The second of Charles Dickens’ Christmas Books, The Chimes, is nowhere near as well known as the first – A Christmas Carol. Jonathan Morris’ Average Romp productions’ audio movie of it should help rectify that situation, with Toby Jones starring as Trotty Veck, whose life is changed dramatically one New Year’s Eve. Morris, well known to readers of Sci-Fi Bulletin for his work for Big Finish, discussed the project with Paul Simpson…

 

Why The Chimes? Is it a story that you’ve always felt had the potential to work as an audio?

I’m not quite sure when I first read it but about five or six years ago I didn’t have much work on, and when you’re a freelance writer and you haven’t got much work on, you go ‘I need to do some demo specs to show what I can do’. Because I’ve got lots of science fiction scripts and comedy scripts, I was going, ‘I need to do a literary adaptation to show I can do that sort of thing.’ I was looking around for things that I could do that I would enjoy, where I could show off, and The Chimes was a good opportunity for that. It’s Charles Dickens, so it has his name attached to it, but no one’s really done it because it’s difficult and a challenge.

If I was doing an adaption of A Christmas Carol, there you’re just ringing the changes. You’re going, ‘What have I done differently from everyone else?’ But with this, you’re taking the short story that Charles Dickens wrote in quite a hurry – I think even by his normal standards it’s a first draft – and going, ‘OK, what story was he telling here? What was he trying to do?’ [I wanted] to give it more of a structure and bring out the characters and the themes and the story that’s there to show that I could do it. So I wrote it as a film and as a demo, originally.

A full screenplay?

Yes. The audio The Chimes is an adaptation of the film of the book. It’s gone through a whole process, which I think is much more interesting than being an adaptation of the short story. Hopefully that comes across in the audio: you’re listening to something which is like a movie. This isn’t a BBC Sunday Serial or a Radio 4 type of adaptation. This is like ‘I’m hearing the movie with the audio description track switched on’, because that’s the effect I wanted. I wanted it to be immersive but also much closer to a movie of Charles Dickens than a Radio 4 type thing.

What did you do with it as a screenplay that you wouldn’t have done if you’d gone straight in as audio?

Not that much actually, because a lot of the things that I brought out or changed or added to the screenplay were to create visual and dramatic interest.

There’s a scene where Trotty’s delivering a letter to Sir Bowley, which in the short story is set in a dining room. They’re talking about doing work for the poor so I thought, ‘Well, to bring that up, let’s just move that scene so it’s set in a soup kitchen.’ In a film, that gives it visual interest and it gives more to what’s going on in the scene. On audio that gives you a sound base; that gives you tramps in the background, people stirring pots, the acoustics of a church hall, which makes it much more interesting to listen to, than being set in a dining room. So the changes I made for one sort of fixed the other.

The other big change for the film was to give Trotty a companion on his trip into the future, the ghostly girl. Again, that was just because, if it’s a film or an audio, it’s much better to dramatize someone’s personality changing if they’ve got someone to talk to. Scrooge always has the various ghosts that he’s talking to, even if they’re not answering back, whereas in The Chimes, the short story, Trotty is a passive observer. He has no one to talk to. He talks to himself a little bit but I thought, ‘No, you need someone else there with him.’

For this audio there’s a narrator because I didn’t want to do that thing of having characters talking to each other describing what’s going on. There’s no way of doing that nicely: either you do it directly and it feels a bit clunky, or you waste thirty seconds gently seeding in the surroundings. There’s less and less narration as it goes on because, once you’ve described a room, you don’t need to describe it again.

People listen to audio now in a way that has become more sophisticated and we actually fill in more. We don’t need the ‘Look at this gun in my left hand that I am pointing at you’ sort of dialogue.

Yes, and because I’ve been doing this for twenty years there are things like, if there’s a scene set in a park, I just go ‘OK, have some ducks quacking at the beginning.’ That immediately means it’s either a park or an abattoir! It’s probably going to be a park… so you don’t need to have people going, ‘Oh, it’s a lovely day here out in the park. Yes I’m really enjoying the sunshine dappling through the trees.’ You just have a few ducks quack, quack, quack. OK we’re in a park.

I think people are attuned to that, even if it’s unconsciously. With a lot of stories, the location isn’t necessarily that important. You just need to establish who’s in the room – or who’s in the abattoir – and that’s what people care about. That’s the groundwork for it but anything else I think people worry about it too much.

Moving that scene to the soup kitchen also obviously helped place it historically. Did you feel you had to do a lot to actually place the story in 1844, which presumably is when it’s set?

The short story is very placed in 1844 because there’s aspects of the story which are inspired by things that Dickens had been commenting on in the press earlier in the year and things that were happening in the news. It has stuff which is topical [to then], but soup kitchens are food banks, and I think mental health issues and the idea that people are socially destined to become criminals and all those sorts of ideas are as relevant now as they were then. They might have become less relevant through a gap briefly in the meantime, but they’ve certainly come back with a vengeance.

