Customer Reviews

BBC Reaches New Heights In Tintin Dramatisation - By: , 12 Sep 2000
In this collection are: The Seven Cristal Balls, Prisoners Of The Sun, The Calculus Affair, & The Red Sea Sharks. Oh woe. To think that I was so smitten by the original 'Six Adventures of Tintin' on audiotape. OK, the first series was good. But this second series is an order of magnitude better. The actors are mostly the same, though Lionel Jeffries now plays Haddock instead of Leo McKern. What has changed is the dramatisation: series one stuck stolidly to the text of the books; series two keeps much of the text but embellishes this to great comic effect time & again. For instance, the Thomson twins were played straight the first time; now they are camped up by the same actor until they are something like a music hall turn. The Eastern European baddies are endowed with a comic malevolence they never had before:in one story you relish how one baddy is called Stefan (pronounced Shhtayy-ffannn, taking about 3 seconds), but roar with laughter when you realise the two of them are each called Stefan. Or consider the Swiss taxi driver forced off the road by more baddies, & who the whole time is ranting on about how great a singer Castafiore is, even while crashing into the river, & who when he is rescued can only exhalt: 'With Castafiore, the best is still to come!'. Or the running gag of how Haddock & Tintin both hate Bianca's singing so much they'd rather fall into the hands of the enemy - 'Quick, back down the gangplank!'. How Snowy starts howling at a Castafiore concert, prompting a member of the audience to shout 'Will somebody shut that dog up', only for Haddock to bellow back 'That is no way to talk about a lady, Sir' - that was notin the book. Or the running gagin the Calculus Affair built on the salute to Kurvi Tasch (Hamaih), which is milked for all it is worth until cold war dictators must be turningin their graves - even when shouting oathsin moments of dire emergency, the baddies have to follow the routine: 'By the whiskers of Kurvi Tasch - Hamaih! Hamaih! - sound the maximum alerts!'. Even lugubrious Nestor the butler chips in: 'And then their was light', he saysin an aside after turning a light back on, that I only caught after listening about 25 times. I could go on, but what's the point? The whole tape is a gem. General Alcazar would doubtless award it the Order Of San Theodoros. Hats off to every last actor & actressin this production, & wild cheers for the dramatist, Simon Eastwood. More please, Beeb.