“I did sometimes find myself bolstering up a weaker story or two by doing something a little bit tricksy with them.”
Blimey, guv’nor, here’s a treat, and no mistake. Today we offer a wealth of musings on Sherlock Holmes, audio dramas, working with Clive Merrison, the demands of radio, freelancing, and even the dark arts of Holmes pastiche, in a special guest interview with writer Bert Coules. And for those who sniff at Victorian consulting detectives, we can add that Bert has been involved in many other audio wonders, from the Max Carrados stories and Brother Cadfael to Asimov’s Caves of Steel, so don’t run away, now…
This fine chap is a true Sherlockian hero, for he and the BBC managed to create something unparalleled – the only complete adaptation of the entire canon of Sherlock Holmes stories with the same Holmes and Watson (Clive Merrison and Michael Williams).
It is no secret that crumbling greydog has written Holmes tales both canonical and profane, with modest success – but such scribbles pale beside the mighty tasks undertaken by Mr Coules. Given the opportunity to interview him, we unleashed a barrage of all sorts, and he responded in cracking form. Which is what you might expect from someone who is a dean of the spoken word. Or a doyen, or a don, that sort of thing.
He has experience of being a recording engineer, sound-effects technician, script reader and producer-director, and in case you didn’t know, has also worked on TV and stage projects. His first script, a 45 minute drama-documentary called ‘Wagner in Hell’, about the composer’s disastrous visit to London in the 1850s, was produced in 1977. Twenty years later he proposed a treatment of a Conan Doyle novel, and the rest is radio history. Over to Bert…
BERT COULES
CONFESSIONS OF A DRAMATIST
Greydog: Bert, thank you so much for joining us at greydogtales. You are legendary here for your Holmes work, though as we’ll mention below, you have many more strings to your radio bow. We won’t bother you with biographical stuff, as we like to get straight to the meat – or soya – of the matter. So, first off, let’s talk Conan Doyle. We believe that as far as Holmes goes, you started with A Study in Scarlet, broadcast in 1989. Was that pure chance, just one of those jobs that turned up, or was it something you were eager to do anyway?
BC: Soya? Actually, it was earlier than that: in 1987 I pitched the idea of doing The Hound of the Baskervilles as a one-off. It was a “what do I have to lose?” sort of move: I’d loved the story and the characters since I was a kid so I had that enthusiasm going for me and the Beeb hadn’t done any Holmes for more than ten years which was also a plus, but I was pretty new as a writer and didn’t think for a moment that they would go for it, so I was amazed when I got the job.
We had Roger Rees as Holmes and Crawford Logan as Watson and the show was very successful, with good audience figures and some very positive feedback, so the producer-director David Johnston and I suggested a follow-up project: the first two novels in the sequence, A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four. It took an age for the decision to be made, and when it was, there was both good news and bad: I had the commission but we had to recast the two leads. That brought us Clive Merrison and Michael Williams as the detective and the doctor, and eventually led to our doing all fifty-six short stories and four novels.
Greydog: Adapting and recording the entire canon is an astonishing achievement, one which took, what, a decade or so? Presumably you had no idea at the start, that this would grow from a handful of radio plays into such a monumental project?
BC: From the first words spoken in the studio to the last, recording the lot took eight years, seven months, two weeks, three days and just under nine hours. Not that I was obsessive about keeping track or anything. After Study and Sign I suggested a six-part series of the strongest of the short stories; again it took months until I heard back, and it was then I learned that my idea had grown a tad: I still don’t know who it was at the Corporation who actually thought of it, but it was a brave decision. The one slightly less than positive outcome – and it was only a small one and the alternative would probably have killed me – was that I wasn’t going to be the only writer.
At that stage I had no idea how that would work out, but in the event I became the head of a small and varying team, acting as (unpaid, sadly) script editor as well as writing the majority of the episodes, so overall it sort of remained my show, which was pleasing. Not that I’d ever want to downplay everyone else’s contributions: a huge number of people, writers, producers, directors, technical teams, production assistants, actors, musicians, and more besides, all made the programmes the success they were.
Greydog: How did you feel after this extended marathon – elated, exhausted, relieved to be able to move on? Were you as weary of Holmes by then as Conan Doyle became (“I think of slaying Holmes… and winding him up for good and all. He takes my mind from better things.”)?
BC: As a self-employed freelance, one of my principal feelings was quite simply that a long-term regular source of income had come to an end: I found myself wondering if there were any similar lengthy series of books available to mine that might prove equally (or almost equally) as productive. But of course I was proud and pleased that we’d managed to carry it off and pretty well too: the first time it had ever been done, in any medium.
