How to Be Sherlock Holmes: The Many Faces of a Master Detective Timeshift

The name's Sherlock Holmes and the address is 221b Baker Street.

"If my little creation of Sherlock Holmes has survived longer

"than it deserved," said Arthur Conan Doyle...

"..then I consider it's very largely due to those gentlemen

"who have associated themselves with him."

Knowledge of anatomy -

accurate, but unsystematic.

Plays the violin well.

Knowledge of chemistry, profound.

For over 100 years,

more than 80 actors have put a varying face to the world's greatest

consulting detective, Sherlock Holmes, each of them drawing

on the distinct attributes of this most enigmatic of characters.

Knowledge of philosophy, nil.

Is an expert single stick player, boxer and swordsman.

Has a good practical knowledge of British law.

Sherlock Holmes was the first detective to be transferred

to the screen and his appearances chart the evolution of film itself,

from silent two-reelers, or quickies,

to the marvel of colour...

..and up to the latest electronic wizardry.

In fact, our notion of Sherlock Holmes today

is as much a creation of the various film

and television performances as from the stories themselves.

Join us, as we examine

and, of course, deduce

the ever-changing face of Sherlock Holmes.

Two men, travelling by train between Cardiff and London in 2006,

hit upon the novel idea for

a modern resetting of Sherlock Holmes,

one that would free him from

the trappings of Victoriana and allow us to see the stories

as they were originally experienced -

exciting, cutting edge and contemporary.

The two men on the train were Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss,

already well-known for their work on Doctor Who.

I said, "Isn't it odd that in the original story,

"A Study in Scarlet, Dr Watson is invalided home

"from military service in Afghanistan?"

And it's the same war as we were then fighting. And there was just

a kind of lightbulb moment where it was like,

"Well, we should do that again."

And in 2010, Sherlock hit our screens.

It reinvigorated this iconic character for a whole new audience.

It's interesting, when you ask

people about who their favourite

Sherlock Holmes is, because I have this theory that

your favourite Sherlock Holmes is the one that you grew up with.

People of a certain age will always answer Rathbone as their favourite,

just as they did

Jeremy Brett with those

who were growing up in the '80s.

And I suspect young people,

when you ask them, their answer's going to be Benedict Cumberbatch.

This modern retelling

set out to keep the spirit of the original stories,

yet completely transformed them for the digital age.

-What are you typing?

-Blog.

-About?

-Us.

-You mean me.

-Why?

HE COUGHS

Well, you're typing a lot.

'We live in a world of'

micro-blogging, which is a fantastic and perfect parallel

for the idea of Dr Watson serialising his adventures.

We've started sending telegrams again in the form of texts.

'We were able to draw immediate and exact parallels

'between the original stories

'and the idea of updating it.'

John.

Rhododendron ponticum. Matches.

'He remains modern now,'

yet there is something of an old soul about him, something

old-fashioned about him, something...

well, removed, slightly sociopathic, slightly, um...

I mean, so rigorous and thorough

that he gets castigated as being cut off.

I think it borderlines, in our version, on someone...

with people who have Asperger's and maybe slightly mild autism as well.

And a lot of that is to do with taking control of chaos,

and that means cutting out human sentiment,

that means being able to think incredibly rationally and...

..scythe through any kind of pretence.

He's not gay! Why do you have to spoil...? He's not!

With that level of personal grooming?

Because he puts a bit of product in his hair? I put product in my hair!

You wash your hair! There's a difference. No, no.

Tinted eyelashes, clear signs of

taurine cream around the frown lines, those tired, clubber's eyes.

-Then there's his underwear.

-His underwear?

Visible above the waistline, very visible. Very particular brand.

'I remember the first sort of press conference,'

all our answers were there to rebut the questions,

"How can you do this without hansom cabs and fog?"

And our whole argument was that it had become all about those.

It was all about the trappings. It was literally lost in the fog.

By the end of the second series, the new Sherlock had built up

a huge following, but the British public was in for a shock.

-'Goodbye, John.'

-No. Don't...

SHERLOCK!

Sherlock's fall to his death put the public in the same hiatus

as it had done 120 years before.

In 1893, Sherlock Holmes' author, Arthur Conan Doyle, pushed him

and Professor Moriarty over the Reichenbach Falls

and the whole nation mourned.

There was an outcry in the press.

