transcript

Speaker 1:
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Speaker 2:
[01:00] You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Molinsky. In general, I am not a fan of true crime podcasts, but I found one that I love. It was created by a guy named John Watson. He's a doctor in London. He was injured while volunteering in the Ukraine War. After that, he wasn't sure what he wanted to do. He thought he'd try podcasting, so he was recording everything in his life. And he was looking for a roommate, a flatmate. And he meets a guy named Sherlock Holmes. And Sherlock's name is the least unusual thing about him. He has this incredible ability for observation, and he works as a freelance consulting detective.

Speaker 3:
[01:49] Evening.

Speaker 4:
[01:50] It's 11 a.m. Right, yes, of course, bedtime.

Speaker 5:
[01:55] Sorry, wait, where have you been? What happened?

Speaker 4:
[01:58] The dead body in Brixton?

Speaker 3:
[02:00] Oh, it was the taxi driver.

Speaker 6:
[02:03] The taxi driver?

Speaker 5:
[02:05] Sherlock, can you... Can you just elaborate for the podcast?

Speaker 2:
[02:15] They're renting an apartment from a real estate agency called Hudson's. And the realtor, whose name is Mariana, takes an interest in their work. Sherlock actually keeps calling her Mrs. Hudson, even though that's not her name. And she ends up becoming the administrator of their business, which is a detective agency and a podcast.

Speaker 5:
[02:35] Oh, yeah, who is that on the phone?

Speaker 7:
[02:38] It was the Brazilian embassy.

Speaker 5:
[02:41] Are you serious?

Speaker 3:
[02:42] What do they want?

Speaker 7:
[02:43] What do they want? They want our help. A Brazilian male murdered in London last night. What?

Speaker 5:
[02:50] Where?

Speaker 7:
[02:51] Barking, East London. Gunshot wound to the head.

Speaker 3:
[02:55] Oh, I found it.

Speaker 5:
[02:56] You've never struck me as a TikTok user?

Speaker 3:
[02:58] It's the quickest resource. Three videos here, one of the body. That's Thor Bridge near Uppney Station. Mrs Hudson, head to the Brazilian embassy. I'll message you our requirements. It's Maria now. Hurry, Watson. The game is afoot.

Speaker 5:
[03:14] Yes, on my way. I'll just grab my phone. Oh, God's sake, where is it? Right, right.

Speaker 2:
[03:23] Okay, as you've probably guessed, this is not a true crime podcast. Sherlock & Co is an audio drama about Sherlock Holmes in the modern world. Now you may also be thinking, didn't the BBC already do that? Yes, there was a TV show with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman playing modern versions of Watson and Holmes. But that show was sometimes more of a re-imagining of the original stories instead of a direct adaptation. And there were only 13 episodes. There was also a CBS show where Johnny Lee Miller played Sherlock Holmes in modern day New York with Lucy Liu as Watson. And that show took even more liberties with the original source material. The creators of Sherlock & Co, Joel Emery and Adam Jarrell, set out to adapt the entire canon by Arthur Conan Doyle. That's 56 short stories and 4 novels. And they're trying to stick closer to the original text. So when they adapted the novel The Hound of the Baskervilles, it took them 10 episodes to cover the entire story. And the format of a fake documentary podcast creates a lot of breathing room to give you the sense that you're just following the lives of these real people. Sherlock & Co has captured my imagination so thoroughly I was inspired to start reading the original canon. And the points of comparison are fascinating. For example, I got to a story from 1893 called The Musgrave Ritual around the same time their audio drama version came out. In the original story, an old schoolmate of Sherlock Holmes named Reginald Musgrave comes to him with a mystery around his household staff. Musgrave comes from very old money. In their audio drama version, Musgrave wasn't just a guy that Sherlock knew from school. He was Sherlock's childhood bully. Sherlock sees him for the first time as an adult at the funeral of Musgrave's father, who had been a beloved teacher at their school. Musgrave is walking in their direction when Sherlock says to Watson, Yes, there is no cruel man.

Speaker 3:
[05:39] He is an incarnation of hatred, spite and wickedness.

Speaker 6:
[05:44] Goodness. Holmes from the lower dorms.

Speaker 4:
[05:47] Delightfully good to see you, old boy.

Speaker 3:
[05:49] Hi, Reginald. Good to see you too. So sorry about your father.

