#as always: liberties were taken with the tls for phrasings and stuff so please feel free to offer corrections where necessary~~~~

[deus-ex-mona]

mona's self liner notes for her second album: a ♡collection♡

[sanguinarysanguinity]

The Hound of the Baskervilles (2011, Big Finish), Nicholas Briggs & Richard Earl

tl;dr above the cut: Sanguinity is cranky because they cut every Holmes-Watson shenanigan in the name of “authenticity.”

I admit, I went into this feeling testy, because in the commentary tracks of the previous Big Finish audios, people had been bragging about how this is the “most authentic” adaptation of HOUN ever.

(Just so you know, “authentic” is one of those poorly-examined words that gets me like nails on a chalkboard. It’s always used for gatekeeping, and in a way that I typically find grossly disingenuous. To badly paraphrase Robert Frost, if someone is building a wall, I’d ask to know why we need a wall, what standing they have to build the wall — is it even your property, dude? — what they are walling in our out, and to whom they are like to give offense. Frustratingly, “authentic” strongly discourages asking those questions: it obscures the actual criteria behind the judgement, and further implies that the judgement is objective, universal, and inherently valuable. Even worse, when I dig into the criteria hidden behind a given use of “authentic,” it often becomes apparent that none of those implied virtues are actually present.)

Anyway, the more they talked about “authenticity” in their commentaries, the crankier I got:

Commentator: No adaptation of HOUN has ever done it straight— Me: Really? I don’t remember either of the Coules adapts taking any liberties with the plot, deductions, or characterizations. Lenfilm was so respectful of the original details as to put ACTUAL phosphorous paint on an ACTUAL dog, and Granada trailed only a little behind Lenfilm in accuracy— Commentator: They always add stuff like seances— Me: Okay, Roxburgh went far afield, but that’s a weird detail to seize on if you’re going criticize Roxburgh for taking liberties. And who else did a seance? Was there a seance in Rathbone or something? Commentator: —or having Stapleton drown in the Mire— Me: Oh, c’mon, that’s the authenticity hill you want to die on? Are you kidding me? Stapleton EXPLICITLY drowning vs Stapleton IMPLICITLY drowning?? Because if that’s where you’re going to set the bar, you’re going to have a tough time clearing it. Commentator: —and most productions cut a bunch of stuff, such as Laura Lyons. Me: All right, that’s a fair cop. She gets cut a lot, and even when she stays in, many productions aren’t super-clear on what to do with her. But what is so critically important about including Laura Lyons?

Eventually, however, they said enough that it became clear that “authentic” meant “lots of narration by Watson.”

I’ve run into this idea before: Watson-narration is a thing in the history of radio Holmes. (Bert Coules apparently had to fight the BBC higher-ups on their insistence that Holmesian audioplays must necessarily include Watson voiceovers. It took half of canon to do it, but Coules eventually started winning those fights, which is why the later Merrison/Williams plays don’t have voiceovers.) I personally am not a believer in the necessity of a Watson voiceover; in fact, I think it often weakens the production overall. In grossest terms, if a single actor is telling us what’s going on, then the production-as-a-whole is failing to show us. An audioplay is a different medium than an audiobook: play to the strengths of your chosen medium, and let us hear the action and emotions! Furthermore, there’s the issue of information flow: it simply requires more time to describe an action than to let us hear it unfold, just as it takes longer to describe emotions than to let us hear them in the actors’ deliveries. The more you employ narration, the less net information you can convey. Narration is a bottleneck, and there are relatively few situations in which it makes the overall story flow more smoothly.

So, you know, I was already feeling testy about the production's conceptual framework before I hit play. But I did try to put my testiness aside and give it a fair listen: appearances to the contrary, I don’t actually enjoy being a crankypants very much.

Altogether, I think it was pushing definitions to call this an audioplay; it is more accurately an abridged audiobook with multiple readers and liberal sound effects. By which I mean, every single line, whether narration or dialog, is a line that Doyle himself wrote. Furthermore, at no point are we allowed to simply hear what’s going on; instead, we are always told everything via narration. We are never allowed to hear a gunshot and infer that someone has shot a gun; Watson scrupulously always takes a few seconds to tell us that the gunshot we just heard was… someone shooting a gun.

