“A Very Noisy Place”: Aickman, the Radio, and “Ringing the Changes”

Simon Cooke

Aickman’s “strange stories” could hardly be described as the sort of material that lends itself to a visual adaptation. It is difficult to envisage a stage version of any of his texts, and although there have been several television treatments of his work – notably Jeremy Dyson’s recent adaptation The Cicerones (2013) – the complexity of the writing, with its strange imagery, unresolved narratives and menacing tone is resistant to dramatization in the conventional sense of the term. It would be interesting to see how the director approached the television version of “Ringing the Changes”, re-titled The Bells of Hell, which was broadcast by BBC2 in the United Kingdom in 1968. Shot on colour videotape and featuring well-known actors of the time, it was deleted after its commercial potential had been exhausted [1].

Aickman may have seen this treatment, although it is improbable that he would have approved. Innately conservative, his attitude to television was either dismissive, or suspicious of its social implications as an instrument of control. In “Magnificence, Elegance and Charm” he notes that “every time you take a television into your house … you bring 1984 nearer” (The Strangers, 222).  And  in “The Swords” he refers to “the telly” (Cold Hand in Mine, 3), a pejorative contraction reflecting his negative view of the mass audience. He was probably more comfortable with the radio, the familiar medium of his age. He gave several interviews on the wireless and wrote at least one short story for the air-waves, “The Fully Conducted Tour” (The Strangers, 107–114), which was broadcast by the BBC on Radio 4 in 1976.

Again, no recording of the performance is available and probably no longer exists, but two radio versions of “Ringing the Changes” were made and preserved. One, part of the Nightfall series, was broadcast on Halloween 1980 by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation based in Toronto. Another, broadcast by the BBC on Halloween 2000, appeared exactly twenty years after the first. Referenced to the date on which the story is set and adapted, respectively, by P. Norman Cherrie and Jeremy Dyson and Mark Gatiss [2], who also produced The Cicerones, these treatments are short (half-hour) programmes. Several times repeated, they are now available on the internet. While the television version has disappeared, we are compensated with these two adaptations, which give intriguing evidence of how Aickman’s work might be adapted for an electronic medium.

Their principal value lies in their inventiveness. They preserve the terrifying essentials of Aickman’s text while creating two distinct interpretations in which the writers modify some elements, suppress others, add new information and generally enhance and enrich our understanding of the source material, by pointing to its unresolved complexities. In the following sections we will examine these unusual broadcasts, the contexts in which they operated and the key questions related to the problems of adaptation.

Adapting the text for CBC and BBC: working with sound and structure

As noted above, “Ringing the Changes” is difficult material, and it is hard to imagine how it would transfer to the screen. Its combination of psychological drama and the horrific effects of the danse macabre would always be problematic, posing the question of how exactly to show the events. When it comes to radio, on the other hand, other issues are at work and in making the adaptation the writers and producers must have asked a series of questions which probe a crucial consideration: will it transfer to the medium of the radio?

Foremost among these is the question of radio’s “blindness” and its capacity to depict a story containing visual information and enacted as a dramatic interaction of characters, settings and situations. “Ringing the Changes” features many descriptive passages and, like all of Aickman’s work, has a journalistic surface. We “see” Hilda’s “ridged” face painted with make-up (“Ringing”, 43) and the kitsch contents of The Bell, where the worn-out register and comically inappropriate antiques are solemnly catalogued. None of this can be shown. At the same time, none of it is purely visual in the way that, for example, Dickens’s characters have to be seen. Yet this apparent limitation is in many ways liberating, opening up a field of possibilities. Released from the need to represent visually, the adaptations of Aickman’s text are free to re-figure the material in terms which purely exist in the imagination. It might be a problem to create the visual image of a mob of dancing corpses, but it is possible to implant or evoke the idea of the scene through other means. As Vincent McInerey observes, a skilful adaptation equipped only with words and sounds can elide the text’s visuality, filling the medium’s “darkness” with implication as it works to “produce an image, or set of images, in the mind of the listener.” (2)

This is precisely what happens in the two versions of “Ringing the Changes”. Both sets of writers evoke “mind-visible” images (8) and both amplify, rather than diminish the text’s effects by empowering the listener to construct the scene for his or herself. Though populated with his strange iconography of familiar objects, uncannily half-skewed and somehow menacing, Aickman noticeably occludes the vital information. For example, we never see the dead in any detail, nor do we see Phyrnne dancing. Working with these weighted omissions, each broadcast opens a space in which the horror can take a very personal form (Crook, 7). The darkness of the radio texts in this sense re-invokes the personal interpretation that takes place when a reader engages with the original words, asserting psychological ownership of its narrative and allowing the spoken parts to seem like an internal voice.