It's said that men wore black crepe armbands,

and legend reports that 20,000 people

cancelled their subscription to The Strand Magazine,

in which the stories were published.

Doyle was vilified for what he'd done,

and even attacked in the street.

But what is it about this inscrutable hero

that elicits such strong feelings, both then and now?

The most important thing about Sherlock Holmes is that

what he was doing was new in the form in which he did it,

and immensely popular,

as if there was some need for this kind of reading that had,

until now, not been met.

There'd been detective stories

by Edgar Allan Poe

and the French detective Arsene Lupin - very famous in France -

and others, but none had had the impact of the stories about Holmes.

He had a brain which seemed to be more varied in knowledge

and ability and deduction than anyone else.

He was unique.

He still is.

Such was the furore over Holmes' Reichenbach Fall

that in 1901, Conan Doyle was forced to bring him back.

Little could he have realised then that Holmes would step off the page

and live on forever in a brand-new cultural medium.

His return, and the subsequent rise in his appeal,

coincided with the coming of film.

Right from the dawn of cinema, writers, directors and, above all,

actors would more than embrace the character of Sherlock Holmes.

It has become one of the great parts to play,

that relaxed control,

and still be just leagues ahead of everybody else,

never really in danger.

There is a temperature and speed of thought and ferocity to him

which I find difficult to change into.

It's the thing I try to make look natural,

but anyone who's worked with me on the show will tell you it's not!

Sherlock Holmes is two things.

He's a man of action and he's also a man of deep thought.

And these are two things that actors love to latch onto because

when you play Sherlock Holmes,

you can do all sorts of running

and fighting, but then you've also got

those moments of calculation,

you've got those moments where the camera

comes in towards the face of

that brooding actor,

where we get right into

the thoughts of this man,

and we get to see something mysterious

flickering across his eyes.

I think the screen, on the whole,

has done it pretty well.

It's managed to find actors who are good actors

and look rather alike. Because, after all,

these stories were illustrated, and by a good illustrator.

We know what Sherlock looks like, or should look like.

It was the story's original illustrator, Sidney Paget,

who created the first visual depiction of Sherlock Holmes.

It was Paget who gave Holmes his deerstalker hat

and his Inverness cape,

details that were never mentioned in Conan Doyle's stories.

The Paget drawings are sort of ingrained. They just are.

That silhouette, and the image of the deerstalker -

it's as iconic as any of the stories, really.

In drawing him so distinctly for a vast readership,

Paget not only secured Holmes something approaching

national emblem status - like John Bull, or even Britannia -

but also provided a visual template for future actors playing the part.

And the story of Sherlock Holmes on screen

really begins with Sherlock Holmes on stage.

The first prominent actor to play Holmes

was an American matinee idol, William Gillette,

in his own version -

Sherlock Holmes, A Drama in Four Acts.

The actor Tim Pigott-Smith played Dr Watson

in the first major revival of Gillette's play, in the 1970s.

Gillette was an absolutely archetypal Victorian actor manager.

That particular role doesn't really exist now,

but then, it was the way the theatre worked.

And like the Paget illustrations,

Gillette added new elements to the character that endure to this day.

In the Paget drawings, Holmes is smoking a straight pipe,

and Gillette introduced the curved pipe. The theory is that

it was better for the mouth, that the audience could see him

more clearly. And, of course, the famous phrase

"Elementary, my dear Watson" was also an invention of Gillette's.

He toured the play extensively.

He brought it to England, where the young Charles Chaplin,

aged 11, played Billy the pageboy.

He made a lot of money out of it. It was phenomenally successful.

The play would serve as a blueprint for future film versions,

especially after William Gillette

committed his famous stage performance to film in 1916.

The film, alas, is now lost

and only these few production stills survive,

but it presented for the first time on screen

the popular image of Sherlock Holmes,

with all the accessories and phrases

that Paget and Gillette had given him, and which many,

if not all, subsequent actors playing Holmes have adopted.

The first Sherlock Holmes films

started in earnest in 1921,

made by Stoll Picture Productions,

in the unlikely setting of Cricklewood...

..with the curiously named

Eille Norwood as Sherlock Holmes.

Eille Norwood's real name was Anthony Brett.

He changed his name, so he always said,

because he'd once been in love with a girl called Eileen, or Eille,

and he lived in Norwood, and he put these two things together.