Now, I don’t have a problem per se with using Doyle’s words — he wrote some fine words! — but it’s as I said above: if you’re going to rely on narration to convey everything, then the information-flow is choked down to the rate of human speech. Their over-reliance on narration meant they had to cut ruthlessly to trim the six-to-seven hours it takes to read HOUN aloud down to the targeted two hours for their audioplay.

Meanwhile, please remember that they were priding themselves on “not leaving anything out.”

How does that work, exactly?

This is how it works: they cut nearly every single character note.

Holmes watching Watson in the teapot, gone. Most of the walking-stick scene, gone. (Conductor of light stayed, but nearly everything around it was missing.) The skull coveting, the snit about M. Bertillon, the rising back-and-forth to the punchline about whose footprints, all gone. The poisonous atmosphere of tobacco smoke Holmes created at Baker Street; the idea that he’d think better in a box; the line that if Watson will tolerate Holmes’ company then Holmes is satisfied with Watson’s; Sir Henry’s declaration that nothing will keep him from the home of his people; the entire scene with the cabbie; Holmes worrying about Watson’s safety in Devonshire… Nearly everything that is charming, comic, or for which I have affection: all of it gone.

(On the upside, they also cut all of Sir Henry’s gawdawful “Americanisms” — so that’s something? I guess?)

I do understand, of course, that any two-hour rendering of HOUN has to pick and choose — I’ve yet to see/hear one that includes every character element I listed above! And yet most still find time to include some of them. To my mind, it’s a very strange definition of “authenticity” that excludes every point of characterization, humor, and character interplay.

(And yet hey found time to describe Sir Henry’s nostrils. By all means, let’s keep the valorous nostrils!)

Altogether, it made for a very flat rendering of HOUN, especially in the beginning, when the humor is the main thing going. It got better after they got to Dartmoor and started describing the fog and the atmospheric gorse bushes, but there were still some strange pacing issues: for example, Watson’s sighting of the ~mysterious figure~ on the tor went by so quickly that I nearly missed it. Which is a shame, for a production that lays so much emphasis on Doyle’s actual words: I do enjoy Watson’s over-the-top turns of phrase in describing that figure.

(Also gone, and which I missed hugely: Watson skillfully distracting Mortimer with a convo about skulls, and Watson later playing Frankland by feigning non-interest in his information. Worse, they had Watson be flat-out eager for Frankland’s info. If you’re going to pride yourself on sticking to Doyle’s actual words, you could at least abridge them in a way that’s character-accurate.)

Given what-all they chose to cut, I was curious as to how they would handle Holmes’ and Watson’s reunion. As it turned out, they kept “you use me but you do not trust me,” and changed the line about the letters from an expression of frustration (“All my reports wasted!”) to a non-judgemental question (“Were all my reports wasted?”) Every other personal part of the reunion was left out: Holmes teasing Watson about how it’s a lovely evening outside, the bit about recognizing Watson by his cigarette brand… Everything that suggests any kind of connection between them, easy or difficult, all gone.

As I said: it’s a very flat HOUN. You better be here for the monster dog, because there’s literally nothing else happening.

And while we’re discussing the weak points of the adaptation, I found the sound effects distracting: they didn’t supply additional information, and many times the effects were subtly wrong. (Every footstep on Dartmoor was apparently taken on gravel, no matter the actual terrain. Also, it was always ONE person walking on gravel, even if the scene was two people walking together.) I admit that I might be spoiled by ‘proper’ audioplays here, ones that use the sound effects to communicate novel information to the listener. I found it hugely distracting that there were all these noises that were both extraneous and misleading.

Now, all that said! Earl was a very fine Watson, and I find Briggs’ voice as Holmes fascinating. (I can’t decide what makes me lean forward to listen better every time he speaks, and yet I do.) And they did a lovely job making the Hound ominous, the final show-down exciting, etc. And of course, the investigatory through-line was as complete as I’ve ever heard/seen it. (As advertised, they did not cut Laura Lyons!)

But again: to my mind, it’s a very strange notion of “authenticity” that leaves out nearly every evidence of the Holmes-Watson friendship.

Or to put it another way, I like what I like, and what I like are all the odd little Holmes and Watson shenanigans. (Holmes can recognize Watson by his cigarette stubs, but not by his footprints!) All that was gone, sadly, and I think the production suffered for it.