I’d always managed to interleave the shows with a decent range of others – comedy, science fiction, horror, and non-genre pieces as well as other crime and detective stuff – so no I wasn’t suffering from Holmes-and-Watson overload, fortunately so in view of what was to come.
Greydog: We can’t say that we’re neutral. Your adaptations are excellent (we have a huge pile of the old audio cassettes).
BC: They’re still available as CDs and downloads (forgive the plug).
Greydog: Of course, and we suspect our cassette collection needs updating, as it’s getting hard to get a pencil in the little spools. Of course, Clive Merrison’s performance as Holmes is superb, and scarcely matched on radio or in any visual media. And we agree with another commentator that Michael Williams was “quite simply the best Watson there has ever been, in any medium”.
BC: No argument from me on either of those points. To give performances that nuanced and involving with just the voice is a rare and rather wonderful skill.
Greydog: Did you work with Clive and Michael at all on their interpretation of the characters, or was it simply a felicitous marriage of your scripts and their theatrical talents?
BC: I was a bit fanatical in the early days about how the duo should be played. Looking back at the first scripts I’m a little embarrassed to see that I went rather overboard with my character notes for the two leads: they were well on the way to being semi-scholarly essays, going into details about the state of the guys’ relationship at the time of each particular story, what else was going on in the world around the same date, that sort of thing. But in fact both actors were kind enough to say that it was useful to them.
The first shows were written before any casting had been done, and as with any long-running enterprise, the actors’ own personalities and what they brought to their characters began fairly quickly to influence the scripting: I came to write not just my idea of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, but my concept moulded and enhanced by Clive Merrison and Michael Williams’ own personal interpretations. This was hugely valuable.
Greydog: How much involvement did you have on the day in the recording studio. We understand writers are usually to hand during recording. Is that more of a ‘reassuring presence’ role, or have you ever had to do an emergency rewrite of a line, for example, or abandon part of a scene?
BC: One of the great joys of working with the BBC’s radio drama department is the value that’s placed on the writer, who’s treated as an integral and vital member of the team throughout almost the whole of the production process. So quite apart from pre-production work on the scripts, I was always consulted about casting, about the choice of music, and so on. And I was always in the studios for the recording sessions. I’ve no idea if anyone found my presence reassuring though, and actually I rather suspect that I was sometimes regarded rather differently, since I wasn’t exactly a quiet and detached observer: I was far too fond of sticking my oar in on matters of interpretation and other things more properly the sole province of the producer-directors. I remain massively grateful to them for putting up with me.
Rewrites on the go are almost always necessary. The scripts only really come alive when the words are lifted off the page, and things can suddenly be revealed which escaped attention in the preliminary discussions: a line can prove tricky to say, a vital plot point can turn out to have been neglected, wording that looked fine on paper can throw up ambiguities when spoken aloud, that sort of thing.
And the time constraints are ever-present: a production assistant has the extremely skilful task of keeping track of timings, charting if individual scenes or sequences are proving to be longer or shorter than estimated, and calculating the probable overall duration. Cuts, and sometimes entire new scenes, have to be come up with, and that’s the writer’s job. I’ve missed a few tea breaks, stuck sitting in a corner of the studio scribbling away.
Greydog: One thing we hear in your versions is the addition of more emotional depth to the main characters. They remain canonical and true to the subject matter, but there are moments of anger or affection which are only thinly portrayed in the originals. Are these put in purely in order to give a more rounded feel for the audio listeners, or are they the ‘Coules’ touch, drawn from how you relate to the text personally?
BC: Both. Not only is that sort of dimension expected and welcomed by audiences now, I do see a depth in the tales which is sometimes not acknowledged, and I’ve always felt that they’re more than simply whodunnit puzzle pieces: for me the friendship between the two men is at least as central as the cases and the investigations. When it was first decided to embark on the complete canon the question arose of how long the short-story episodes should be: the spaces available in the schedules were thirty minutes or forty five and I argued for the longer slots. It gave everything the space to breath and the writers the chance to get beyond and a bit beneath the basic plots. And of course the actors and producer-directors brought new dimensions of their own.
Greydog: It’s always fun to listen to your adaptations and spot where you’ve developed or reworked certain aspects. Perhaps the most notable example is your ‘His Last Bow’, which (to be honest) we prefer to the original.
BC: Thank you.
Greydog: There is a poignancy and a weariness, coupled with your re-framing to have Watson more involved, and characters express both fear and anger concerning the horrors of the coming war. Watson is particularly powerful in that regard.