At one point Trotty says, ‘You’re born bad.’ I thought that was an expression from the 1980s and came in with Thatcherism but it’s actually in the short story. There are phrases that you’d think were modern which were actually knocking around 180 years ago. So actually, I was trying to make it sound authentically Victorian with all the conventions that we’ve built up around how people spoke then, but also to give people a bit of a spark, to give people life and not to make it too formal and too Radio 4-ish.

What is it about that, that you specifically want to set aside from?

When I’m being disparaging, I’m being disparaging about a sort of character in my head who’s in The Afternoon Play, where it’s people sipping cups of tea and chatting in their living rooms. It’s not stuff like Dirk Maggs’ work, because he’s done extraordinary sound design productions – they’re dynamic and there’s no messing about. It’s The Archers and stuff like that – which has many great talented actors and writers working on it, but a lot of what they do is designed for people to listen to in the car or while they’re doing the washing up or the gardening. The Chimes is not. It’s designed that you are sitting there and you’re listening to it because it’s immersive. It’s not a background sort of thing.

The minute Trotty goes up into the belfry and the shit starts to hit the fan, as a listener you’ve got to be almost turning your head to catch everything that’s going on. Were you consciously moving into a different feel as we get into that more supernatural bit or did that come out of [director] Lisa [Bowerman] and [sound designer] Howard [Carter] working on the soundscape?

A huge amount of the soundscape is dictated in the script. I did far more directions for sound design than I would normally do. Howard did a fantastic job but he was probably going, ‘This is unusual. I’m getting sound design directions every two or three lines, where normally Jonny would only do one at the top of the scenes and say nothing.’

A lot of it was just trying to give a sense of a sort of accelerating roller coaster, as it were. Because, as we find out later, it’s almost certainly a nightmare, a dream that Trotty’s had, just like Scrooge has a nightmare about four ghosts. With a lot of those dreams they start out quite logical and lucid and then they bring a momentum of a train of thought, linking things together.

That’s how I went from scene to scene: as Trotty starts thinking about this other person, he moves into that person’s life and starts seeing their life. I was trying to dramatize a train of thought: as he starts waking up, as he becomes more anxious, things take an even darker turn and become more surreal. The connections start becoming more obvious, I think, and it starts becoming obvious that it’s a dream, I think. There comes a point where you go, ‘Oh hang on, that’s that character from earlier on coming back. That’s those people he was walking past, talking.’ So you flag that up gradually until it becomes, hopefully, clear.

And of course, with the ending, are we quite sure that he’s woken up? Did you play with that ambiguity or did you want to maintain that ‘Are we in a dream within a dream’ idea?

In the initial story there’s a sort of slight discontinuity. Trotty goes to sleep in his chair in his upstairs attic and he wakes up in the bell tower, so somehow he slept-walked to the church, in Charles Dickens’ version. If he’d woken up in the armchair, you’d go, ‘Oh, it’s obviously a dream.’ But because he’s changed location, something has happened during the night and with all these things, I was very conscious that “he woke up and it was all a dream” is a bit of a cop out. It’ll make people go ‘Oh well, I’ve wasted my time then, haven’t I? None of it actually happened. It wasn’t actually him time travelling in the future with a ghost of… whatever.’ That’s why I had Meg come back and go, ‘It doesn’t matter if it was all a dream, that doesn’t stop it being true.’

There’s an interview with Richard Curtis where he makes a point of going, ‘At some point in the story, you shouldn’t be ashamed, you should just have someone spell out what the story’s about. Just in a sentence, so that no one can get it wrong.’ It doesn’t matter whether it was a dream or not; that’s not the point. The point is that everyone knows what the future will hold if they don’t do certain things, if they let things slide; you can stop that and you can make a difference and you can try.

A Christmas Carol has the same ‘he woke up and it was all a dream’ thing but almost every adaptation goes ‘No, they’re real ghosts. He really did see ghosts.’ They never play up the ‘it was a dream’ part. I was taking my lead from that a little bit as well.

The BBC did a version where the ghosts were going round recruiting Marley and others to do the haunting and you go ‘OK, it’s clearly not a dream in this version because the ghosts have a life of their own outside the story.’

And a savvy audience listening to this has seen Inception or Doctor Who’s Last Christmas.

There’s certainly bits in there where I’m consciously echoing bits of A Christmas Carol because The Chimes has a very similar structure and I can’t fight against that. I can’t pretend it’s not there, so I use it, I actually dial that up a little bit. The film It’s A Wonderful Life has a very very similar structure but The Chimes has never been considered an influence on It’s A Wonderful Life so I used that and brought that out.

Certainly, in terms of the time travel, the idea that he’s a ghost in his own future is something which 100 years ago, people would have needed half an hour to explain. They’d have gone, ‘But how can he be there, not touching people?’ whereas in this, I went, ‘He tries touching his daughter’s hands. His hand passes beside her like a ghost’ and the audience goes, ‘Oh, it’s one of those­­ – a ghostly version of the future.’ We’ve had those, we know what’s going on, so I don’t need to waste any more time on it.

