For a long I have wanted to write about Sherlock Holmes and have stumbled over and over again due to the sheer immensity of the task. Sherlock Holmes is an immense character, an immortal work of fiction who appeared in sixty written stories by Arthur Conan Doyle and who then has spent the last one hundred and twenty years being constantly reinvented and translated across to radio shows, feature films, television series, comic books, interactive fiction games, board games and anything else you can possibly imagine. Holmes and his good friend Watson have lived through dozens of pairs of actors, been transplanted to the present day, moved to New York, and in one double-part adventure of Bravestarr shifted hundreds of years into the future. It is an amazingly vast subject, too big to ever even think about. As a result, talking about Sherlock Holmes is impossible in general.
I was introduced to Sherlock Holmes via two big hardback collections of his stories, one comprising the novellas and the other the short stories, that my parents bought for me from a then good service station nearby. This was the same place where we got giant anthologies of Famous Five and Secret Seven stories, and even a mammoth hardback five-novel James Bond collection. At least I think that was my first introduction as the BBC Radio 4 dramatisations may have been in full swing at about that time. On second though I'm reasonably sure that they were later but it's hard to tell with such childhood events. The Radio 4 shows were utterly enchanting, so much so that the sixty-four CD set was one of the first things I ever bought with my doctoral stipend when I was studying for the seemingly unending PhD. The radio shows really blur together with the written stories in my mind in the most idyllic way, where the voices of Clive Merrison and Michael Williams radiate off the pages as they're read. Those two actors, Merrison and Williams, were unique in that they were the only pair to complete the canon in dramatised form. I don't think anyone else has ever came close.
Many, many people will say that Jeremy Brett was the ideal Holmes, or Basil Rathbone. In the heat of the moment, a lot of people would currently espouse Benedict Cumberbatch but we'll have to wait until he and Martin Freeman finish their show and go through the long-time correction before that can really ring true. For me, Merrison and Williams were the ideal casting for the Great Detective and Stalwart Companion, and it is actually down to Michael Williams, who played by far the best version of Doctor John Watson to ever feature on the airwaves. In those Radio 4 plays Watson was a well-rounded, warm and sincere human being who couldn't be called anything even close to stupid. He was the character who wrote the stories, yes, but in those stories it is always implicit that Watson is playing himself down and Holmes up to make the tales more dramatic and exciting. Williams' John Watson was a full protagonist and foil to Holmes, who was more than capably played by Merrison but never to the detriment of his friend. It was a phenomenon. I suspect that Cumberbatch and Freeman will fare well under the fury of time's criticism but they won't approach the number of performances of my favourites and nor should they.
The modern 'Sherlock' is a fascinating beast of a television show, an adaptation and updating of the spirit of the original stories which cherry picks the best from those tales and meshes the results into compelling television movies but we'll be lucky to reach a grand total of fifteen segments before it collapses due to the busy-ness of its leads, its super-dependence on the mighty scribe Steven Moffat, and the danger in proceeding without sufficient remaining source material. No Sherlock Holmes has ever succeeded fully without being in contact with the source material in some way, which leads us into the show I haven't seen: 'Elementary'. I shall see it soon, and hope to be surprised, and if anything I've read is to be believed then the core to 'Elementary' is that Sherlock's back story is very connected to some version of updated canon and that it happened in London before he left for New York. If so, that's very smart to establish canon and also be in America, but we shall see.
O.
PS I hope my PhD ended. It's becoming very hard to say.
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