Commentary meme: The Coming of the Hound

[john_amend_all]

pedanther wrote: The first of your Sherlock Holmes Storytime pieces, whichever that was.

"Do you not find it interesting?"

"To a collector of fairy tales."

— The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The Coming of the Hound is not only my first Sherlock Holmes Storytime, it's my first Storytime full stop. I'd been sufficiently impressed with lost_spook's rendition of Snow White to want to try and write a Storytime of my own. The legend of the Hound seemed to fit the bill, particularly since I'd heard Sir Donald Sinden's rendition of it for the BBC Radio adaptation. Here's a snippet.

Since the legend of the Hound does have a single canonical text, unlike most of the tales we'd had previously, I found myself quoting extensively from it, quite often to contrast it with what's actually happening onstage.

The first piece of casting, without which I'd never have written the rest, was Rover as the Hound. The mental image I began with was the drunken roisterers confronted by a large, white, homicidal bouncing ball.

Starting from that point, I cast Owen as Hugo pretty much straight off. The last complete Torchwood episode I had seen then (and have seen to this day) was "Greeks Bearing Gifts", and it's from the preceding handful of episodes that I decided he was the right rapist for the job. Of his henchmen, I picked Jack and the two Masters for the three witnesses, on the basis of "One, it is said, died that very night of what he had seen, and the other twain were but broken men for the rest of their days."

In such episodes of Torchwood as I'd seen, Owen seemed to be making Gwen his primary target, so she went in as the farmer's daughter. The Fourth Doctor usually plays deceased and absent fathers, so he went in here. He doesn't have any lines in the original story, but I made him read some here, much to his chagrin. Doctors Five and Ten were, I considered, young enough to portray his sons.

Of the rest of the villains, the four members of WANKER went in for their rabbit-in-the-headlights attitude when faced with the possibility of getting their hands on a genuine human female, and the Jacobi Master because he didn't get enough screentime. The rest were there pretty much to make the numbers up to thirteen.

The Abzorbaloff's predeliction for fried squirrels is a reference to an old Spectrum game — Robin of Sherlock, which has a Kentucky Fried Squirrel take-away (amid much other madness). I really wasn't impressed with the Abzorbaloff on TV, but he's useful in the exaggerated distorting-mirror world of Storytime.

In the scene in the dell, Gwen and Owen only die when the narration points out that they're dead. That's a Monty Python reference:

Mozart :
Thank you, Eddie. And now time for this week's request death. (taking card off piano) For Mr and Mrs Violet Stebbings of 23 Wolverston Road, Hull, the death of Mr Bruce Foster of Guildford.

Cut to a lounge setting. Mr Foster sitting in chair.

Foster :
Strewth! (he dies)

Turning to the framing story, Watson was the obvious person to narrate it, in the absence of Hugo Baskerville himself. He must have ended up with the original manuscript, or at least borrowed it, in order to transcribe it into chapter 2 of The Hound of the Baskervilles. Holmes then came along to provide an excuse for why Watson's in a playgroup telling unsuitable stories to the children. I always feel that Holmes doesn't ring true with third-person narration, and yet that's how I've ended up writing him whenever he makes appearances in my fanfic.

I think the only running joke I picked up at this point was Victoria's tendency to react badly to stories the other children like. It seems to have got stuck in my mind ever since; even in the most recently-posted instalment of The Haunted Hotel, she's sobbing over nonexistent squashed rabbits.

When Izzy opens the storybook, the illustration it shows is for 'May Colvin', showing the complete cast: Lucy Saxon as the protagonist, Harry Saxon as the false knight, the Fourth Doctor as the aged father, and the Tenth as the parrot. That was because at the same time lost_spook and I were engaged in drabble tennis about whether Jamie and Zoe would get to sing that song; by putting it in the storybook, I was attempting to rig the conclusion in my favour.

Tenth Doctor :
I think we should have swapped our lines. You know, when we were the farmer's sons. That way Fivey would have ended up chasing after the lost ram and we could have had a reference to All Creatures Great and Small.

Fifth Doctor :
Tegan and Turlough might agree with you, bearing in mind what that throwaway line turned into. Do you think it would have worked if it had been Rose and Mickey instead?

Tenth Doctor :
I don't see why the Giant Robot wouldn't fall for Rose. Everyone else does.

Jack :
It's a pity the author couldn't find a place for Tosh in the story.

Gwen :
Ah, you didn't see her, but she was hanging about near the Hall with a quad bike. How d'you think I managed to get as far as the standing stones before anyone caught me?

Fourth Doctor :
I think that's more to do with the maximum speed of an unladen robot dog over rough ground.

K-9 :
Objection, master. This unit was not fully charged before use. It was necessary to use power conservation—

Fourth Doctor :
That sounds like an excuse to me, K-9.

K-9 :
Negative, master.

Jacobi Master :
Would you say Rover was eight feet across? I think the author was exaggerating. Six or seven, perhaps.

Jack :
Easy for you to say. You didn't get up close and personal with it.

Jacobi Master :
Don't tell me. You tried to flirt with it once.

Jack :
An autonomous rubber balloon that tries to suffocate you? What's not to like?