Speaker 6:
[05:54] Very, very decent of you. Most thoughtful. Let me just have a quick natter with the family and I'll circle back two ticks, lovely man. Thank you so much.

Speaker 3:
[06:03] Satan himself.

Speaker 5:
[06:04] Sorry, that guy.

Speaker 3:
[06:06] Guy, you say, inferring a cell or two at least of humanity. Far from it, John. Far from it.

Speaker 5:
[06:12] The guy that held your shoulder and called you a lovely man.

Speaker 3:
[06:14] The serpent sheathes its fangs, Watson.

Speaker 2:
[06:18] So in the audio drama, when Reginald hires Sherlock, along with John and Mariana, to solve a mystery, Sherlock has very conflicted feelings about it. Joel Emery writes the scripts and Adam Jarrell does the sound design and editing. I asked Joel, when he looks at the original stories, does he ask himself, how can I add a layer of emotional meaning to every plot point?

Speaker 6:
[06:46] Yeah, that's a really good question. It's partly because of the nature of what the audience is these days compared to in Arthur Conan Doyle's days. We do expect a bit more. Characters can't really come out of nowhere and you can't just sort of not comment on a sort of broader relationship between the characters. We just don't accept any more, oh, I used to know this guy. We expect there to be whether it be baggage or whatever else might be there. So generally, I will try and expand what just a modern audience would expect. But Musgrave Ritual and Gloria Scott.

Speaker 2:
[07:26] The Gloria Scott is the name of another short story they adapted.

Speaker 6:
[07:30] They both kind of, they're Sherlock, if I remember correctly, Sherlock telling Watson of something that happened quite a long time ago, and these are his notes on it. We can't do that because we're bound by John actually releasing his podcast at the modern day as things go along. So I'll sometimes use a number of devices that make the characters feel younger and more vulnerable. So in Gloria Scott, they're literally having a sleepover, and John and Mariana are starting to get to know each other, and there's something about it that makes them feel like children again, because that story was Sherlock Holmes' first ever case that he figured out when he was a teenager. And again, we can't do that, but we can bring the kind of sense of that to them. And then Musgrave Ritual, bullies, sort of tricky academic subjects and stuff like that, are things that will remind us of being young. And again, it was about, can we get the sense of the original story by just kind of making our characters kind of regress? And once again, they're in a kind of sleepover situation, big scary house, feeling vulnerable.

Speaker 2:
[08:38] So Adam, when do you come into the production process? Because I mean, the audio, I'm very picky about audio dramas, and I am stunned at how real it sounds and how quickly I suspend my disbelief. Like, how much location recording do you do?

Speaker 8:
[08:54] Whenever we can, I try to do that. Speaking of Musgrave Ritual, for any spoilers, there's a scene where they scrub what end up being the crown jewels, basically.

Speaker 2:
[09:07] I know, I'm like, do I say spoiler for a story that's 130 years old?

Speaker 8:
[09:12] Exactly. You'd be amazed how many times we get told off for spoilers, and I'm like, come on, come on. And I actually did that, things like that, I like to do, sort of get my hands dirty about it. It's one of the things I love most about my job on Sherlock & Co. But yeah, there's four, Silver Blaze and Hound of the Baskervilles. Joel and I went to Dartmoor, and I was running around with my microphone, the same microphone that John uses in the story, so it sounds as authentic as possible. I'm a bit of an audiophile. Music is my first love, so I also am picky with audio dramas like yourself, Eric. And I just, it needs to sound like it's being captured on John's microphone. Now, of course, we take artistic license when it comes to underscoring, for, you know, to heighten drama, or even if there's some things where you think, hang on, would they really be able to record this? But that's just suspending your disbelief. Yeah, whenever we can try and get location recording, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[10:08] Well, tell me, the Hound of the Baskervilles was, that was, I was so riveted by that. You have a motorcycle chase in that audio drama.

Speaker 8:
[10:16] Oh, yeah, they steal the McDonald's delivery driver's moped. That's what they do, yeah.

Speaker 5:
[10:23] You did what? I told you, it's the least we could do for stealing the bike.

Speaker 3:
[10:27] We're not stealing it, we're borrowing it. Because we are busy. Busy with something much more important than a McCrispy chicken burger.

Speaker 5:
[10:37] It's the McSpicy chicken burger, to be accurate.

Speaker 4:
[10:41] Oh, shut up.