Each listener is thus encouraged to construct his or her own version of the text, conflating the experience of reading and listening. Of course, the same could be said of any skillful adaptation, but in the case of “Ringing the Changes” the transfer from page to sound is efficiently achieved. Cherrie, an experienced writer, went on to adapt other material in the Nightfall series, and both Dyson and Gatiss worked on the radio before they presented material on the television. However, they were able to achieve these effects because the text itself is what Adam Golanski describes as “perfect for radio” (“As Dark Locks In”) and Richard Hand as “ideal material” (155) for the airways. Though incorporating visual imagery and informed with a strong sense of seedy reality in the manner of British “New Wave” films of the early sixties, “Ringing the Changes” practically begs to be heard. It is impossible to know if Aickman wrote it with a sense of its broadcast possibilities, but it is certainly constructed in a manner which facilitates adaptation. Its use of sound, its emphasis on a central relationship and its dramatic construction are lucidly realized, and each of these ingredients can be refigured in aural terms.

A key constituent in the text’s transfer to radio is the tightness of its structure. Short stories are generally the best material for broadcast in the form of a 30 minute programme (McInerey, 55) and “Ringing the Changes” is constructed as a classic piece of condensed story-telling, with limited information and the type of small cast that fits neatly within the constraints of a short slot. Sharp, terse and overwhelmingly urgent, its dramatic form enshrines the Aristotelian unities of time (from the afternoon of 31 October to early the next morning), place (Holihaven, with a short preliminary sequence on the train), and action (the Bansteads’ encounter with the townsfolk, both dead and living). This cogent organization empowers the radio writers to encapsulate its essentials in the form of a compressed dramatization, conveying the text’s work in a single, rapidly consumed unit which maintains its original focus.

The tale’s limited action and characterization are particularly useful as a means of building the “intimacy” that McInerey regards as one of the defining features of the radio play (55) and helps to make it intelligible as it is consumed (usually, but not exclusively) in domestic spaces. “Ringing the Changes” is especially effective in these terms because the central focus is on the relationship of newly-weds, mismatched though they may be, seemingly like figures of Age and Youth and with a huge generational distance between them. But their conversations are nevertheless ideal material for the all-listening ear of the domestic consumer who would have heard the plays in leisure time, late in the evening. Aickman dramatizes their relationship in the form of highly-nuanced dialogue, and the radio writers preserve most of their conversations, enabling the listener to enter into their most private exchanges. As in reading the text, most of what we need to know about the couple and the complicated dynamics of their marriage are condensed into rapid-fire exchanges, and the same could be said of the listener’s engagement with Shotcroft, Don and Hilda, whose inner lives are enshrined in their spoken dialogue. We listen in to their conversations and construct our understandings as they speak. The process is rather like hearing a secret: space is eliminated and listeners are immersed in the story as vividly as if they were overhearing confidential information.

This effect is heightened in order to create an emotional bond with Gerald, who suffers most and acts as the intermediary between the normal and strange. In the case of Cherrie’s version the third-person framing spoken as the prologue is changed into a first person narrative, engaging the reader in what seems like Gerald’s horrified confession after the event. And in Gatiss and Dyson’s the opening lines are preserved as a grim introduction. These changes strengthen the identification between the listener and the character and intensify the sense of deeply-felt experience. Spoken information more generally allows the radio adapters to build a clear sense of the characters’ personalities, casting the parts (as we shall see) with actors whose voices interpret the “detailed, witty characterizations” (Hand, 155) inscribed in the original text.

Spoken dialogue is thus deployed as the mainstay of the radio adaptations. Aickman draws the reader into a deadly nexus of intimacy, and the radio dramatists do the same.  The dialogue also provides an opportunity for the broadcasters to inflect the material, manipulating the way the words are spoken to bring to the foreground aspects of the characters and their situations. Both plays noticeably dwell on differences between the protagonists’ age. Gerald is spoken in both versions by an older man, while Phrynne is “twenty-four years younger” (“Ringing”, 38) and has a voice which in Cherrie’s version sounds girlish. Their conversations are well played, acted with close attention to detail by a range of outstanding and versatile actors. Douglas Campbell and Nicky Guadagni act the parts in the Canadian version with perfect, understated English voices, and George Baker and Fiona Allen, prime practitioners of “cut-glass” precision, in the broadcast for the BBC. The nuances of the lovers’ interactions are subtly conveyed, and the female performers are especially effective in bringing out the sexual undertones of Phynne’s apparently casual comments. Her final arousal is powerfully performed in both pieces and leave the listener with a lasting sense of unrest and puzzlement.

The radio versions are equally faithful to the original material in bringing out the nuances of class and power. Though Aickman never spells it out, the main characters’ bourgeois status is accentuated on the radio, with Gerald, Phrynne and the Commandant speaking in British “RP” or “Received Pronunciation” accents, the discourse of the educated and privileged. The “thick bucolic accent” (72) of the railwaymen and the Pascoes’ “common” idiom are similarly conveyed (with one or two inaccuracies in the Canadian version), and in both plays there is a clear sense of class distinction. Darryl Jones has noted how “Ringing the Changes” has “a real sociological point to make about the English class system in the post-war settlement” (76), and the two radio versions act as a dramatic microcosm of the troubled  relationship between the middle and lower classes. As in everyday life in an unequal society, the manner of speaking is as important as the words’ meaning, and the voices presented here express conflict in how they speak as much as what they say.  Gerald’s irritation at not being served by the railwaymen (who deflect his appeal for help with the bags) is vividly conveyed, and his disapproval of Hilda (implicitly a “common” woman) is registered in the contrast between Gerald’s commanding tone in a clipped accent and the landlady’s anecdotal, shapeless droning. He speaks in the accent of power and command, and they refuse to act with the appropriate deference.

