ABSTRACT
My favourite review of a TV programme is that by Nancy Banks-Smith in the Guardian of 11 December 1987. The TV programme was on the BBC earlier that week and was called The Case of Sherlock Holmes.
Conan Doyle is the visible proof that inside every fat man there is a thin one biding his time. Doyle looked a strapping tweedy chap with a moustache at the top and a dog at the bottom as you could see in the precious film clip in The Case of Sherlock Holmes. The very image of Dr Watson.
But what is that, round and glittering rising and falling on his substantial waistcoat? Not a fob, not a monocle. Eliminate the impossible and what remains, however improbable, must be the truth. A magnifying glass.
A hundred years ago, in a historic bit of fission, Conan Doyle split into good, old Dr Watson and Sherlock Holmes, ‘Tall and slender, given to long bouts of depression relieved only by cocaine in a 7 per cent solution. A tortured as well as a lonely man.’ The fall-out can still be measured.
I might mention that Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde had been published the year before. These are deep waters, Watson.
Doyle was an Irishman whose father drank himself into an asylum, a background not dissimilar to Shaw’s or Chaplin’s. Geniuses are not mad but they probably know someone who is.
The case of Sherlock Holmes was a 40 Minutes Special, you could tell it was special because it lasted 70 minutes. The idea was to investigate the Holmes phenomenon and make a bit of money for the BBC. To this end it turned into a fair old international rag-bag of films and fans.
My favourite, I confess was a Czechoslovakian film in which a voluptuous woman in a sort of corset gripped the hand of Sherlock Holmes and said vibrantly, ‘I hunger for you.’ Her hand moved up his pale blue sleeve towards his velvet collar. ‘Have you,’ she added hungrily, ‘your violin with you?’
‘Of course.’ said Holmes, ‘I never go anywhere without it.’
‘I love a man who gets hold of a violin by its neck,’ she cried holding his hands to her pounding heart.
In America John Bennet Shaw, an undertaker who, I suspect, found his sense of humour too well developed for his job, has devoted his life to Holmes. He has the largest collection of Holmes memorabilia in the world including three chocolate rabbits called Inspector Hector (‘Terrible chocolate but artistic of course’) and ladies’ panties with a picture of Holmes, his magnifying glass and ‘It must be in here somewhere. ’ He is a collector, he cheerfully agrees, with the sensitivity of a vacuum cleaner.
Once a year he leads a pilgrimage to the confused hamlet of Moriarty in New Mexico. Wearing deerstalkers, they sing ‘unhappy birthday to you, you bastard’ (Bastard, Shaw alleges, was Moriarty’s middle name) and deposit ceremonial dung. Moriarty considers it the highlight of the year but, then, there’s not a helluva lot going on there the other 364 days.
At the end of a windy English pier, Paul Sparks, who has modelled his life on Holmes’s methods, was wearing a helmet sprouting wire coat hangers and demonstrating a device for tracking down stolen bicycles which, one fears, is still in its infancy. Mr Sparks explained that he was ‘Trying to see patterns in the chaos of life.’
When he finds one I hope he will let me know. Likewise if he finds my bicycle.
