Watson as narrator

I've been neglecting my reading lately, which always makes me feel somehow guilty. But the lure of Baker Street still holds true as I make my way through the Ronald Howard TV series (I should really say 'Sheldon Reynolds TV series' as he produced it, but you know what I mean). And one particular aspect of this series has got me thinking not only about Dr Watson's media portrayals but about the Dr Watson of the printed stories.

H. Marion Crawford's portrayal is one of the best as far as I'm concerned. As with his co-star's Holmes, the portrayal is more of a kind of 'folk memory' version - plucky, brave, frequently laughing out loud, a handy boxer when fisticuffs are required, wonderfully exaggerated with his facial expressions - and Holmes' constant companion (even when shoving in earplugs to cope with his violin-playing). So yes, it's a bit broader than Doyle's original, but the spirit of it feels 'right' - this is not Nigel Bruce's loveable old buffer, nor is it the somewhat stuffy 'perfect Victorian gent' of Nigel Stock.

This prompted me to wonder just how it is that media portrayals have thrown up such a wide diversity of Watsons. H. Marion Crawford's gave me a clue - one feature of the series is that he provides in-character voiceover narration. This isn't entirely unique to media Holmes (David Bradley provided voiceovers to 'open' and 'shut' some of the cases in the first Granada TV series) but rather than merely coming at either end of the stories, it is frequent throughout. This is mostly during pre-filmed linking location scenes, with Watson telling us something of how perplexing the mystery is so we've gone to Scotland Yard or that Holmes is on the scent of a clue but keeping me in the dark etc. Charmingly we even get him announcing the return from the ad break ("And now we return to the case of the--").

Which leads to the clue - TV and film usually can eschew the narration which was necessary for the stories to work in prose form. Conan Doyle lends the stories an interiority courtesy of Dr Watson - he narrates events, we see characters from his perspective, and most importantly he is able to be 'fooled' by events - making Holmes' revelations and problem-solving at the end all the more impressive. This has begged a question over the years - do Holmes' disguises really work, or is it only poor old Watson who's taken in by them? In media versions it's always perfectly obvious to the viewer that "oh, that's Ronald Howard in an old man wig!/oh, that's Basil Rathbone dressed up as a song and dance man!" - but with the interiority of the prose stories 'we' are fooled every time, along with our narrator.

Without this interiority, what remains of Watson, as it were externally? His basic function, as a sidekick to Holmes rather than biographer; the dialogue, which can be interpreted many ways - when he says "That seems to be the explanation" has he really arrived at that conclusion, or is he standing there bored and/or befuddled and just looking for something to say? Is his insistence that he is familiar with women over many continents a brag, a boast, an exaggeration or even a joke? And his physical condition after recuperating post-STUD - did this permanently affect him and render him 'past it', or  was he "reckoned fleet of foot" because he'd fully recovered and was back in peak condition? 

In other words, actors over the years seem to have homed in on certain aspects of Watson... and ran with those as the basis of their interpretations.

Regardless, this narrative aspect remains one of the most consistently delightful aspects of the Doyle stories. Would adventures without the first-person narration still hold quite the same charm, beguiling us to want to read and re-read them? Perhaps, perhaps not... Media adaptations have their compensations, by way of interesting actors, rich sets and locations... where they have the budgets for them!