This situation, implied in the silent text of the original story, is promoted in the plays, dramatising the idea that in Holihaven middle-class propriety is denied. The power of a bourgeois accent is meaningless in this setting, presenting in an aural form the class anxiety that underpins the story and that is found throughout Aickman’s fiction. Its final powerlessness, we might say, is conveyed in the arrival of the dead and their revellers. Aickman describes this moment in terms which are defined by the differences in class-accent and its dangerous implications. The Bansteads speak in Standard, non-regional English as they cower in terror, while the racket outside is described as the sound of proletarian yokels, “agitators bawling a slogan, or massed troublemakers at a football match” (“Ringing”, 74). This formless shouting and bellowing is overpoweringly presented on the radio, viscerally conveying the idea that the bourgeois voice (the agent of correctness, power and “normality”) is impotent in the face of the formless desires of the masses. This seems snobbish, but we have to remember that the dead (speaking in dialect, shouting loutishly and thrashing around) are more vital, paradoxically more alive, than the middle-class speakers of the Queen’s English. The plays postulate this riddle in accordance with the text, and the effect is unsettling in that both sets of accents are ultimately oppressive and destructive.

This complex interplay, uncovering the social implications in Aickman’s writing, typifies the sophisticated way in which dialogue is exploited for dramatic effect. Dialogue is also used to advance the story, and here, once again, Aickman provides a template. The initial moment of horror, when Shotcroft convinces Gerald of the terrible truth, is figured as a script of terse statements:

“Take her away, man,” said the Commandant, with scornful ferocity.

“In a day or two perhaps,” said Gerald, patiently polite. “I admit that we are disappointed with Holihaven.”

“Now. While there’s still time. This instant.”

“They can hardly go on practising all night,” he said. But now it was fear that hushed his voice.

“Practising!” The Commandant’s scorn flickered coldly through the overheated room.

“What else?”

“They’re ringing to wake the dead.” (“Ringing”, 60).

Functioning as a play-text which progresses the story to the next stage, these words are ready-made material. Indeed, Aickman does all the work. The exchange is animated by the immediacy of surprise, and he offers what are essentially stage-directions, telling us exactly how the words should be spoken in the form of the Commandant’s “scornful ferocity” and the hushing of Gerald’s voice as he realizes the truth of what is said. It seems, once again, as if Aickman is writing for the radio, and all the writers of the broadcasts have to do is preserve the original text and give it a spoken form. This they do with great effectiveness. The Commandant’s “scornful ferocity” is witheringly spoken in both versions, and Gerald’s fear is given subtle dimensions by George Baker’s intonation in the BBC treatment.

The urgency of the exchange propels the narrative forward in the short story and in the adaptations the pace likewise quickens. Underpinning this movement there is of course the overwhelming emphasis on the bells. Gerald describes Holihaven as a “very noisy place” (59), and the radio plays are practically overwhelmed by the clangour. The BBC version made use of a new recording, and in both treatments the “booming” of bells “like warriors fighting in the sky” (46) is maintained throughout. Like Phyrnne, who hears the ringing “with my left ear, and another lot with my right” (47), the listener is assaulted by the noise. Gerald’s half-deafened terror becomes the listener’s as our hearing struggles to cope with the cacophony, identifying with his discomfiture, “tautly listening” (47) to the developing clangour.

 However, this grisly campanology is only part of what Richard Hand describes as the story’s “aural register” (155). Critics have routinely spoken of the bizarre implications of the inescapable ringing, but it is important to point out that the story as a whole is arranged as a montage of significant sounds. As with the dialogue, so too with the background, the author constructs a ready-made, orchestrated framework which establishes the narrative and moves it towards a climax not of sound, but of silence. This structure underpins both broadcasts and once again the writers exploit the lexical markers in the story, converting them from descriptions of sounds into the sounds – or “sound signs” – themselves. They also expand the text’s aural textures by adding others which are implied but not heard.

Within this “noisy place” (59) the narrative is opened by the blowing of a whistle and the sound of the train’s rumbling (39). This opening effect is in the foreground of both plays, although each are obliged to add the unmentioned sound of a steam engine; this would have been taken for granted by readers of 1964, but is unfamiliar to the later radio audiences. Once the couple have arrived, however, Aickman provides a list of sounds that appear, in seamless transition, on the airwaves. The single bell initiates the sense of uncertainty, and thereafter we hear bells that boom (41, 46) in ‘deep note[s]’ (41–2), a ‘din’ (49) in the manner of firing ‘artillery’ (52), a Coffee Room bell that sounds ‘like a fire-alarm’ (51), an ‘inferno of ringing’ (69), shouting and singing in the street (75) and, finally, the glass, china and wood-work smashing into pieces as the dead bodies storm the Bansteads’ bedroom (75).

