The Call of the Wild is about a dog seized in sunny California and taken to the frozen north in the gold rush. He learns to bite out the ice between his toes and eventually becomes leader of a pack of wolves. It is a novel of such physical intensity and savage excitement that it has been filmed no fewer than five times in the 109 years since its publication. The first radio dramatisation of Jack London’s classic story began last weekend on Radio 4 Extra; it ends today and, on the BBC iPlayer, can be enjoyed for another week. It also seems to me to demonstrate both how to portray animals on radio and how not to.
Buck, a St Bernard-Belgian shepherd crossbreed, is played in this BBC Scotland production in two ways. As the narrator, chronicling his adventures, he is voiced by the Scottish actor Robert Jack, in an excellent Californian accent. When the humans speak, however, we immediately hear Buck as they hear him — large, powerful and increasingly ferocious, full of yelps, snarls and growls.
The first of these approaches, with Buck speaking, works only if we accept that Buck is able to make assessments and draw conclusions, think logically and describe his life: “I am the lead dawg... I am sold and bought and sold again... the mad humans go away to die under the ice.”
It drives the plot forward, but you know it is an illusion. Animals are not capable of thought in the way that we understand it; they communicate using many methods, but never by human speech.
This anthropomorphic trap is one that film and television producers can avoid more easily: they do not have to give animals sentences because they can let us see the body language, which always says more than words. It would have made Steven Spielberg’s War Horse utterly ridiculous if Joey, sent to France in the first world war, had been made to talk; but when Radio 2 adapted Michael Morpurgo’s book in 2008, the BBC felt he should, so Timothy Spall played him. Being so obviously artificial, the result is infinitely less convincing.
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Similarly, when Alan Davies played Jack, a gentle mutt observing his mistress’s tangled love life, in Radio 4’s About a Dog, and when Roy Hattersley wrote Buster’s Diaries from his pet’s perspective, they illuminated human and not animal foibles. As comedies, that was, of course, the point, but to give animals speech always sheds light on our motivations, not theirs.
It is always better, therefore, if dogs can be played by dogs. When Buck raises his head to a starlit sky in the Yukon and howls, it is spine-tingling. There are several such moments, but they are always the calls of the wild, not the speech of the wild. Other radio dogs that sound like dogs have included The Hound of the Baskervilles; Henry, the devoted animal in Ronnie Corbett’s When the Dog Dies; Tony Blackburn’s faithful Arnold; and, going back a bit, Rustler in Riders of the Range, one of the creations of Charles Chilton, now 94. Despite all that, I shall be tuned in at 4.30pm today, to hear where it all ends in the blood and the snow of the frozen north.