Speaker 2:
[10:43] So what was that? How do you record something like that?

Speaker 8:
[10:46] We steal a moped and we drive it through London. No, no. We have access to a lot of sound libraries. And there are hundreds and hundreds of motorbike sounds. And it's just up to me or Joel when Joel edits as well, to just try and find the best sounding one and mix it in. I think that scene in particular had something between 20 and 25 audio channels. Because you can't just have the sound of a city. It has to be the sound of a motorbike passing through various elements of a city. So you've got a part of one conversation goes from the front of the right ear to the back, and different vehicles going by. There's a lot of moving parts, quite literally, to a scene like that. That's probably the extreme, isn't it, Joel, with regards to chases, any kind of vehicle chases. There's a big one at the end of Shoscombe Old Place as well, which I remember took me a couple of days just for a scene. It's one of those things where you sit back and go, oh, I've definitely done well there. I wonder how long I've done, and then you zoom out and it's three minutes. But these things last the test of time. If you're passionate about it, it's never going to be finished. So sometimes I listen to an episode and go, oh, I should have done that. I should have put an extra bit in here. But with regards to vehicle chases, they're probably the extreme of what a lot of the show, not a lot of the show, but the most common place is obviously the living room of 221B Baker Street, which is nice and simple with regards to sound design.

Speaker 2:
[12:14] Well, when you do, when you said, for Hound of the Baskervilles, you went out to the Moors to record, or I think I read that you actually went to modern day Baker Street to see, well, what does it sound like out there?

Speaker 8:
[12:24] Yeah, all the scenes of Baker Street when they're walking to and from the house, that is walking to and from 221B Baker Street. I did it about 15 times one day. I must have looked lost. I must have looked like such a lost tourist. But I just had to make sure I didn't get any a shot of anyone mentioning Sherlock Holmes, or mentioning the BBC, or something like that. So that is genuinely Baker Street, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[12:50] The original stories about Sherlock Holmes were supposedly written by John Watson and published in a contemporary magazine. A modern-day Watson who was committed to writing instead of podcasting might find it challenging to figure out where to publish his stories, and Sherlock would have no interest in helping him find the best online platforms. So the safest bet for Watson would be IngramSpark. IngramSpark is an award-winning publishing platform that provides everything you need to successfully self-publish. They make it free to publish and edit your book as needed, and that means you can focus on what you do best. The craft of your writing, well, they make it possible for you to share your work with millions of readers. When you self-publish with IngramSpark, you are plugged into one of the publishing industry's largest global book distribution networks. They give you access to over 45,000 retailers, including independent bookstores and libraries. They also have courses on their site that you can take on marketing, design, and much more. Plus, you can connect with fellow authors and publishers through the IngramSpark community. Get 15% off your first order of 15 more books using the code Imaginary15. This offer expires at the end of the year. Get started today. When I first started listening to Sherlock & Co, I kept thinking about the challenge of adapting classic literature to the modern world. And I asked Joel, when he goes through one of the original stories, are there ever moments where he's completely stumped as to how to modernize it?

Speaker 6:
[14:35] The biggest thing is this such, this is so strange, but in this country, like the sort of, the right-wing nostalgic view is that people back in time were harder, sort of hardier folk, stiff upper lip type thing. That is absolutely not true of Victorians at all. They will faint at the slightest embarrassment, they will die of fright, all these different things, and a lot of the time, Conan Doyle has put those things in. I mean, Sir Charles Baskerville dies of fright. There's a few characters that die of things that are very, very Victorian. They're quite sort of gentle in their disposition, and sometimes those things, I'm a bit like, what is fright? What on earth is that? Is that, is he had a heart attack? Because that doesn't make sense, because Conan Doyle has mentioned heart attacks before. So I find that area tricky, and I think it's probably basically a lack of expertise in the area of, you know, biology and stuff. I don't know what fright would translate as in the modern day. And also the deaths are key to any case. So I'm reluctant to kind of fiddle around with them too much. Those are the things that I get on my guard about, because the other ones are obvious, which is basically social standards. And especially when it comes to things like race, to things like sex, but I can, as anyone, meaning Conan Doyle, will know that he's a man of his time. You know, we're in our time and it's, you know, those things need changing, adapting. If I don't think it's that important, I'll just flat out avoid it. Some of them are absolutely integral to the plots themselves. So as an example, the man with the twisted lip, that's clearly someone with what we would call a cleft palate and you would never suggest that someone has a twisted lip because it's quite a cruel thing to say. So we put that phrase, as it were, into a child's voice, essentially. It was a much more naive thing to say. It's not a sort of pointing finger and saying, look, there's a man with a twisted lip. So we have sort of tricks like that. But otherwise I'd say that's it. Security cameras are the biggest bummer, to be honest. Security cameras are a real true crime killer, to be honest, for want of a better word. You do often think, how on earth would this person get away with doing the thing they've done in one of the most heavily monitored cities in the world? Yeah, that's the big one.