This arrangement works, in short, to create a progressive sense of tension. The louder it becomes, the more agitated Gerald gets, and the more terrifying the denouement becomes. At the same time, Aickman breaks the sound for dramatic effect, and both Cherrie and Gatiss and Dyson integrate this element, presenting clear caesuras in the noise. On radio, spaces without sound can be as effective as sound itself and, as the narrative moves towards its climax, the silence in the text becomes in the broadcasts a moment of dread and tension that forces the listener to strain for the next significant clue. As the Bansteads wait, the sudden diminution to a single bell in the text is matched by a weighted silence on the radio with “no sound of any kind … not a creaking floorboard or a prowling cat or a distant owl’ (70–71). This gives way to a “thick bucolic accent,” a “guttural vibrato of emotion” (72) which is then taken up by the “pandemonium” (69) of the deafening noise of the milling dead, “scraping …scuffling … singing …banging” (75). These effects overwhelm the soundtrack. The actors’ shrieking and screaming are powerful enactments of the characters’ terror, marking aurally the extreme point of distance from their light flirtations in perfect Home County accents, and the singing of the dead is enhanced in both versions with extra, demonic muttering and growling. The action is closed by the gravediggers working “silently” (80), though in the Canadian version the scraping of spades is distinctly heard.

It might thus be argued that Aickman provides the radio dramatists with a series of ready-made structures which enable them to adapt the material with efficiency and directness. The formal arrangement of the story, with its controlled narrative, terse dialogue and graded sounds make it, as noted earlier, a perfect piece for the assailing of our ears.  Showing it on the stage or film would probably be ineffective, running the risk of degenerating into just another retread of the zombie-genre. But it is the perfect starting point for a radio drama in which the “mind-visible” (McInerey, 8) is allowed to prevail, implanting the strongest of individual imaginings through the medium of highly textured sound. There are further complications, however. Although I have suggested the interchangeability of the structures, with the prose text providing a script for a play of voices, it is important to remember that Aickman’s short story is not and cannot be the same as the radio dramatizations. Aickman provides the ground-plan, but changes have to be made in addition to the elements that are preserved. As Albrecht-Crane and Cutchins explain of cinematic re-writing in words which also throw new light on adaptations for the radio:

Adapters cannot “transpose” or “transfer” [directly from one medium to another] … They must interpret, re-working the precursor text and choosing the various meanings and sensations they find most compelling … [and then select] scenes, characters, plot elements, etc., that match their interpretation (16).

The richness of the two versions of “Ringing the Changes” is vested in the fact that while they appear to be quite literal treatments of their source, there is still space in which editorial changes can be made, fashioning the material to reflect the contexts in which the broadcasts were made, and the expectations of the audience. Most of all, Cherrie, Dyson and Gatiss uncover the nuances of Aickman’s tale. Recognizing its status as a “fluid text … that exists in multiple versions” (Bryant, 48), they follow the style and outline of his writing but inflect the material, offering distinct interpretations that allow us to understand the multifaceted nature of his work.

Gothic horror: Aickman in Canada

As noted earlier, in Canada “Ringing the Changes” was broadcast as part of the celebrated Nightfall series. Other stories included Dickens’ “The Signalman”, Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” and Jacobs’ “The Monkey’s Paw”. All of the pieces are Gothic in tone, with the explicit intention of frightening the audience in the relaxing setting of the fireside. Aickman’s story, with its horrifying encounter with the dead, was an obvious candidate for inclusion. Figured as a text within an anthology, a status it also enjoyed in print, Cherrie’s version is shaped to fit its listening context. Phrynne and Gerald (here called Horstead rather than Banstead) are terrified by the events, and Cherrie harmonizes the tale with others in the series (and with other texts within the genre as a whole) by emphasising its status as a Gothic thriller. This shift in emphasis was achieved by making small additions to the script, by focusing the actors’ delivery on conveying key messages and on creating the effects of horror, especially through the use of music.

Cherrie intensifies the suspense by preserving the more economical dialogue while adding proleptic details of his own. The framing section ominously warns that the tale is a “special love story for lovers of all ages” and Gerald’s opening lines are adapted to suggest some existential doom, announced as if in retrospect. In the original there is no suggestion of foreboding beyond his worrying about the age difference, but in Cherrie’s dramatization Gerald anxiously remarks that they had been “to the village at the end of all of things” and “perhaps they tried to warn us.” Warnings they certainly receive. In additional dialogue the railway porters tell them that they’ve “made a mistake” visiting on “tonight of all nights,” and before the Commandant instructs Gerald to escape, a drunken Don repeatedly tells him to “run – go.” Each of these markers project the narrative forward and other additions, spoken by Phrynne, have the same effect. While walking in the deserted streets she notes that “it’s like an empty stage set. I wonder what happens when the curtain goes up?”

Further prefigurative clues, giving new information, are applied to the encounter on the beach. Gerald asks what Phrynne has “stepped on,” and is told it is “something soft – and bone.” These warnings and speculations present more questions to be answered, and Cherrie is skillful at tantalising the listener. The reference to the object “like bone” implants the notion of a dead body, while Phrynne’s description of the streets seeming “like a tomb” amplifies the growing sense of morbid unease.