Tricky to do, Sherlock Holmes,

on the silent screen,

because it depends so much upon

those set-piece explanations

of how things happened.

What Norwood did was concentrate upon staging the idea

of Holmes thinking, so much so that

he even had his head shaved

up to the temples

in order to make himself

look more intellectual.

The Norwood series of films

also began the trend of placing Holmes in a new era.

They went in for a contemporary 1920s setting -

this was Holmes for the Modern Age -

and one of their highlights was in their use of real locations.

But how would Arthur Conan Doyle,

who was still writing Holmes stories set in period,

react to such a modernising approach?

Conan Doyle gave it his official stamp of approval.

They met and they toasted each other

and gave each other grateful thanks, so he is the first screen Holmes

to come with the proper official endorsement of Holmes's creator.

Following Eille Norwood's

impressive and successful run of

47 silent quickies,

Sherlock Holmes now became

a staple subject for the cinema.

But over the next few years, the performances on screen

tended to be slow and over-studious affairs, only Arthur Wontner's

authentic Paget-like performance

making any real impression.

Elementary, my dear Watson.

What Sherlock needed was the film-star treatment

and, in 1939, with Europe on the brink of war

and cinema audiences eager for escapist adventure,

he would get just that.

Sherlock Holmes was about to be reimagined by Hollywood.

And the actor who took up the challenge

and went on to define it was, of course, Basil Rathbone.

Oh, Professor Moriarty...

'On the screen,'

for me, the perfect Holmes - Basil Rathbone.

With Rathbone, he just had a great elegance and charm.

He was very smooth and cool with it, he was sort of a Bond figure.

It's always been Rathbone,

and when I think of the other ones,

I tend to sort of superimpose Rathbone on it, really.

People look at him on screen and think...

not, does this accord with the Arthur Conan Doyle stories?

But, does this accord with the Holmes that's in my imagination?

And I think that's where Rathbone was particularly successful.

'He looked like Holmes,

'he was lean physique, he had a sharp profile,

'he had a confident manner, and an incisive English accent,

'and he had that almost arrogant air that people associate with Holmes.'

A whole day and a night have gone by

since that bestial affair in Edgware Road.

'Rathbone manages to capture that cool, ascetic, calm, thinking mind.'

I suppose there is something slightly...

autistic, we might say now, about Holmes.

A lack of connection with feeling,

which is one of the things that makes him so compelling.

20th Century Fox's

The Hound of the Baskervilles

was to be the very first

big-budget Sherlock Holmes movie.

And surprisingly, it was the first

Sherlock Holmes film to be set in period,

as a Victorian gas-lit adventure

was felt to be at a comfortable distance for audiences

from the realities of impending war.

Rathbone had been chosen personally for the part

by the studio boss himself - Darryl F Zanuck.

Zanuck had a very hands-on approach.

He wanted Holmes to be a clever, observing fellow,

not the sort of chap who pulled rabbits out of the hat.

So, in other words, he wanted it to be about deduction.

But Zanuck's control also extended to the script,

and there was one line that he mysteriously added,

which would, for the first time on film,

mention Sherlock Holmes's most controversial vice,

his cocaine habit.

The very last line as Rathbone goes out of the room...

He opens the door to go into another room,

he says, "Watson, the needle!"

Watson, the needle.

The line contravened the Hays Code,

Hollywood's moral censorship guide,

which dictated what could and

could not be mentioned on screen.

There was actually a specific line where you had to tick

to say that you had not referred to narcotics.

The needle is all over the press book

for The Hound of the Baskervilles.

In fact, there is a wonderful figure of Watson,

struggling under the weight of a giant syringe

and the caption says, "Watson...the needle!"

-Watson!

-Coming, Holmes!

And it was in these films too that the character of Dr Watson

finally caught up with Holmes to take equal billing

on screen for the first time.

Thank you for your timely assistance.

Really, Watson, aren't you a little stout for this sort of thing?

Rubbish. Ideal weight for a man of my age...

'The character of Watson is certainly not'

what Dr Watson was...

played by Nigel Bruce. It's unforgettable and extremely funny.

CHIMING MUSIC

Huh!

'What you get there is a sense of'

these figures being a double act,

in the way, I suppose, that Abbott and Costello were a double act,

or the way in which Bob Hope and Bing Crosby were a double act.

-I say, Holmes?

-What?

It's morning.

Allow me to congratulate you

on a brilliant bit of deduction(!)

