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SHERLOCK’S BIG FINISH, conducted by M J Elliott

AN INTERVIEW WITH NICHOLAS BRIGGS

There is no doubt that Nicholas Briggs loves the Sherlock Holmes tales. Known around the world as the voice of the Daleks in the phenomenally successful television revival of Doctor Who, he also masterminds a range of Who audio productions released by the company Big Finish. Briggs writes, directs and performs in many of the dramas (which are available as CDs or downloads from the Big Finish website), appearing alongside the stars of the original series. With 168 Doctor Who releases available at the time of writing, you’d think he would have enough on his plate ... but the allure of the adventures of Sherlock Holmes is just too strong.

“I think there are some similarities,” Briggs observes, “because the Doctor and Holmes in many ways fulfil the same function in the plots of their respective genres. And quite often, Doctor Who stories feel a bit like Sherlock Holmes stories in the sense that some terrible thing has happened and the Doctor comes in to solve the mystery, and, of course, that’s what Sherlock Holmes does. I’ve always seen Doctor Who as a kind of mystery thriller, and I think it works brilliantly when it’s like that. Quite often, my Doctor Who audios follow that mystery thriller format. That is the similarity, and the fact that Holmes is this very singular person, slightly obsessive, with all that information in his brain, and again that’s similar to the Doctor.”

Big Finish began its association with Holmes when it produced recordings of David Stuart Davies’s one-man plays, Sherlock Holmes—The Last Act and The Death and Life of Sherlock Holmes (the one man in question being actor Roger Llewellyn, who has toured the world with both productions and re-created them in the studio for Big Finish). But for their third audio drama, Briggs took the role of Holmes in a multi-cast production of Holmes and the Ripper, another adaptation of a stage play, this one written by Brian Clemens, architect of the Emma Peel era of The Avengers. Having already starred in a revival of the production, this was the natural début for the Briggs incarnation of the world’s greatest detective, alongside Richard Earl as his faithful Doctor Watson.

In the gap between this series and the next, there followed a dramatisation of one of Conan Doyle’s most famous stories, The Speckled Band, narrated in large part by Earl (who plays both Watson and the villainous Grimesby Roylott). Briggs explains: “That’s what gave me the idea to do this series like this—to take out all the ‘he said’s and ‘she said’s, but still keep the narration as a very important part. I just wanted to see how that went, and we had a lot of fun with it. I wanted this to feel as authentic as possible, especially in the light of the BBC’s new Sherlock series (which I really love). But I wanted people who want really proper authentic Sherlock Holmes to have the opportunity to hear dramatised versions. I don’t even want to put an extra twist in it, or find a clever way of adapting them. I want, in the case of the Conan Doyle ones, the Conan Doyle voice—I want Watson narrating, I want it to be as authentic as possible.” The narration is a very important element for Briggs: “When you’ve got an audio, you have to find ways of telling the story differently, and if you can’t have Watson’s voice narrating, you probably have to bend the plot a bit to make things clearer, which is a valid approach. But we don’t need to do that, we’re being more straightforward. I felt in my gut that was the right thing to do—not by thinking ‘What am I going to do with Sherlock Holmes?’. Let’s give a portal for Sherlock Holmes and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to speak through. And even with the stuff that isn’t Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, we’ll still do it in that style.”

The second full series of Sherlock Holmes audio dramas by Big Finish begins with Briggs’s own adaptation of The Final Problem and The Empty House, featuring Alan Cox—a former Watson in Barry Levinson’s 1985 film Young Sherlock Holmes—as Professor Moriarty. I visited the studios during the recording of another Conan Doyle classic, The Hound of the Baskervilles. “So many people remember The Hound of the Baskervilles because it kind of has a monster in it,” Briggs tells me. “And it’s a great title, isn’t it?” For this production, he has assembled a reliable, highly professional cast he can rely upon to convey the authentic Holmesian atmosphere in a relatively brisk recording session. “I’ve got together a bunch of actors I know can do it this way, more or less continually recording. I think Richard Dinnock has done a really good job of adapting it. All the major plot points are there, we all have our little favourite bits, and there are a couple of things that aren’t in there. But the plot is all there, and it rockets along.” Briggs is no stranger to The Hound either, having adapted it for the stage some years earlier, with Samuel Clemens (son of Holmes and the Ripper author Brian) as Sir Henry Baskerville, a role he recreates in this audio version. “It was about Watson putting a play on,” Briggs recalls, “to which he’d invited Holmes to last rehearsals, and wanted Holmes to play Holmes, to see if it was all authentic. So I brought Holmes back on during the long period when Watson was in Devonshire, and have him ask awkward questions about the plot: ‘If you were supposed to be looking after Sir Henry Baskerville, why did you go off to the postmaster?’ For the Big Finish production, many of those awkward questions are avoided by the simple act of removing the final explanatory scene in Baker Street. “When you get to the end and the Hound’s been killed, and you think, more or less, that Stapleton’s gone, and Beryl has been treated so badly and Sir Henry is a mess, it feels fulfilling and that it’s the end of the story. You don’t miss that explanation in dramatic terms.”

But this second series is not made up entirely of Canonical adaptations. Coming in between the Moriarty saga and The Hound is The Reification of Hans Gerber. “It’s an entirely original script that I asked George Mann to do,” says Briggs. “George has written lots of stuff for the Black Library, and he’s very good at Victorian pastiche. He put himself forward very early on, and suggested a story which I liked, which had an interesting twist. He’s written something very much in the style of Conan Doyle, and very much in the style of all of them in this little series—there’s a lot of Watson’s voice.”

Rounding off the second series is a dramatisation of David Stuart Davies’s 1992 novel The Tangled Skein, which sees the most famous fictional detective of all time battling the most famous vampire, Count Dracula. The adaptation is again by Richard Dinnock, and its placement immediately after The Hound is entirely intentional, for Skein serves as a semi-sequel to the Conan Doyle classic. It would be unfair to those unfamiliar with Davies’s novel to go into further details here—instead, I advise you to purchase them both. Dealing as it does with an undead adversary, we are going further into the realm of the fantastic than usual. Has Briggs ever considered an encounter between Holmes and the Doctor? “I was never tempted to do that, not at all. In Doctor Who, everything else we know of as fictional is fictional. So in the world of Doctor Who, Sherlock Holmes is fictional. It might be a difficult one. It’s not a priority for me to do that.”

And what does the future hold for Sherlock Holmes in the very capable hands of Mr Briggs? “I want to see what our audience likes best. I would like to carry on doing a mixture of adaptations and original stuff as well, getting other writers to come up with entirely new Holmes stories which feel like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.” For the time being, though, the masterly first series of adventures can be obtained by visiting www.bigfinish.com.