Big Finish returns to Holmes

Big Finish Productions is known for its top-notch audio dramas featuring Doctor Who. It also produces an original series about Oscar Wilde’s eponymous antihero Dorian Gray and a slew of other properties, including Sherlock Holmes.

I sat down with Richard Earl, who voices Doctor John Watson in the series, to find out how he landed the role. Always quick with a quip, he responded, “I was the only one who returned Nick’s answering machine message.”

He’s referring to Nicholas Briggs, Big Finish’s co-executive producer and creative director, who takes on the role of the Great Detective himself in the series.

“Nick just asked me [to play Watson],” Earl tells me, sobering up, “and so, I said ‘Yes, thank you very much.’ I didn’t know it was going to be the beginning, in 2009, of our doing…this is our twentieth, I think!”

Briggs, Earl, and a full cast will soon be heard in Sherlock Holmes Untold, a series of eight half hour-long episodes exploring some of Holmes’s unchronicled tales, including that of a club in the lower vault of a furniture warehouse, as referenced in The Adventure of the Five Orange Pips, and a “remarkable worm, unknown to science,” mentioned in The Problem of Thor Bridge. The series was penned by Jonathan Barnes, who has been writing the Holmes audio pastiches for years now.

“Once Jonathan was on board,” Earl says, “no disrespect to Conan Doyle, but the whole thing just seemed to take on a life of its own! Genuinely a life of its own, because we’re now doing original stories.”

Richard Earl, left, and Nicholas Briggs, check through a script.

It seems like playing in Conan Doyle’s Sherlockian world is a dream come true for the actor. “I was obsessed with Sherlock Holmes as a kid,” he admits. “I tried to make my bedroom look as much like 221B (you know, the consulting room, not the entrance hall or something) as I could. But sadly, there was just a total lack of clients.

“You remember the brilliant classic TV series with Edward Hardwicke and Jeremy Brett? Whenever that was on, even though I was trying to follow the plot, I was making a note of where everything was in the room. It was only a small bedroom, and it was difficult trying to get three armchairs in there! And a coal scuttle…”

Before Barnes joined the team to create original pastiche dramas, Big Finish adapted published stories, some pastiches by authors like the late David Stuart Davies and some canonical, such as The Adventure of the Speckled Band. When it came to performing in the adaptations, Earl would read the story once, then try to forget how any previous performer had played Watson.

“Once Jonathan was on board, I think I got more confident, because I was now being allowed to be the first person to massacre these particular Watsons. I’ve gone to every recording knowing how old he is. I’ve tried to do my research as much as I can.

“I haven’t listened to them for a long time, but I’m pretty sure early on I was probably massively overplaying it, but now, because I like to see Nick as a friend, when we are trying to play it, and Nick is standing next to me, I try to tap into our friendship and try to imagine if we were in this situation, then how would we go?

“And I find that Jonathan always writes beautiful goodbye scenes as Holmes goes off on his next adventure, which I think are just as touching as anything Conan Doyle wrote. It might be just because they come at the very end of four days of recording, and we’re knackered and sick to death of each other, but I find them very easy to play.”

For my entire interview with Richard Earl, Nicholas Briggs, and Jonathan Barnes, taking a deep dive into Big Finish Productions’ upcoming audio drama Sherlock Holmes Untold, pick up a copy of Sherlock Holmes Magazine issue No. 22, on sale now.