Speaker 2:
[16:51] So I want to dive into Sherlock himself, because I think it's fascinating in terms of modernizing him. Because one of the things I love about your format is there's a lot of downtime. Like in one of the earliest episodes, he and Watson stumble into a pub trivia night.

Speaker 6:
[17:06] What is Wrigley Tin? The answer is corrugated iron.

Speaker 3:
[17:11] It's corrugated steel, you fool. You are incorrect, sir.

Speaker 6:
[17:18] Someone's complaining.

Speaker 5:
[17:19] Sherlock, sit down.

Speaker 3:
[17:20] It's corrugated steel.

Speaker 2:
[17:23] The other thing is that one of the big differences now is the way men express themselves and their level of psychological self-awareness. The Benedict Cumberbatch batch version of Sherlock famously called himself a high-functioning sociopath, but your Sherlock refers to himself as neurodivergent. How do you adapt Sherlock Holmes for modern day?

Speaker 6:
[17:44] We've never really liked the cold, calculated genius. We were always going to bring him out of his shell fairly early on. Sherlock Holmes, another surprising thing when you read through the canon, he's quite silly. He tries things out of just curiosity. He'll do unusual things. It's a very, very attractive side of the character. To me, that's way more attractive than the cold, hard thinker that's got no time for people's emotions and stuff like that. So yeah, I look out for the sort of affectations as well as not just in terms of what happens in the case, but how he behaves in the case, because you are bound to find something where he's decided to dangle upside down because it's given him a better perspective on something, stuff like that. So we heighten those, and that's made much easier by the fact that we have a very young listenership who love those kinds of things and will always gravitate way more towards them than the austere, steely stuff. So yeah, we definitely embrace the fun side first, which isn't blasphemy to Conan Doyle fans because that is already in the text. It just kind of got forgotten after 130 years, which is fair.

Speaker 8:
[18:55] Yeah, I think there's always a danger to make him too condescending. I think when they go for the high-functioning sociopath vibe, I feel like it's a little harder to almost root for him. Not that there's a team John and team Sherlock, but I think with the amount of time that they spend together, he would kind of soften that sort of hardness, but he's obviously a genius. When Joel read the original works, he said, obviously, this man is neurodiverse, and that comes back to Ellie about the Victorian attitude towards certain diagnoses and etc. That's kind of what you took from it, wasn't it, Joel?

Speaker 6:
[19:34] Yeah, it was. Yeah. I mean, as I've said before, my daughter was two at the time. She was diagnosed when I got the job to do this. So I'm reading books about autism, and then I'm reading Sherlock Holmes, and I think, wow, this is pretty close shot from Conan Doyle.

Speaker 2:
[19:50] There's a scene actually in one of the recent episodes where Watson discovers that Holmes has actually kept some letters from listeners to their podcast, talking about him and being neurodivergent. Are those real?

Speaker 6:
[20:02] They are, yeah. They're, they're, they're e-mails that he's obviously, I've, I've said that they're letters or he's printed them out. But yeah, they aren't genuine. Yeah, I removed, I removed some details of one, but yeah, they're real, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[20:17] Yeah, I had a feeling they were.

Speaker 5:
[20:19] Hello. If this gets read, I'd like to express just how much this podcast means to me. I'm 12 and autistic and this by far has been one of the best things. Hi, I'm Kai Rose from Buffalo NY. Sherlock has made me realize that I don't need to mask. Thank you so much for everything. I love everything about your team. Dear Sherlock... Sherlock, you keep all this.

Speaker 3:
[20:52] I do. I keep things that matter to me.

