More Pop Culture Past...

Back to my early pop culture memories.  (Although a brief roof update is probably in order: I heard from the roofer again today and he reckons the damage is worse than I thought, so we're back to wrangling with the insurance).  Way back in 1970, as a child, I saw an early BBC colour production which was to have a profound influence on me.  Ever since I've had vivid memories of what I later knew to be a repeated episode of the 1968 series Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, starring Peter Cushing.  To be specific, it was a dramatization of The Sign of Four.  It was the bizarre plot elements such as the man with a wooden leg and his poison dart firing pygmy accomplice which stuck in my young mind, along with the climactic boat chase along the Thames.   These memories sparked a lifelong interest in the Great Detective and the works of Arthur Conan Doyle.  A few years later, by chance, I found a copy of the Conan Doyle novel The Sign of Four and, upon reading it, realised that my fragmented TV Holmes memories were of an adaptation of the novel, recognising various scenes from the TV episode as I read it.  Since then I've seen many adaptations of that particular Holmes story, some better than others, but frustratingly, I've never been able to see the Peter Cushing version again.  Until now.

This Christmas I received as a present a box set of the only six surviving episodes of the BBC colour Sherlock Holmes series.  Fortuitously, amongst the six is The Sign of Four.  It was fascinating to watch this episode again for the first time in more than forty years.  Whilst the limitations of early colour TV recording are all too clear, not to mention budgetary restrictions, I still found the whole style of the production fascinating and quite exhilarating.  Of course, condensing the novel into fifty minute episode means that it moves at breakneck pace, without many of the long, static dialogue scenes which characterise many UK TV productions from this period.  Fascinatingly, it eschews the usual fades and dissolves of the era in favour of fast cuts or simple fades to black.  Another notable feature was the use of 'point of view' shots and an entire exterior sequence which is not only 'point of view' but also apparently shot with some kind of hand held camera, as Holmes and Watson employ a tracker dog to trail a suspect's scent.  The exterior shooting, whilst limited (for the aforementioned budgetary reasons) has an agreeably gritty look and feel to it - the locations look like real locations, not like dressed exterior sets.

Obviously, as was common at the time, the switch between film for exterior scenes and videotape for studio shots can be jarring, due to the clear difference in quality and lighting, but this is to be expected from a 1968 production.  Overall, I was pleasantly surprised - all too often when you finally get to see something that impressed you in childhood many years ago, it turns out to be a disappointment, but this was still entertaining and enchanting.  Of course, I thought, it could just be that The Sign of Four is an aberration in terms of style and pacing, but upon watching the other five episodes, I found this not to be the case.  Whilst most are slightly slower paced, they all employ the same fast edits and point of view camera sequence which had impressed me, (The Boscombe Valley Mystery is particularly innovative in its use of a brief animated sequence to illustrate a character's past misdeeds).  Interestingly, The Blue Carbuncle, made as a cheap Christmas episode, although mainly set bound, is one of the most dramatically satisfying episodes, with especially fine performances from Cushing as Holmes, Nigel Stock as Watson and guest star James Beck (best remembered as Private Walker in Dad's Army).

Indeed, it is the performances of the leads, particularly Cushing, which really distinguish these episodes.  Cushing apparently had real reservations about his performance, feeling it had been adversely affected by the budgetary problems and hurried shooting schedules which had beset the series, (shooting the first two episodes, the two part Hound of the Baskervilles which is included in the box set, put the series over budget and behind schedule, with fourteen more episodes still to shoot).  On the evidence of these episodes, he was doing himself a disservice, delivering a masterful performance as Sherlock Holmes incisive and aloof, despairing at Watson's wooing of Mary Morstan in The Sign of Four, at times passionate in his pursuit of justice and even mischievously humourous at times.  His interactions with Stock's Watson are also well played - never as patronising as Rathbone's Holmes was to Nigel Bruce's Watson and more often than not suggesting a genuine warmth between the two characters.  All in all, these six episodes left me yearning for the missing ten, (under the original agreement with the Conan Doyle estate, the BBC was only permitted to repeat the series once - they retransmitted twelve episodes on BBC2 in 1970, when I encountered them - so there obviously seemed little point in keeping them, so the tapes of the missing ten were wiped for re-use), perhaps, like old Dr Who episodes, some will turn up one day in Nigeria....