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Overview from ITV AT
50:
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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