Speaker 2:
[20:58] You know, what's interesting too is that Sherlock's social class has been hinted at in previous depictions. I mean, every version of Watson has noticed that Holmes doesn't really need a job. But your Watson is very aware of it, and it bothers him not that he has an issue with that. It kind of bothers him that Sherlock doesn't want to acknowledge the class differences between them. You can hear it in their accents and their choice of words. I just found that totally fascinating. When did you start to realize this is something people in modern day would kind of talk about?

Speaker 8:
[21:32] I think it was one of the first things I said to you, Joel. I think it was a case of like, if it's two guys in their 30s living in Baker Street, they're going to need a lot of money to afford the rent. I think when we made the Illustrious Client, what do they get for the Illustrious Client case? A quarter of a million, was it, in total? Or 125,000?

Speaker 6:
[21:54] Yeah, I think so. Yeah, or 150 grand or something.

Speaker 8:
[21:57] Yeah, and I think my kind of working class envy, let's call it that, of these two guys who were able to live in Central London, I was like, okay, well, that will be them for a year. They're probably sorted for a year now. So as mundane as that sounds, I was always perplexed as to how they could afford to live there. We didn't want to hint too much at some sort of, Sherlock's from a rich family, he's got this money, he's got this tied up in this. I think the Illustrious Client was enough for John, Sherlock and Mariana to say, oh, we could potentially make a business out of this. If this is the first case and we've done this well, we might be able to set ourselves up and give this a good go, which I thought was quite sweet, and I think you kind of root for them after that, because it's not like the show drops in and they're already solving crimes. We hear how they recruit Mariana.

Speaker 7:
[22:47] Do you do this sort of thing often?

Speaker 3:
[22:51] Not often enough, Miss Hudson.

Speaker 7:
[22:53] You should, I mean, you should set up a company for this, like as a business, for the money and the future of revenue.

Speaker 5:
[23:05] God, you're right.

Speaker 7:
[23:06] I'd be happy to help you set everything up.

Speaker 5:
[23:09] You would?

Speaker 7:
[23:10] Absolutely, I could, I mean, I could run it.

Speaker 5:
[23:13] That, yes, this is brilliant.

Speaker 4:
[23:16] Let's, right, let's register it.

Speaker 5:
[23:18] Let's do it.

Speaker 7:
[23:19] Okay, great.

Speaker 2:
[23:20] Actually, I wanna ask you about Mariana. I love the way you've turned, and a lot of people comment on this. Mrs. Hudson was the, she was the landlady, basically.

Speaker 8:
[23:29] Yeah, the housekeeper, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[23:31] Housekeeper, landlady, always bringing them tea, occasionally helping them out. And you have this, a woman named Mariana works for a real estate agency called Hudson's, and then for a while, Sherlock calls her Mrs. Hudson, which annoys her, it's very funny. And she becomes the administrator of their business, she's like a third detective, and a friend. So what, you know, you're really sticking a lot to Watson and Holmes in the canon, but then you've invented basically this new character, this Spanish woman, who is, they're now a trio. How have you noticed, as you write, and as the actors perform organically, what are you noticing about how the dynamic changes with them as a trio instead of as a duo?

Speaker 6:
[24:09] There's some stories where I think, I can't fiddle with Holmes and Watson in this particular case. And Mariana might sort of be back at base in that sense. But a lot of the time I'll generally think, how can I bring Mariana along? I always think of them, I don't know if you have this in American wiring systems, but in the UK, you have, in a plug, you have live, neutral and earth, which essentially live is the majority of the electrical current, neutral is the cable that loops it back into the whole circuit, and earth is the cable that makes sure that the house doesn't burn down, it's the thing that keeps you safe. And I think Mariana is the thing that keeps them safe, Sherlock's the live wire and Watson is that sort of neutral wire that is there to present the show, as it were. So she's really handy in that sense. And for a long time, I kind of stayed away from that because it felt like a trope for the female character to sort of be like, hold on a second, you two are thinking of doing what? But ultimately, by embracing a sort of side of Marta de Silva, who voices Mariana, I sort of walked the character towards Marta's kind of nerdiness, she wouldn't mind me saying that. And I think that's made, that's opened her up to be way more interesting in that Mariana has a sense of keeping everybody sort of under control and not getting too carried away. But she does have sort of quirky character characterizations in herself, rather than just being, you know, some sort of, some sort of square or killjoy or whatever you want to call it.