Adding pace in the form of these small interventions, and compressing what is already an extremely dynamic text, Cherrie’s treatment is restless and urgent. The hurrying of the narrative is matched by the febrile intensity of the acting and sound effects. Gerald – brilliantly played by Douglas Campbell – speaks impatiently to the Pascoes and the railwaymen, and the scene on the beach is treated as a moment of climactic horror, even though in the original narrative it is only a stage in the process of disorientation. Aickman notes simply that Phyrnne gives a “sharp cry” (48), but in the radio play this becomes a terrified scream. Gerald’s confusion is also intensified to the point of panic as he shouts repeatedly, casting around in an existential darkness. A moaning sound follows the insertion of her foot, apparently issuing from an invisible corpse. Ugly and disturbing, the play’s soundtrack underscores the volatility of the actors’ voices.

Built up in these small details, Cherrie’s Gothic excess quickly moves from suggestion to explicit horror. Tension is further developed by the unsettling music – sometimes percussion and sometimes “acid rock” – and the mounting suspense is formalized by dividing the text into short, episodic scenes. The score punctuates the sections, and the opening words of each part are noticeably more anxious in delivery as the play unfolds, accentuating the text’s staccato rhythm. The key moment in this treatment, as in the story, is the meeting with the Commandant. Positioned as the play’s centrifuge, his conversation with Gerald has immense impact, a moment in which secrets, so cleverly implied in the previous minutes, are revealed.

Played with relish by Nightfall regular Sandy Webster, the significance of Shotcroft’s bizarre disclosure is accentuated in a number of ways. The terse exchanges are preserved and his key line, “they’re ringing to wake the dead” (“Ringing”, 60) is delivered with sneering intensity. Other changes are made elsewhere. In pursuing his Gothic project Cherrie diminishes Shotcroft’s ambivalence, converting him from either a troubled neurotic, or a diehard of the military type, into a sort of shaman. His back-story is deleted and he speaks to Gerald in a curious, rasping accent which invokes the strangeness of the foreign Other, redolent of Bela Lugosi’s delivery in Browning’s film version of Dracula (1931). He is certainly not a native speaker of English, let alone a practitioner of an upper-class accent, and he seems to be timeless, speaking from beyond the grave. Essentially a supernatural monster, he is rewritten in this version to support the tale’s Gothic credentials. If there were any suspicion that Gerald is subject to an indulgent imagination, it is dispelled in his meeting with this strange creature. Shotcroft’s voice shifts the story from the prosaic everyday into the domain of nightmare, and the story quickly progresses to its all-too tangible conclusion.

Gerald and Phrynne do not have time to make love or attempt to make love. The cadavers arrive, complete with distorted voices, a demonic growling, screams and the sort of music  stereotypically associated with horror films. The action is closed by the Banstead/Halsteads’ recovery and here again there is a crucial change. In Aickman’s text the key moment is Gerald’s contemplation of Phrynne’s response to the re-interment of the dead, when she becomes momentarily aroused with her “soft mouth” becoming “fleetingly more voluptuous still” (80). In the play, however, he simply warns her not to look and is answered with a sensual “Why ever not, Gerald?  Why ever not?”  This change preserves the text’s openness but stresses a continuing menace. Once the knowledge has been gained, it is impossible to unlearn it.

The change points more generally to the ways in which the text has been transformed. Aickman’s text is a rich field of possibilities; Cherrie’s is much narrower. He highlights the dramatic effects of suspense, but elides the subtler implications of psycho-sexual malaise and the dynamics of the dream. In order to make the text fit into its broadcasting context, he converts it into a Gothic shocker which deploys a lexicon of familiar tropes. The innocent are overwhelmed by the experience, and the comfortable certainties of the everyday world are submerged by horrors. The fascination and threat of taboo, and the extension of the human mind by its transformative encounters with the unknown, are the central concerns of this interpretation, linking it to the broader concerns of its (putative) genre. A partial reading of Aickman which is at times too formulaic, Cherrie’s dramatization is still an unsettling experience that highlights the original author’s capacity to create bizarre situations of anxiety and despair.

Life in the provinces: a very English interpretation

Cherrie’s version stresses the horror of Aickman’s tale, and it is widely regarded as a worthy contribution to a series that is opened by a narrator imitating the voice of Vincent Price, set to stereotypically “spooky” organ accompaniment. Adam Golaski notes its impact on his childish ears as he listened in terror, and it undoubtedly made a lasting impression on many. Its appearance online has extended its malign influence over a new generation of listeners.

In Dyson and Gatiss’s approach (2000), on the other hand, there is less emphasis on the visceral nastiness of the situation and more on the text’s exploration of another sort of ugliness. Treating it as a coded exploration of the repressed horrors of respectability, sexual repression, class and the stultifying conditions of provincial life, these radio writers present Aickman’s tale as a Gothic critique of British society. As noted earlier, Darryl Jones reads the tale in sociological terms (76) and Dyson and Gatiss, working on the same premise, rewrite it as a piece of calculated subversion. It mimics the textures of the domestic dramas that typically feature on Radio Four, but it undermines their orthodox, conservative view of the status quo. Their adaptation re-positions the work in the social context in which it originated (1964), although it also comments on the social tensions of contemporary British society. Locating this analysis within the unfortunate encounters of Gerald and Phyrnne, the writers point to the fissures and inconsistencies at the heart of British (or at least English) life. This project is achieved with only small editorial changes and additions. As in Cherrie’s version, the nuanced speaking of the actors carries the effect.

