Books on the Box :sx the BBC Chronicles of Narnia .sx KIMBERLEY REYNOLDS .sx It is rare to find parents and educators actively promoting a television series ( other than the specifically didactic 'schools' broadcasts ) and treating it as a cultural event .sx This reflects a deeply rooted ambivalence about television as entertainment which is directly linked to attitudes surrounding children's reading .sx Watching television is inevitably regarded as an activity less worthwhile than reading , and for long has been accused of seducing children away from books .sx Nevertheless , when in 1989 the BBC launched its three-year serialisation of C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia , families around the country regularly settled down to an early Sunday evening's viewing , and the whir of institutional video recorders switching themselves on was almost audible .sx The ongoing adaptation of the Narnia books for television ( at the time of writing The Silver Chair is being screened in the six weeks leading up to Christmas 1990 ) raises a number of key issues about children's literature and television .sx These have primarily to do with status , audience , and the construction of narrative .sx In particular , the 'made-for-TV' nature of the series ( as compared with the many film adaptations of children's texts such as Black Beauty , National Velvet , The Secret Garden and Treasure Island ) created problems and possibilities which need to be explored .sx In this article I shall be less concerned with the specific adaptation of Lewis's books than with the attitudes toward televised versions of children's books the series highlights .sx In particular , I want to question the long-held assumptions about the fugitive and reductionist nature of visual renditions now that the video recorder has come of age .sx Screened stories :sx sceptics , status , and skills .sx C.S. Lewis belonged to a well-established school of thought which holds that books are infinitely superior to films and ( especially ) television , and that any attempt to make a filmed version of a 'good' book is doomed to fail .sx He identified some of the reasons for this failure in a brief analysis of a filmed version of Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines .sx Of its many sins - not least the introduction of a totally irrelevant young woman in shorts who accompanied the adventurers wherever they went - only one here concerns us .sx At the end of Haggard's book .sx .. the heroes are awaiting death entombed in a rock chamber and surrounded by the mummified kings of that land .sx The maker of the film version , however , apparently thought this tame .sx He substituted a subterranean volcanic eruption , and then went one better by adding an earthquake .sx Perhaps we should not blame him .sx Perhaps the scene in the original was not 'cinematic' and the man was right , by the canons of his own art , in altering it .sx But it would have been better not to have chosen in the first place a story which could be adapted to the screen only by being ruined .sx .sx Lewis goes on to say that the story is ruined not because one ending is necessarily better than another , but because they create entirely different feelings in the reader/spectator .sx This difference in feeling he attributes to two causes .sx First , the dictates of cinematic conventions and expectations ( his prejudices against which are not denied ) , and second , the lack of understanding on the part of the film's director of what constitutes a good story .sx The educated e lite , Lewis argues , tend to disparage the power of narratives which concern themselves more with plot than character development or portraits of society , and particularly those plots which involve excursions into other worlds or 'shadow lands' .sx The kind of literary snobbishness which dismisses genres such as children's fiction or science fiction as all plot and no substance misses an important point , for to a certain kind of reader such writing has the power to convey " profound experiences , which are .sx .. not acceptable in any other form .sx " .sx Lewis's defence of literature characterised by powerful plots is based entirely on the subjective nature of the reading experience .sx It is unique , personal , private and capable of enabling the reader to transcend mundane reality .sx Because of these qualities the written text is supremely able to adapt to the needs of the individual reader and to do this at different stages in his/her development .sx Lewis believed utterly in the power of the written word , be it poetry for the educated or adventure stories for the masses , and likewise deprecated filmed narratives .sx " Nothing" , he wrote , " can be more disastrous than the view that cinema can and should replace popular written fictions .sx The elements which it excludes are precisely those which give the untrained mind its only access to the imaginative world .sx There is a death in the cinema .sx " .sx In such passages Lewis is articulating the fear held by many that television and films would do two things ; especially with regard to the juvenile population .sx First , that they would prove so seductive that children would abandon , or fail to acquire , the habit of reading .sx Second , that filmed versions of texts would make even the best stories mechanical :sx each viewing would be identical to the one before ; the child would not be free to change emphases ; the viewer would become a passive spectator , as all the 'work' ( e.g. the animation of the text ) had been done , etc. All in all , the viewing process was portrayed as an entirely impoverished one when compared to that of reading .sx It was believed that the child would develop no analytical skills through watching rather than reading .sx Perhaps most important of all , Lewis is suggesting that watching a film prevented the child from making the complex series of unconscious identifications with characters and situations which make fantasy literature useful for psychological development .sx However vaild some of these arguments may be , they must also be understood as typical of attitudes toward popular culture throughout the ages .sx Ironically , Lewis was at great pains to defend the virtues of popular forms of literature ( including children's fiction ) precisely because of their appeal to less experienced or sophisticated readers .sx It needs also to be remembered that at the time that