Speaker 8:
[25:48] Yeah, that's a testament to Marta, isn't it? All our cast, everyone involved was so lucky to have such a phenomenal cast. But I think it's testament to Marta especially that she's the most famous duo in history, basically, in fictional history, and now a trio in R1 and no one has said a bad word about it. Not even the most traditional of Sherlock fans have had a bad word to say about Mariana.

Speaker 2:
[26:11] Yeah, that actually is quite remarkable because you can imagine people raging about that.

Speaker 8:
[26:16] Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[26:17] Yeah.

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Speaker 2:
[27:58] One of the surprises to me, actually, reading the original stories was, your Watson is actually more, I feel like you've changed Watson in some ways more than Holmes, because the Victorian Watson is very Victorian. He is a proud citizen of the British Empire. His attitudes towards women might seem kind of patronizing by today's standards, but very normal for the 1890s. And also, what surprised me is that Watson doesn't live with Holmes that long. He actually gets married fairly quickly. He is primarily a doctor. Writing stories about Sherlock is a fun hobby. He will take any excuse to ditch his conventional life and have adventures with his best friend, who he admires unconditionally. And there are so many scenes in the original stories that crack me up where he'll say, well, I was having dinner with my wife, and she's saying, well, this weekend, we're going to do this, this. And I get a telegram from Holmes saying, you're needed at once. Luckily, I keep a bag packed at all times. And I say, darling, can I ditch you for the next two days and hang out with my best friend? She says, of course, dear. That's not your Watson.

Speaker 6:
[29:00] Nope.

Speaker 2:
[29:02] How did you come about adapting your Watson?

Speaker 6:
[29:06] One of the things is that in the Victorian times, generally, if you wanted to move into the upper classes, the much beloved upper classes, which is not the case now, you would become a doctor or you'd become a soldier. Watson becomes both. So he clearly wants to be in the upper classes. Now, we've made him a bit more modern British, which is that resentment of the upper classes and that sense that he's the real Brit, he's the proper Middle Englander, he's the one that works hard, etc. So he's got that chip on his shoulder, I think would be fair to say, which we just found nice ways to manipulate that into funny moments. I have tried to make Watson, we have to be careful because like I said, listeners are young and they're global. We have to be careful when we do make Watson as patriotic and as much of a servant of the king as he sees himself as the original, because not everyone agrees or enjoys those attitudes towards Britain. But ours is well grounded, I think. He's from a rural area of the UK. Sherlock Holmes is beguiling to him, not just because of his skill, but because he's this aristocrat that's got no interest in being an aristocrat, and he's this guy with all this money, he's got no interest in exploiting his money, and I think that's what makes Watson curious towards him.

Speaker 2:
[30:31] I think there are also too, I think, a lot in listening to your Watson versus reading the stories, is how what's changed so much as how men express themselves, their level of self-awareness, how they express themselves emotionally, and friendships, male friendships are very different now than they were. In that sense, I feel like both Watson's are ultimately very typical men of their times.

Speaker 6:
[30:54] He's quite affectionate in the book. There's quite a lot of Victorian literature. They do men fawn over each other's character a bit, but they would never say it to each other. So Watson writes it, doesn't he? Obviously. Yes. And he'll talk about the majesty of homes and this kind of thing. I mean, what I will say is we're talking about a particular echelon in Victorian England. I would say, you know, the working classes were probably as hard as nails, and then some, because they had to be just to survive. But that kind of, as you sort of move upward class wise, as they would have seen it back then, there is this kind of softness, delicateness towards one another. It's really interesting.

Speaker 8:
[31:34] We have our own version, I think, in our adaptation where John will often have silly, jokey nicknames for Sherlock, calls him Shurles quite a bit, Shirley Whirly, Matey Mate. There are a lot of affectionate words that come out of John's, more so than Sherlock, definitely. Although, like you say, we do keep the tradition of My Dear Watson, My Dear Companion, which is lovely. I think if people are listening, they always get a nice little smile out of that, especially if they know the original text.

Speaker 2:
[32:06] Given how old the original stories are, I was surprised to learn that a lot of their listeners are under 25. I asked Adam and Joel, is that because Gen Z grew up watching Benedict Cumberbatch and Robert Downey Jr. or Sherlock Holmes and they're hungry for more content? Or do they relate to this version of Watson because he is a content creator?