Gender conflicts are clearly marked by accentuating the age difference between the main characters. Though Phrynne is supposed to be twenty–four years younger than Gerald (“Ringing”, 38), the voices suggest the difference is much greater. Acted by George Baker and Fiona Allen, the contrast between them is very pronounced, with Baker sounding old enough to be her grandfather rather than her husband. This difference is initially used to present the particular conditions of their marriage. Gerald is essentially a boring authority figure, pompously explaining the levelling of the railway line, while Phrynne, cast as a dependent, literally fixated by his plangent voice, only wonders how he knows about such arcane matters. The father/child relationship is asserted, though Dyson and Gatiss almost immediately point to the emerging weakness in this arrangement, inserting a few lines which suggest that Phrynne is unwilling to accept her role. Gerald claims he is mature “like old wine”, to which she responds that he is “deliciously full bodied.” This new line asserts her sexuality at the start of the play. According to him she is just “cold and choosy,” a sexless “girl” (38) or a “dead girl” (56). Yet her erotic small-talk clearly indicates she is looking forward to their bedtime encounter and is not willing to be the passive recipient of his affections. Her suppressed eroticism is also heightened in other changes. The text notes that he “kissed her” (39), but in the radio play she takes the initiative, saying “come here.” A loud kiss is heard for several seconds, creating a mental image of a passionate embrace.

Indeed, in this reading, Phrynne is far from the passive spouse of post-war Britain. Though described as a kitsch child-wife – with pathetic “big eyes” and a “tiny face” (39), a portrait in the manner of Dickens at his most sentimental and patronising – her mature sexuality is repeatedly asserted, and her physical attractiveness is as pronounced as her innuendoes and small-talk. Following on from the extended kiss, the railwaymen are positioned as admirers, with one lasciviously noting in an East Anglian accent: “look at that … cor!” Both Shotcroft and Hilda are impressed by her beauty. In Aickman’s words Hilda looks at Phrynne’s near-naked body following the dance with “animosity” (79), but here she is given an extra line, noting with regret that “she’s very beautiful.”

 More importantly, the writers stress Gerald’s discomfiture as he contemplates his wife’s behaviour, becoming progressively more anxious as the evening unfolds. One key line underpins this interpretation. We are told in the original text that she “opened her pretty legs to the fire” (53), but in the play Gerald’s response is the focus: “Don’t sit like that, Phrynne.” The line is spoken with an embarrassed tone which leads immediately to suppressed anger as he notices the Commandant inspecting her with her legs apart. “Why are you standing there?” he demands. Phrynne’s appeal is obvious and, crucially, she is willing to display herself.

This reorientation brings to the foreground the subtext and highlights the notion of the couple’s mismatch – with an older man in sexual decline married to a young women whose sexuality is on the point of release. The contrast is made entirely apparent following the danse macabre. Phyrnne (“almost naked”) is found downstairs at The Bell, while the Commandant has to help Gerald to walk. He is infirm, suddenly a very old man, while she is still luxuriating in her erotic encounter. This juxtaposition forms the dramatic core of Dyson and Gatiss’ treatment. Framing the tale as a contrast between repression and release, self-expression and fear, it presents Aickman’s tale as a study of sexual dysfunction in which Phyrnne’s encounter with her erotic self is a positive event.

Not quite a feminist tract, the play suggests that her transformation, her ringing of the changes, involves the death of her old self, which is cast aside when the dead literally dance anew and her vitality is re-discovered. Her marriage is already a grave and her grisly release is a resurrection - an escape from Gerald’s deathly presence. The point is clinched in the final sections of new dialogue, giving voice to a silent passage in Aickman’s text. Phrynne notices the re-interments and Gerald informs her that “ploughing” (shifting the action from the cemetery to a field) is taking place. Yet she immediately contradicts him: “they’re not ploughing, they’re sowing.” The “sowing” is her recognition of the awakening of her sexuality, and she closes the play with laughter and a sort of post-coital humming - a version of the mob’s singing. At the same time, she has taken control of her life and is no longer the inert recipient of his dull conversation. Talking down her husband symbolizes her new awareness of her own desires, and nothing he can say is important. “None of it matters any more,” she remarks, and the listener is left with an overwhelming sense of Gerald’s irrelevance as he lectures her on the sights of Cambridge. Their marriage has been fractured by her realization of her husband’s impotent uselessness as she seeks to express her erotic desire. Sombre oboe tones, which have punctuated the scenes, suggest the joyless, sexless years that will lie ahead.