Lewis was writing his defence of popular texts ( 1947 ) , television ownership was not widespread , prolonged daily viewing was impossible , the VCR had yet to be invented , and no research had yet been done into the viewing process .sx Since Lewis's death in 1963 a considerable amount of research into the effects of television on the child has been conducted , and much of it can be used to debate the objections outlined above .sx In particular , it is now recognised that children are not necessarily passive and indiscriminate viewers , but may instead develop 'visual literacy' skills which can complement those acquired through reading .sx The ability to decode a complex visual narrative often precedes but does not necessarily preclude a similar degree of sophistication and facility with written texts .sx Despite frequent media discussion of these issues , there has long remained a distrust of television and filmed versions of classic children's books , and the advent of cable and satellite TV seems bound to provoke a reactionary revival of those parents who announce that they have no television as if this were a virtue .sx ( Funnily enough , such behaviour is closely related to the non-smoking , teetotalling , vegetarian adults Lewis repeatedly mocks in the Narnia books .sx ) Recently , however , there has been a volte-face on the part of many adults who previously deplored filmed versions of children's books as at best inevitably disappointing and at worst travesties of the original .sx There seem to be two key reasons for this U-turn .sx The first is that far from discouraging children from reading , television and films have given birth to a vigorous new publishing activity - the book of the film/programme .sx Children's book sales have increases by 170 per cent over the last five years , precisely the period over which domestic sales of VCRs have also rocketed .sx Through TV tie-ins young readers are introduced to an eclectic range of writing , from Ghostbusters to Adrian Mole and back to such classics as A Little Princess and , of course , the Chronicles of Narnia .sx More importantly , the viewing and reading processes have increasingly been recognised to be complementary rather than mutually exclusive .sx The second and in some ways more interesting reason for the new acceptability of filmed versions of juvenile texts , also based on the widespread use of VCRs in homes and schools , is the growth of a children's video library .sx Much work needs to be done to raise the overall quality of material readily available on video for children , and this is important .sx Videos are not just 're-usable resources' , useful for keeping children quietly entertained ; they have the potential to make the viewing process more analogous to reading and so for developing analytical skills useful for both activities .sx VCRs make it possible to re-view , to skim , to watch selected scenes repeatedly , to omit sections and pause over others - all of which make viewing more personal , more creative , and potentially more intellectually demanding .sx They also mean that greater care has to be taken over the translation of complex texts into videos , as re-viewing , like re-reading , demands that there be something new to discover at different stages in the young viewer's development .sx The ramifications of this degree of control over the presentation of video material are many .sx For the older child it enables very detailed interaction between the written and visual texts .sx By encouraging visual decoding , videos may enhance understanding of the director's version of a text and so the potential for comparison with the reader's own interpretation .sx Repeated watching of a visual version of a text with which the child is familiar can highlight differences in the narrative functioning and capabilities of the two media .sx Even a young child will notice and understand adjustments to the way in which a story is told ; for instance , the need to make the narrator a character in the action or to substitute descriptions of events ( as in a letter ) with enactment .sx By comparing the narrative organisation of printed and visual versions of a text a great deal can be learned about the relationship between structure , form and meaning .sx Re-viewing is undoubtedly the most important aspect of video material .sx According to Lewis , the desire to re-read indicated that a story was not just being read to find out what happened or whodunnit ; indeed , his criterion for a good book was that it became more pleasurable on subsequent readings .sx Particularly in the young child it is no aesthetic qualities which are being sought through repeated readings , listenings , or tellings but ( as the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim has observed ) the satisfaction of having resolved difficult emotional problems .sx The same applies equally to the viewing process , which additionally has the reassuring property of never forgetting or changing what comes next .sx For all of these reasons videos have the potential both to complement printed versions of juvenile texts and to raise the standard and status of televised adaptations .sx If they are to do this effectively it is necessary to overcome established attitudes to children's literature itself and , just as importantly , habitualised practices in the adaptation process .sx To render the narrative complexity of texts ( and particularly those which were not originally intended for reading aloud ) , those involved in making adaptations must be encouraged to exploit the medium of television to its full potential .sx At present most books which are adapted for television make unhappy compromises as to how far they are prepared to 'adapt' the original text , and as a consequence generally leave the viewer dissatisfied .sx In a recent article for Screen , Paul Kerr identifies the principal cause of this dissatisfaction as the tendency for televised versions to " flatten " a text so that , " it is less a 'novel' as such that is being adapted than its plot , characters , setting [and] dialogue " .sx The reason for this flattening is a direct consequence of the elevation of the written text over the film ( and especially over TV) .sx Tradition has enshrined the practice of trying to be entirely faithful to the original , which means treating film or television as a transparent medium purely concerned with showing what the writer has written .sx