Speaker 8:
[32:29] I think it's a mixture of the two. I think you've hit the nail on the head there. If I had to hazard a guess, I would say equal parts what you just said, Eric. I think the BBC series was quite something when it came out. I remember it, for lack of a better term, it was really cool. I think if you're a kid watching that, you'd think it was really cool. I think it's one of those things if you were good all week, you're probably allowed to stay up and watch it. It's probably one of those shows where, wow, what a treat. But also the content creator aspect and element of it. That's something that as myself and Joel in our late 30s didn't grow up watching people who were content creators as such. So I think it probably strikes a chord with them. I'm not sure. But I think the reason that we mention how young a large amount of our listenership is, is because it was such a shock for those reasons as far as how old these stories are. But I think classics are classics for a reason and they resonate with people of all ages, really, no matter how you are introduced to the characters.

Speaker 2:
[33:34] Yeah, I think it's actually kind of an amazing one-to-one, because in terms of Watson publishing the stories, the world of media that he would have been publishing the stories, the only equivalent to that would be now True Crime Podcasting. In the 100-and-something years in between, if he's writing stories in the 1940s, you know, it doesn't have the same impact that it does. Oh, that's nice, how quaint. Or even in the Benedict Cumberbatch Martin Freeman version, he has a blog. And you're like, okay, so he's a blogger. But somehow, being a content creator, it actually is such a perfect one-to-one in terms of what the meta idea of what Watson was doing, that it's kind of amazing that it's taken this long for it to feel how exciting and vibrant that must have been for him to have been publishing these stories in the 1890s.

Speaker 6:
[34:25] Yeah, that's exactly how we feel. I think I can't name any other versions that are Watson's POV at all. I can name some brilliant versions of Sherlock and Holmes, obviously, but generally, it's about watching the two of them. It's got nothing to do with Watson's POV, whereas you are stuck with our Watson, whether you want to be or not, because it's his microphone and he cuts it all together.

Speaker 2:
[34:50] Well, I do love the way on social media you react or you interact with the fans as Watson. I mean, you continue the thing, like on Patreon, people, if they write to you, it's Watson. A Discord as well, I think. I mean, how far do you take this?

Speaker 6:
[35:04] So he does the Discord, he does Discord chats, people call them John Lines. So there's a couple of them a month where he'll sort of just say, you know, I'm preparing a carbonara in the kitchen and Sherlock is currently in the lounge trying to fix his violin. Marianna is on the phone to a client downstairs and then people will just kind of like talk about their day and Watson will make, you know, a few sort of jokes and stuff. And then, yeah, it's kind of sort of 15 minutes of that. When we first started, Watson was replying to emails. Can't really do that anymore because there's just too many of them. Listeners have obviously been shouted out to in the show. We'll do Twitter and Blue Sky. Instagram and TikTok we've had to do as a show, as the show itself, because we basically found it impossible to promote stuff without shattering the fourth wall entirely. So we essentially had to kind of pick which ones were going to be John Watson, which ones were going to be Sherlock & Co podcast.

Speaker 2:
[36:06] So the show has grown a lot, you're talking about in terms of the fandom, and also too, as Watson has become a better podcaster and better audio producer, the show has become more sophisticated in how it sounds. Are there things as you've got now probably a third of the canon left? Are there things that you are looking forward to doing creatively that you maybe haven't done before?

Speaker 8:
[36:26] Oh, that's a good question. I think once Mycroft is introduced, there'll be a whole new dynamic. I'm really looking forward to Mycroft coming into the show.

Speaker 2:
[36:37] Mycroft is Sherlock's brother who is high up in the British government.

Speaker 8:
[36:41] That'll just be someone else for Sherlock to bounce off and for John to be confused by. I'm looking forward to that relationship. Any underscoring that we do, coming back to what you mentioned about John becoming a better editor. You notice that there's a bit more underscoring in certain adventures. He would have never done that when he first started learning to edit.

Speaker 6:
[37:04] He does it in Golden Pants, doesn't he? Then he actually says in the outro, how great was that editing?

Speaker 8:
[37:09] Yes. He's so chuffed with it.

Speaker 6:
[37:11] That's his first go at it.

Speaker 8:
[37:12] He's so chuffed. In the redheaded league, he underscores a car chase and then we hear the cut, and Sherlock going, you added music? John's like, yeah. He's like, hmm, seems a little on the nose.

Speaker 5:
[37:25] Well, it captures the drama.

Speaker 1:
[37:27] What do you mean, hmm?

Speaker 3:
[37:29] Just an interesting creative choice, that's all.