Read in these terms, Gatiss and Dyson’s adaption is another treatment of a classic British theme: repression. The casting of the voices and the small inflections divert Aickman’s tale away from its Freudian track and re-cast it as a study of the sheer dullness of bourgeois respectability, and the psychological transformation that is needed to escape. Phyrnne, with her enhanced dialogue and voluptuous tones, is an iconoclast. She breaks the rules of middle-class propriety and asserts the text’s application as a mode of social criticism. It reminds us that the story’s first appearance was in 1964. Phyrnne is cast as a liberated woman of the sixties who rejects the stultifying lifestyle offered by the moribund Gerald, the emblem of an old-fashioned paternalism. It is equally relevant to audiences of 2000, projecting Aickman’s tale into a social arena in which women are still treated as objects and trophy wives. In this version, Phrynne’s dance with the dead is a dance to escape the limitations of sexism and male domination.

This assault on bourgeois mores has other applications in the treatment of class tension. As noted earlier, accents are used in both plays to register the difference between the bourgeois characters and the others, with each radio-text reflecting on the powerlessness of class superiority. Gerald, Phrynne and the Commandant are used to taking control and giving orders but the voice of privilege is useless in the context of Holihaven. For British listeners, however, the impotence of class-based authority has another, troubling dimension. The differences in accent and the differences between Standard and regional English are amplified in the BBC version with the aim of accentuating the couple’s sense of embarrassment and uncertainty. Gerald, though commanding, barely knows how to speak to the Pascoes, and adopts an inappropriate tone when he is speaking to the railwaymen. The denial of the usual response breaks the code of propriety and politeness, adding a sense of isolation to the developing sense of social anxiety. It is further accentuated by the Bansteads’ position between the unruly proletariat and the upper-class Commandant, whose cut-glass accent, spoken with cold precision by Michael Cochran, is as intimidating as the roughness of the other characters. Caught between the threatening coarseness of the under-educated and the arrogant dismissiveness of the upper-class Shotcroft, who treats Gerald with contempt, the Bansteads are placed in a familiar British trap. Voices connote the acceptable transactions of social discourse, but here the skewing of the register, with none of the rules being obeyed, adds materially to Gerald’s unease and Phyrnne’s bewilderment. With no other middle-class characters in the hotel, their fearfulness is intensified by their social isolation. Taken out of their milieu, with no one to speak to from their own class and taken away from their usual, reassuring routines, they are indeed outsiders, menaced by the rituals of a remote and inward looking community.

Indeed, Gatiss and Dyson focus on the provincialism of Holihaven, stressing its detachment, as a run-down backwater, from everyday life. The play removes Gerald and Phrynne from their social context by accentuating the conflicts of accents, and it removes them geographically from their Home Counties setting as well. Gerald is given extra lines to highlight the sense of difference. He explains the slowness of the train as a matter of Holihaven being part of a quieter lifestyle, a place where “Time matters less,” although his commentary is ironically contradicted when they arrive at the imagined rural idyll. Anything but cheerful bucolics, the railwaymen are rude and uncooperative, the streets are empty, the bells deafening, and the Pascoes unwelcoming. The town is redundant -  even the sea has retreated from it. In this treatment it is also unrelievedly bleak. At several points during the walk to the sea the added sound of wind is heard, evoking a sense of melancholy, and the intimacy of the couple’s conversations is undermined by subtle echoes, stressing the coldness of the empty streets. Caught in a drear and uninviting place, the Bansteads are the quintessential outsiders, the emblematic “civilized” people who, through some aberration, have moved from normal life to the abnormal, from reason to the strangeness of the archetypal, secretive “village” (“Ringing”, 39) of the Gothic imagination.

This emphasis aligns the reading with the enduring idea of the menace of the British provinces and here, once again, the appeal is directly to the home audience. Gerald imagines Holihaven in the stereotypical terms of the English paradise, the place of quaint streets and picturesque quayside, but Gatiss and Dyson uncover the darker side of the equation. Drawing on the tradition of remote communities as traps, the writers’ emphasis on Holihaven’s hostility connects their text most immediately with David Pinner’s novel, Ritual (1967), and Robin Hardy’s film treatment of the same material, The Wicker Man (1973). Somehow drawn to the place, Gerald and Phrynne are the unwilling participants who turn up at the least appropriate moment, and Gerald can be viewed as another version of the fated Sgt. Howie, the sexless, fearful puritan in Hardy’s film [3]. Like him, the Bansteads are allowed to see a pagan Britain, with bells raising rather than burying the dead in a curious subversion of the everyday structures of the prevailing, “normal” culture, and in paradoxical mockery of the Christian notion of resurrection.

In short, this treatment probes some particularly British anxieties, linking Aickman’s text to English Gothic by locating it within a discourse of social, sexual and cultural alienation. It pushes to the fore his story’s function as a critique and it suggests the range of its application, anatomizing the tensions lying at the heart of a series of codes. More understated and resonant than Cherrie’s version, its very rectitude is unsettling. Until the dead arrive, the play sounds like just another domestic drama on Radio 4, intensifying its horror by containing it within the reasonable tones of the English bourgeoisie.

Aickman and the radio

Both radio treatments of “Ringing the Changes” are accomplished works. A challenge to the listener, they preserve and promote the intensity of their source material while also providing lucid explication of Aickman’s ideas for a series of audiences. More interestingly, they inflect the story with seamless additions and small changes of emphasis, allowing us to view the material as a Gothic shocker and as an analysis of social and sexual mores. Like all good adaptations, the radio versions enhance the original text, pointing to its underlying tensions and its considerable density and richness. Stimulating and strange, they are worthy treatments of this most complicated of writers, allowing us to enter his world in ways which extend beyond the limitations of the visual and the literal.