BC: “That’s great: you’ve given Watson some balls.” (Clive Merrison)
Greydog: Absolutely. Stamford makes a return appearance from the early days, and you even include the historical figure of Captain Vernon Kell of Military Intelligence, effectively the founder of MI5. Did you worry about making such major changes?
BC: The overall brief for the project was to be “imaginatively faithful”. I thought that was a marvellous way to look at what needed to be done. What was paramount was to stay true to the spirit of the originals: drama and written fiction have very different needs, and what works well on the printed page is by no means always appropriate in another medium. It does no favours to an author to give actors long stretches of literary dialogue or narration if the excitement and colour found in the original context is lost. It can actually be more faithful to change things – to capture the atmosphere and the emotion in a different way – than not to change them.
There’s also the point, made in an interview by the great TV writer Alan Plater when he dramatised one of the stories for the Jeremy Brett TV series, of needing to fill the time slot. I don’t recall the exact words but I vividly remember him saying something like, “The Solitary Cyclist contains about six minutes’ worth of action: of course I had to make stuff up”. The trick is to make it relevant and interesting stuff, not just padding.
Greydog: And which story – if you can remember – was the easiest to adapt, the one which needed least reworking to suit the medium?
BC: I’m tempted to say that none of them was actually easy, but The Hound of the Baskervilles – which I dramatised twice because I didn’t want simply to reuse my early version – had one of the most linear and dramatic structures. And of course it’s among the strongest of the tales: I did sometimes find myself bolstering up a weaker story or two by doing something a little bit tricksy with them.
Greydog: The original Holmes stories, the canon, have been supplemented by thousands of pastiches, homages and parodies, from as far back as when Conan Doyle was still writing Holmes himself. You yourself added fifteen ‘authentic’ tales, which the press described as ‘A joy from beginning to end… ingenious extensions of the Conan Doyle originals’. Do you read other people’s canonical pastiches, such as those in the ever-growing collection of anthologies from MX Publishing and Belanger Books?
BC: I suspect that virtually every devotee of Holmes and Watson has sought out (or created for themselves) stories beyond the canon, and I’m no exception: I’ve been lucky enough to be paid to do the creating and I’ve always done the reading for the pleasure of it. From the earliest efforts through Adrian Conan Doyle and John Dickson Carr’s 1954 collection The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes to the very latest MX Publishing anthology, I love a good pastiche.
Greydog: How do you feel about more wayward interpretations? We have Holmes and his young female apprentice; Holmes against Lovecraftian horrors and so forth, not to mention explicitly supernatural and steampunk settings. Is Holmes such an icon that he’s fair game?
BC: I think that he (and Watson) are perfectly fair game, yes. I can enjoy what DC Comics used rather splendidly to label “imaginary stories”, which use the characters but not in their normal world (sometimes literally so) as long as those characters remain true even when the settings don’t. Again, it’s preserving the spirit that matters. But having said that, a truly audacious step away from Doyle can be entertaining – and enlightening – too if approached by a reader in the right frame of mind. I know that I’m not alone among Sherlockians in admiring the sheer nerve of Michael Dibdin’s novel The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, but I also know that we’re in a distinct minority.
Greydog: And as we’re followed by quite a lot of Holmes enthusiasts, we have to ask if you have an absolute favourite – short story or novel – from the original canon?
BC: As a writer I couldn’t allow myself that luxury. But as a reader I tend to have a fondness for some of the perhaps less well-regarded entries, not always for the piece as a whole but for some wonderful detail within it. ‘The Yellow Face’ is a favourite.
ADVENTURES IN OTHER WORLDS
Greydog: Now, it would take a lot of time to delve into your many other radio adaptations. A notable one is perhaps your Wizard of Earthsea (finally released in 1996) with Judi Dench as narrator, which is now sadly hard to find. And we were surprised to find that you also adapted the classic ‘Flowers for Algernon’, the moving science fiction story by Daniel Keyes. Which, of all your non-Holmes audio projects over the years, brings you the most satisfaction?
BC: It’s interesting that you mention examples from fantasy and science fiction. Both of those genres were, at the time, extremely hard sells: Beeb radio retained a definite aura of literary worthiness and genre material was quite a way down their desirability list. I was extremely pleased when I managed to sell the main drama department a feature-length dramatisation of Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel but unfortunately things returned to normal when I couldn’t interest them in any of the sequels.
Greydog: You seem to have had an abiding interest in science fiction through your career…
BC: Yes indeed, fuelled in my extreme youth by Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future, in the Eagle comic, and some wonderful SF on radio in the days when it could be found in relative abundance.
