Jonathan Morris’ production company Average Romp has followed up its successful adaptation of Charles Dickens’ The Chimes with two more of his Victorian tales: The Cricket on the Hearth and The Haunted Man. He chatted with Paul Simpson about the challenges of the new stories…

You’ve returned to Dickens after three years. Why now, and why the gap?

The gap is because I had other things on the go, like producing the V series for Big Finish. One of the things that happened after doing The Chimes is that Jason [Haigh-Ellery] and Nick [Briggs] at Big Finish went, ‘Oh, Jonny can produce things, we could get him to produce stuff for us.’ So I ended up getting work off the back of it, and that’s kept me busy.

The Chimes was re-released by Big Finish a year after Average Romp released it, so that gave it another lease of life. Then there’s been a year gap and here we are.

Why now? I was hungry to do more for my own company. The Chimes got an extremely glowing review in The Guardian from Miranda Sawyer which was very encouraging. And I was looking at these two stories – I’d spoken to Eddie Robson many years ago, when I was pitching The Chimes for TV, and he said, ‘Don’t do The Cricket on the Hearth because I want to do that.’ I put that in my back pocket and years later I thought, ‘If we do another Christmas Dickens it’ll be The Cricket on the Hearth; Eddie claims he’s got a good idea of how to do it. But it’s not enough to justify release on its own, so we’d have to do one of the others.’ I read [Dickens’ fourth book] The Battle of Life and despaired, to adapt it you’d have to redo it from scratch, but The Haunted Man, I read that and thought, ‘I know how to make that work’. In Charles Dickens’ lifetime it was adapted for the stage, which tends to mean it can be done for audio, they’re similar mediums. It’s famous for being the first production to use the effect of Pepper’s Ghost. Not something you can do on audio, of course.

Eddie’s idea was to do The Cricket as a kind of sitcom Christmas special.

I didn’t put it in the review but what did cross my mind was there was a degree of a Brass Christmas Special.

Yes, exactly! Because Charles Dickens’ version isn’t set at Christmas, my main note was ‘Make it Christmassy.’ It’s about a toy factory owner, so it’s not a big reach.

With The Chimes I’d focussed on every issue that is relevant to today; poverty and mental health and domestic violence, and so I did that with The Haunted Man as well. What really interested me is the idea that your memories of bad things that have happened to you give you a conscience and grant you empathy and compassion. The story’s about what it would be like if someone didn’t have those memories, and you go ‘Oh god, that is Elon Musk.’ That is the tech bros, these human beings who might not be psychopaths in a medically diagnostic sense but who have been brought up where they’ve never known suffering. They’ve never directly experienced how the other half live. I think that’s exactly what Dickens was going for, going ‘There are upper class people out there, who are living lives where the fact that they have no contact with hardship means that they don’t become evil, they just become uncaring.’

They’re divorced from it, aren’t they?

Exactly. So while I was adapting it, I was going ‘That’s what I want it to be about.’ When I was reading it I was going, ‘It is called The Haunted Man, it sounds like a spooky ghost story and it does have that element’ so you want to bring that out but also, it has lots of comedy in it. It has Philip the old porter who keeps mentioning how old he is. ‘I’m eighty seven, you know!’ And the Tetterbys have this passive aggressive relationship where they are really bad for each other, he’s a lazy bastard and she has to do all the work, but they are devoted to each other. And when they lose their memory of their good times together, they realise they’re a really unsuited couple!

I just really wanted to get back into the studio and do some more. I wanted to get back with Lisa [Bowerman] directing because she does a lot of Big Finish, Doctor Who, science fiction stuff and she was always saying ‘I want to do more [like The Chimes].’ To work with Howard [Carter] again and for the actors, get in a couple of old friends, get Dan Starkey back of course. To see who else we could get for the money, because we got Toby Jones last time and so I was thinking who can we get this time? We got Graham Fellows and Paterson Joseph and that’s pretty cool in my book. And Eddie’s one’s got an actor called Bronté Barbé who is just phenomenal; she just absolutely nailed the tone. It’s just great to do it again, to get down to the Soundhouse and record my own thing there and be in charge! Because I have this company, for it to be ticking over, it has to be producing stuff. But it is difficult. Getting people to pay for audio is very tough because so much is available on the BBC or on Audible. But I can say with my hand on my heart, if people buy this, the price you pay is what it cost to make. Nobody is getting rich off the back of this.

It’s two hours for £12!

And that’s two pints of lager, less than two pints of lager now. You could listen to it and drink a bottle of wine and the wine would cost more.

I’m really proud of them, I think they’ve both turned out exceptionally well. Because we’ve put so much work into them, we’ve done so many cuts of every little bit that didn’t quite work – there’s about ten minutes cut from each play, of just moments where you go, ‘That could have been lovely but actually no, it’s better without.’

One of the things that I noticed on both and I will comment on it on my Haunted Man review, is the pacing is spot on.

I was determined that they’d be no more than an hour long because they’re short stories; more than an hour long and you’re going to be trying the listener’s patience. Also, with both of them Charles Dickens has this sort of structure in which the story climaxes after about forty minutes but then keeps on going! So what you think is the end of The Cricket is the surprise reveal of the character who turned out to be the person you suspected them of being all along, but you go, ‘But that’s not the ending, it goes on for another fifteen minutes!’.  So you have to roll with that a little bit and just try and make the last fifteen minutes entertaining even though the climax is structurally earlier than you would normally want it.

It’s the return to the Shire thing, isn’t it. That, ‘How the hell do we deal with all that boring bit?’

Yes and a lot of it is just every single little plot piece is set up, you need to tie it off with a little bow and go, ‘And this is where that character is, there.’ With The Haunted Man, I had Redlaw’s ex-fiancée turning up at the end, which doesn’t happen in the book. She is mentioned but Dickens has the student’s fiancée turning up instead, which isn’t very elegant. I was reading it going, ‘Eh? What fiancée? You’ve never mentioned a fiancée!’ But Redlaw’s lost love turning up, that is how it should end. That gives him a reward, that gives him a payoff, for his journey through the story, like some versions of A Christmas Carol have Scrooge meeting Bella again, at the end.

All the worst versions of Jesus Christ Superstar that finish with the resurrection.

(laughs) Yes. They should just keep on going into Acts.

Meanwhile… here are the letters we were writing earlier…

I have done these two more and now I’m going ‘What else is there to do?’ There are more Dickens Christmas short stories that people don’t know about. But Battle of Life is, I think, unadaptable, even for me who can adapt anything!

With Charles Dickens, there’s a novel no one’s ever done called No Thoroughfare. No one’s ever heard of it. It’s a novel that he wrote with Wilkie Collins. We could do that but I need to cover the costs to justify doing more.

Also, if there’s other stuff out there that people want us to do, let me know because I’ll look into it. If there’s a public domain property or an author who’s written some books and wants an audio adaptation of them, please let me know. There are some odd things that you know are out there, like Ray Galton and Alan Simpson’s second Hancock film, which would be a lovely thing to do. But, are there enough Hancock fans [to justify] getting the rights? Are people willing to buy it?

So are you just waiting to see what happens with this?

Yes. I have a list of about a dozen projects that I want to do of various shapes and forms but it all depends on recovering the costs. Thanks to Big Finish distributing The Chimes, it did eventually cover its costs but it does take a long time and I’m not in a position to pay for more until I’ve made my money back on the last one. So, please buy it!

The Cricket on the Hearth / The Haunted Man can be purchased here.