Speaker 5:
[37:32] Right, go away.

Speaker 8:
[37:34] Then we come back into the scene.

Speaker 2:
[37:38] One of the most impressive things to me about the show is that the actors don't record together. Paul Waggett, who plays Watson, is British, but he lives in New Zealand. So the time zones don't match up with Harry Atwell, who plays Holmes.

Speaker 6:
[37:55] What Paul Waggett's able to do is John Watson, to not just hold people's attention and not just sort of pull them through the plot and keep them interested, but to be so likable, to be so like, to have people really kind of reach out, care for him, root for him and stuff like that, is just so hard to do. I mean, any actor will tell you, I know Paul's, R. Watson is comical in a sense, sort of playing the straight man and playing the person that's trying to keep the plot on track, his hard work, his hard craft. You have to be so likable and you have to really found your voice by the time you go for that. And then Harry Atwell, who plays Sherlock, I sometimes feel guilty making Sherlock have jokes or Watson jump in with a joke because sometimes I just want to hear Harry go for it and go and go and go. Cause I genuinely believe when he's absolutely Sherlocking or doing sort of scans of a room of a person of a conclusion of a case, I genuinely think he's the best Sherlock Holmes there is. I don't think there's anyone better.

Speaker 2:
[38:55] Now that I'm reading the stories, I'm actually hearing Harry's voice in my head as Sherlock.

Speaker 8:
[39:00] Oh, great. That's good.

Speaker 2:
[39:01] And it's funny too is when I first heard him too, I was like, oh, he must have been very influenced by the Benedict Cumberbatch version, but you've said he never watched the show.

Speaker 8:
[39:09] Never seen it.

Speaker 2:
[39:11] Yeah.

Speaker 8:
[39:11] Never seen it.

Speaker 6:
[39:13] What Harry has given us is they, and I don't mean this in the bad way because it's a really good way, there's a kind of rigidity to him, his Sherlock. You can almost feel his posture when Harry's talking, and it has allowed for some verbatim lines to come out of Harry's mouth and sound absolutely what our Sherlock Holmes would say, and not something that a Sherlock Holmes would say 1895, and we're trying to make it work. It sounds totally natural to him. I've put a lot of work into making that the norm for our character, but I don't think it would have been possible without the kind of voice that Harry gave us, because he doesn't speak like that in real life. He has a very sort of bouncy, fun voice. But yeah, it's perfect really. It's absolutely spot on.

Speaker 2:
[40:01] In some ways, I actually find Sherlock Holmes more interesting in the present day. On one hand, a 21st century Sherlock finds himself in a crowded pop culture landscape that is full of quirky outsider detectives who are probably inspired by him. But Sherlock still stands apart because of the way his mind works. He's like a living search engine or a human hard drive. And I know people who feel like their ability to recall anything is diminished because they rely so much on the internet or information they stored on their computers. And when we get absorbed in our phones, we don't see what's right in front of us. Sherlock Holmes does not have those problems. But when people try to act like Sherlock Holmes and obsess over every detail of a real mystery, they sometimes turn themselves into conspiracy theorists. They think if they look hard enough, they'll see the truth hiding in plain sight. But they end up constructing a fantasy. It's nice to believe that somebody like Sherlock could unpack the most convoluted mysteries. And when he gives his conclusions, everybody agrees he's right. I wish more things in the real world felt that elementary. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Joel Emery and Adam Jarrell. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. If you liked this episode, I did a whole episode just about John Watson and our mini-series about sidekicks in 2019. We have another show called Between Imaginary Worlds. It's a more casual chat show that's only available to listeners who pledge on Patreon. In the most recent episode, I talked with LARP designer Joseph Mastintuono about an incredible LARP that I played called Acheron 4. The LARP is inspired by Soviet science fiction and he's running it in Philadelphia on May 23rd and May 24th. I'll include a link in the show notes. Between Imaginary Worlds comes included with the ad-free version of the show that you can get on Patreon. You can also buy an ad-free subscription on Apple Podcasts. If you donate to the show on Patreon, at different levels, you get free Imaginary Worlds stickers, a mug or a t-shirt, and a link to a Dropbox account, which has the full-length interviews of every guest in every episode. Our merchandise is also available to buy at our T-Public store. It's a great way to support the show, and we have very cool designs. You can subscribe to the show's newsletter at imaginaryworldspodcast.org.