Greydog: Happy days – we grew up on Dan Dare and the Trigan Empire. And we believe you’re also a Dr Who enthusiast?
BC: Very much so. If Chris Chibnall is reading this, I’m available and at very reasonable rates.
Greydog:We also wondered if you were familiar with William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost Finder stories, from the Edwardian period. The revival of WHH and Carnacki has been a hobbyhorse here for some years, and Dan Starkey gave a superb audio performance as Carnacki* not long ago. Surprisingly, there are more stories written in homage to Carnacki the Ghost Finder than there are of any other Victorian or Edwardian detective – save for Sherlock Holmes. Hence our tongue-in-cheek recognition of Carnacki as the second Great Detective.
BC: Beyond the names, I don’t know anything about the character or the author: I must rectify that, thanks.
Greydog: In the same sort of quirky areas, you’ve adapted Ernest Bramah’s The Eyes of Max Carrados (the blind detective), and Houdini’s A Magician Amongst the Spirits. This latter is of added curiosity because Houdini undertook his own detective work to expose fraudulent mediums, whilst Conan Doyle was desperate to believe in spiritualism. Do you read supernatural literature?
BC: A Magician wasn’t a dramatisation, it was an original piece. I just pinched the title of Houdini’s non-fiction work. It was the first ninety-minute play I ever sold and it went out in the old Saturday Night Theatre slot, which was regarded as a sort of rite of passage for a radio writer. The supernatural has long fascinated me, yes. It pains me when I see Doyle’s beliefs belittled, which still happens: spiritualism was a crucial and central part of his life and should be treated seriously. I was very pleased with the way actors John Bott and Barry Dennen handled Doyle and Houdini in A Magician.
Greydog: Now we have to see if we can find a copy of that. You’ll have gathered that at greydogtales we wander around the niches of supernatural, disturbing and detective fiction fairly randomly, shifting between late Victorian pieces and contemporary weird without much thought. Our hearts are often lodged somewhere in Edwardian times. Given that you’ve adapted everything from Brother Cadfael to the far-flung futures of Isaac Asimov, do you have a ‘comfort’ period when you settle down with a book for pleasure, rather than work?
BC: No, not really: for recreation I happily read almost anything and everything, fictional and otherwise. On the go at the moment I have a book about the textual changes in the first three published versions of Hamlet, a biography of the remarkable Lilian Baylis, founder of the Old Vic theatre and the Royal Ballet, and a newly-published Sherlock Holmes pastiche.
Greydog: Finally, is there any recent or forthcoming work of yours that you’d like to mention? And are there audio mountains you still wish to climb?
BC: They’re not audio but I have two current projects in hand which both arose from radio work: Lost Empires, a stage version of J B Priestley’s wonderful novel about the decline of the music halls and the onset of the first world war, and 221B, a Holmes and Watson TV series which takes the characters and their world right back to the Victorian-period originals. The Priestley has been staged in London and on tour in a tremendous student production but I live in hope of a full-blown professional outing for it one day; and the TV series is currently under option, so who knows what that might lead to?
On radio, I’d love to tackle James Hilton’s Lost Horizon whose story of a hidden secret oasis of calm dedicated to preserving everything good and valuable in a world gone mad and heading for destruction is astonishingly prescient and relevant. There’s definitely a mountain or two to climb there.
Greydog: Bert, many thanks again for being with us, and good fortune in all your endeavours. We can pay only in raw chicken carcasses, which we have to steal from our large, hungry dogs, so your remittance may take a while…
BC: Thanks for asking me to do this; I’ve enjoyed it. Pre-chewed raw chicken will be very acceptable: pay me at once if convenient. If inconvenient, pay me all the same.
* We interviewed actor Dan Starkey here http://greydogtales.com/blog/doctor-who-and-the-detective-its-the-starkey-stratagem/ and Scott Handcock, the Big Finish audio producer, here: http://greydogtales.com/blog/come-freely-go-safely-dracula-returns-scott-handcock-rules/
You can follow up on Bert Coules’s work below:
His website: www.bertcoules.co.uk
BBC audio Sherlock Holmes website: www.merrisonholmes.com
His book about the BBC series: http://merrisonholmes.com/book.php
“The most engaging and informative non-fiction Sherlock Holmes book I’ve read in many long years.” Charles Prepolec, writer, editor, Sherlockian commentator.
greydog, aka John Linwood Grant, is currently editing a two volume anthology Sherlock Holmes and the Occult Detectives for Belanger Books due out early 2020. His Holmes pastiches can be found in a number of other recent anthologies.
Many thanks to Greydog for the invitation to chat and the nifty presentation.