I've now listened to the BBC Radio versions of LAST, ILLU, and BLAN. Bert Coules wrote the first two of them, while another dramatist Roger Danes wrote BLAN. These adaptations depart quite a bit from the original stories, and not for the better.
I was prepared to find LAST sad and nostalgic in the usual "there's an East Wind coming" way, but Bert Coules made it fucking depressing by writing that Watson hasn't seen Holmes in ten years other than one weekend visit to Sussex. One. Coules has reduced "an occasional weekend visit" to one only, and he implies that Holmes's lack of invitations is the reason it's only been once. (Whereas in the "Lion's Mane" story, Holmes implied that Watson's absence was because he was busy in his life, not that Holmes didn't want to see him.) So that's an unhappy distortion of their drifting apart. We find out this info because Watson meets with Stamford at a New Year's 1914 party and agrees to give some public talk on Sherlock Holmes to some young doctors. Watson confirms to them that Holmes is retired to beekeeping, but he thinks Holmes is just going through a phase; he'll ache for brain work again and eventually unretire himself.