Why to do the production now and as an Average Romp release? It’s not like previous productions.

Average Romp started out because I have scripts which I’ve written which haven’t been made, which is the curse of all writers – and of course you think the ones that haven’t been made are the best scripts you’ve written. I wanted to get them out there and certainly, during the pandemic, there was an opportunity to do that. I thought, ‘All these actors are sitting around with their home recording kits not doing anything, I can exploit them… or I can provide them with much needed work!’

It started off for me talking to Toby Hadoke about doing one, which became three episodes of Dick Dixon. And then I was like, ‘OK, I can do this. It’s not as difficult as I’d imagined it would be.’ So we did When Michael Met Benny just as a practice run, really. What’s it like going to a studio, and working with Lisa for the first time?

But The Chimes is the calling card: that’s what this company can do. Obviously I want it to recoup its costs in terms of sales, I want it to make loads of money, I want it to become a huge international hit where it brings me in thousands and thousands of pounds every year. That’s what I want!

In reality…

In reality, who knows. What’s Toby Jones’ acting profile going to be like next year? He might disappear without a trace.

He’s in Indiana Jones!

Oh yes, he’s in Indiana Jones. So I’ll be tying in with that, I’ll be plugging it: ‘Did you like the guy from Indiana Jones? Well, here he is again.’ At Christmas when The Detectorists comes on, I’ll be plugging it like a mad man as well.

But the calling card thing is to say, ‘OK, this is what the company can do.’ I can take that up to Radio 4 and go ‘I can provide you with audio productions.’

I’ve got a list of things I want to do as long as my arm. Some are my own scripts and some are things where I go, ‘Well, that’s a good idea but I don’t want to write it. I want Toby Hadoke to write it or I want Eddie Robson to write it or Lisa McMullin to write it’ – someone who I know is better than me at certain things, hard as it is to admit.

Why’d you go for Toby Jones as the lead?

First of all it’s because he’s a great actor. When Lisa and I were doing wish lists, we were going, ‘Oh wouldn’t it be fantastic if we could get Toby Jones?’ He was top of the list, for that part. It’s the publicity of having him but also it’s because the point of the project is to go, ‘OK, if this was being done on television, if this was being done by ITV or as a British film, who would they get to do it?’ And they’d go, ‘Well, we’d get Toby Jones.’ It’s that level.

I also wanted it to be someone who people hadn’t heard lots before. You want the sort of reaction of ‘How the hell did they get him?’ It’s like when Big Finish got Kate Winslet, you go ‘What?’

We wouldn’t have got him to do it if he wasn’t interested in the project because he can pick and choose. He did it because he hadn’t heard of this one, it was an interesting character, and because the rest of the cast were all good people. This wasn’t an amateur dramatic production that he was letting himself in for.

He’s in pretty much every scene: even if it’s not audible in the scene, you know he’s present in the scene, observing it. On the recording day in the studio, we got our money’s worth! We had him in that booth for seven hours. He was well up for it, he was fantastic.

I find my own work quite affecting – I was crying when I was writing some scenes – and I come back and find it very moving, which is as it should be. That’s not a vanity thing; if it doesn’t work for me, it’s not going to work for anyone else. And with Toby, he took what I’d done and made it sound natural and chatty, and brought lots of character and emotion. Lots of actors can do that but not many actors can do that with that sort of lack of time to prepare and to get through so much in one day.

I think the fact we got Toby means it’s going to be something which will still stand up in ten or twenty years’ time and still be out there, still be available and still be of interest, hopefully.

What have you learned as a writer and producer from this, that you’ll take onto the next project that you didn’t think beforehand would have occurred to you?

Generally, the scale of the project is quite big in terms of the amount of actors and the amount of post production. This is like doing a whole box set of stories. It’s a huge project and I wanted to challenge myself to see if I could do it, with the very experienced Lisa to hold my hand. One of the things about being a producer is to get someone else who’s really good and Lisa is really good.

I think what I learned, just generally, is that dealing with agents and actors is actually quite easy. You think, ‘I should be intimidated by these top agents.’ But these are nice people, they’re trying to get their clients work, they’re trying to be helpful. I was dealing with them on the most professional basis I could possibly do: ‘You sign up, you get the contract, you do the gig, you get paid ridiculously quickly’. Hopefully, every agency that I’ve worked with now goes ‘OK, Average Romp are a very good company. Everyone has a nice time, they do good work.’ I’ve sent all of them a copy of the play, which doesn’t always happen with actors either. Things like that, they go, ‘Everyone gets a copy of the play, everyone feels included, we’ll work with them again. They’re a good company.’

In this business you want to have a good reputation so I think what I’ve learned is, I can do that and that’s always a relief.

 

Cast photos by Lisa Bowerman, (c) and used with permission

The Chimes is available from the Average Romp website here

Read our review here