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Overview from ITV AT 50
October 2005
THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES
There hadn't been a proper TV treatment of Conan Doyle's irascible invention for almost 20 years when, in 1983,
Granada decided to begin working through all the author's short stories with all the cash, resources and late-Victorian smog they could muster. John Hawkesworth, the brains behind Upstairs, Downstairs and The Duchess of Duke Street, was put on script duties. A fully-functioning Baker Street was slung up just round the corner from the Rovers Return and peopled with numerous rozzers, coppers, tinkers and nabobs. And gazing down on them all, from the suitably cavernous windows of 221B, was Jeremy Brett.
Here was Granada's trump card: a well-known and accomplished actor willing to go to the lengths of losing weight, dying his hair and taking up pipe smoking to properly inhabit the world's most famous detective. Yet it must have come as something of a shock to first see Holmes portrayed with such a mixture of arch pomposity, blind fury and bone dry humour. Wasn't he supposed to be a smooth sophisticate, the quintessential cerebral charmer? Even worse, where was the bumbling, incompetent Watson? David Burke had instead turned the ever-present "friend and colleague" into a sharp, youthful firebrand, alternately moaning at his comrade for not tidying up and supplying the all-important final clue.
The extent to which Brett had clearly immersed himself in the role proved irresistible. Sadly it also proved fatal for him, leading to a nervous breakdown, repeated illness and a premature death. Still, the early run of episodes, peaking in 1986, remain a master class in intelligent, entertaining period drama where the humorous ("Watson, this is no time for eating humbugs!") and the introspective ("It seems death is all around us") are just as exciting as the discovery of the next dead body.
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