Notes

1.      This programme was broadcast as part of BBC 2’s Late Night Horror series at 23:10 on 17th May 1968. Directed by Naomi Capon, the main parts were played by Ronald Hines and Michelle Dotrice. Its details have been preserved by the BFI.

Prior to the setting up of a professionally run archive in the mid-seventies, it was the BBC’s practice to delete its videotaped programmes once they had been broadcast, repeated and/or sold to foreign broadcasters. The relatively high cost of video at the time meant that erased material was taped over. This procedure was followed with scant respect for quality, with some outstanding programmes of the period being preserved and others, now considered significant, being discarded. We are fortunate in that most of the BBC’s “Gothic strand,” including masterworks such as Kneale’s The Stone Tape (1972) and John Bowen’s Robin Redbreast (1970) have been saved, and are now under the protection of the BFI. The Bells from Hell was not one of the survivors, unless, as has happened with a large amount of material, some copies still exist in overseas archives or private ownership. Material mounted on 16 mm. colour film (such as Lawrence Gordon Clark’s treatments of Dickens and M.R. James) is fortunately intact.

2.      I can find no details of P. Norman Cherrie’s writing career beyond his contributions to Nightfall. Mark Gatiss and Jeremy Dyson, on the other hand, are well-known British writers and actors. They are best known for their black comedy, The League of Gentleman, which was broadcast by the BBC in three series and nineteen episodes, 1999–2002. The incongruous and menacing tone of these programmes reflects the writers’ interest in Aickman. Both are champions of his work.

3.      The casting of Barbara Shelley as Hilda Pascoe is a playful reference to the text’s connection with cinematic versions of British Gothic. Shelley played the “love interest,” menaced by vampires and monsters, in many Hammer films of the fifties and sixties, bringing authenticity to her parts as she does to her reading of Hilda.

 The plot of “Ringing the Changes” (1964) is echoed in many morbid, low-budget Hammer films of the period that typically show middle and upper-class characters (doctors, scientists, landowners) being threatened by inexplicable traditions and the menace of an unknowable peasantry. Aickman’s tale is most closely related to John Gilling’s Plague of the Zombies (1966), an effective “B” film in which the dead overwhelm a small Cornish village.

Works Cited

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---. “The Fully Conducted Tour.” 1976. The Strangers. Leyburn: The Tartarus Press, 2015.  48–106.

---. “Magnificence, Elegance and Charm.” 1956. The Strangers. Leyburn: The Tartarus Press, 2015.  218–230.

.----. “Ringing the Changes.” Dark Entries. 1964. Rpt. London: Faber, 2014. 38–80.

Albrecht-Crane, Christa & Cutchins, Dennis. “Introduction”. Adaptation Studies: New Approaches. Eds. Albrecht-Crane and Cutchins. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Press, 2010. 11–24.

Browning, Todd [director]. Dracula (85 mins). Black & white. Universal, 1931.Bela Lugosi (Dracula).

Bryant, John. ”Textual Identity and Adaptation Revision.” Adaptation Studies: New Challenges, New Directions. Eds. Joergen Bruhn, Anne Gjelsvik & Frisvold Hanssen. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. 47–68.

Cherrie, Norman P. Adaptation of Aickman’s Ringing the Changes (27 mins). Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, broadcast at 21.00 on 31 October 1980.  Produced by Bill Howell. Performed by Douglas Campbell (Gerald), Nicky Guadagni (Phrynne), Sandy Webster (Shotcroft) and Ruth Springford (Hilda).

Crook, Tim. Radio Drama: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge, 1999.

Dyson, Jeremy & Gatiss, Mark. The Cicerones. (13 mins). Colour. Sureshot Films, 2002. Broadcast on Channel 4 (UK). Directed by Jeremy Dyson and with Mark Gatiss as Trant.

Dyson, Jeremy & Gatiss, Mark. Ringing the Changes (26 mins). The British Broadcasting Corporation, broadcast at 23.00 on 31 October 2000. Produced by Pauline Harris. Performed by George Baker (Gerald), Fiona Allen (Phrynne), Michael Cochran (Shotcroft) and Barbara Shelley (Hilda).

Golaski, Adam. “As Dark Locks In: Nightfall.” Open Letters Monthly (1 October 2012).

Hand, Richard. Listen in Terror: British Horror Radio from the Advent of Broadcasting to the Digital Age. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014.

Hardy, Robin [director]. The Wicker Man (87 mins). Colour. British Lion, 1973. Written by Anthony Shaffer. With Edward Woodward (Howie), Christopher  Lee (Lord Summerisle).

Jones, Darryl. “Robert Aickman, the Ghost Story and the Idea of Englishness.” The Ghost Story from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century.  Eds. Helen Conrad O’Briain & Julie Anne Stevens. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010.  61–80.

McInerey, Vincent. Working for Radio. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988.

Pinner, David. Ritual. Bath: Chivers, 1967.