dramatic reading with beautiful music and soundscape/effects, read by Richard Coyle who starred in the all too brief series Strange several years ago (well worth checking out), is a classic.

www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFR1l06xPxanMn_na_PTmb7PLU4K3RJU8

H.

Having heard the first few minutes, I think that is a very good reading. I would give it an 8 on a scale from 1 - 10. But it is not masterful. Its greatest strength is its perfect clearness and stability. But I don't get a sense, from the reading, of true wisdom, insight, and empathy into the subject matter, which is revealed by a complete lack of intelligently put variation of vocal accentuation and emphasis.

It is also a very manly voice. Too macho for my taste. (But that is very much in line with the superhero muscled action adventure attitude we are expected to be assailed with these days from the entertainment business.) I would have preferred a more gentlemanly intellectual voice, fragile, reflective, and subtly faltering near the brink of abysmal madness.

[helrunar]

This past week, I finally listened to Simpson's Innsmouth serial, the final installment in what had evolved into a trilogy, entitled The Lovecraft Investigations on BBC Sounds (Radio 4). This latest effort had all the strengths and weaknesses of the previous dish-ups. Great ensemble cast headed by Barnaby Kay and Jana Carpenter, and brilliant use of sound (really best listened to with headphones--I can't imagine attempting to follow it if one were listening on some kind of outside speaker with ambient noise to interfere and distract). The scripts, while there are occasional flashes of amusement and even brilliance, invariably wind up foundering on X-Files cliches and an odd failure to follow up on teasing references to occult lore and classic strata of supernatural horror literature. I listened to part 2 last year mostly in a mood of frustration and disappointment; part 3, I simply laughed my way through. 

Some more specific complaints: heroine Kennedy Fisher's titular visit to the Innsmouth of 2020 winds up with an extraordinarily anti-climactic encounter with the Deep Ones, who then simply vanish into thin air, evidently because the writer has no idea what to do with them. After hinting and teasing that they're behind certain things for three or four episodes.

One episode nears its conclusion with a dramatic flourish at the appearance of  the Comte de Saint-Germain; the protagonists, who supposedly make a living investigating esoteric woo-woo weirdness, respond with a shrugged "who's that?"

The grand finale includes plot elements swiped from Algernon Blackwood's "Ancient Sorceries" and Children of the Stones  (I see there's a new serial adaptation of that as well on the Radio 4 site and I'll probably listen to it next week), but nothing at all is made of these. The whole thing collapses under a colossal load of hooey at the end. The production crew do get points for coming up with a beautifully realized soundscape for the climactic Yog Sothoth ritual (which has been planned supposedly for 5000 years, and lasts about 60 seconds).

It seems as if Simpson is going to continue the saga but under a different aegis from the "Lovecraft" shtick, which is just as well, since there was very little Lovecraft at all in the preceding chapters. These are hugely popular with some, so there's clearly an audience for this kind of thing.

H.

[helrunar]

Well, last night I listened to episode one of the Children of the Stones radio drama on BBC Radio's site. I found it to be an incoherent, muddled, off-putting mess. So I don't plan to continue with it.

In this version, it is a daughter who accompanies her parent to the village of Milbury with its mysterious circles of standing stones. Mia, from what I was able to gather from the very muddled script, is a disturbed child whose uncontrolled psi powers were awakened when she survived a car crash that killed her Mum. Mia of course has her own podcast which features in the program. Her father's emotional distress as he grieves his wife and feels waves of guilt for his inability to parent a child having her own multiple sequences of psychic upheaval is another element in this re-telling.

This might be interesting for fans of "hauntological" types of experimental soundscapes--it is just not this listener's flagon of mead.

H.