'And every time that Sherlock Holmes makes a deduction...'

Nigel Bruce, with the Rathbone films,

always says, "Great Scot!"

which always amuses me. You know it's coming.

-Watson!

-Great Scot!

Great Scot!

Great Scot, it's the guard!

Great Scot, Holmes!

This new dynamic, introduced by the pairing of Holmes and Watson,

with its comic potential,

was to become central to all subsequent screen versions.

Yet after only two films,

20th Century Fox,

thinking they had bought the rights to the characters outright,

were forced to drop the famous pair.

They were under threat of a lawsuit.

This came from Arthur Conan Doyle's estate,

which was being managed by his two sons, Adrian and Denis Conan Doyle.

One Conan Doyle biographer has described them as,

"spendthrift playboys," and they were out to milk as much as possible

from the estate. So Holmes disappeared from the screen

for three years, while Denis Conan Doyle

basically hawked it round all the studios.

And there was one studio

that felt Sherlock Holmes

would be ideal for them.

Universal were very keen

because, at the time, there were a lot of crime series

and Universal didn't have one, and they bought up an option

to produce 12 films over the next seven years.

But Adrian and Denis Conan Doyle

also had various stipulations as to

what could or could not be done

to the character.

They couldn't kill off Holmes,

they couldn't criminalise him,

they couldn't make him look ridiculous,

but they were allowed to modernise him.

And that, of course, is exactly what they did.

The first in the Universal pictures

was Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror,

set during World War II,

with Holmes and Watson up against

the "Nazis" - this was an obvious

and explicit patriotic war film.

Nothing prepared them for the opening shot of the film,

which is a map of Europe, with the shadow of a radio mast across it

and the voice of Lord Haw Haw,, or a Lord Haw Haw sound-alike,

"This is the voice of terror, this is the voice you will fear!"

So suddenly, we're not just

in the modern era, we're in the war.

Germany broadcasting,

Germany broadcasting.

People of Britain, greetings from the Third Reich.

This is the voice you have learned to fear.

This is the voice of terror...

'At the end, there's a very moving'

speech by Holmes, a speech that was so successful

that they commissioned similar speeches for the next four films.

There's an east wind coming, all the same.

Such a wind has never blew on England yet.

It will be cold and bitter, Watson,

and a good many of us may wither before its blast,

but it's God's own wind nonetheless,

and a greener, better, stronger land

will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared.

Denis Conan Doyle wrote to the studio, and the letter's here.

It says...he thinks, "The modern setting was a daring experiment.

"This is incomparably the best Sherlock Holmes film ever made."

Now, we have to think about the fact that Denis Conan Doyle

was receiving 12,000 every time they made a film.

I think this might have influenced his view of it.

There he is.

After three war-themed escapades,

the series strayed into other genres

for which the studio was well known.

Firstly, into gothic horror...

..and then pitting Holmes against

a very different kind of arch-villain

from Professor Moriarty -

the femme fatale.

'And this started with a film called Spider Woman.'

During the war, millions of women had gone out to work

and there were genuine fears that when the war ended,

women would not want to return to domesticity.

So you got these clever, deadly,

sexually attractive women,

trying to outwit Holmes.

He described a crime that was particularly cruel

and he said he knew it was the work of a woman

because he said it was "feline, not canine."

The presence of a female nemesis

introduced sexual tension

into Holmes's world

for the first time.

And this was something that

the recent series of Sherlock

was keen to revisit, only now,

the femme fatale is transformed into

a cunning dominatrix.

For Sherlock, being beaten by a woman

takes on a whole new meaning...

It's always hard to remember an alias

when you've had a fright, isn't it?

There, now.

We're both defrocked...

Mr Sherlock Holmes.

Miss Adler, I presume?

Look at those cheekbones.

I could cut myself slapping that face.

Would you like me to try?

The character of Irene Adler holds a unique place

in Holmes's affection, and it would seem

a unique place amongst her own gender,

as Holmes wistfully confides, in the last of the Rathbone films.

What do you mean by that?

I do hope you've given, er,

THE woman a soul.

She had one, you know.

By "THE woman," I suppose you mean Irene Adler?

Yes. I shall always remember her...

as THE woman.

And yet, despite his huge success and continuing appeal,

Rathbone felt typecast for the rest of his life as Sherlock Holmes.

"The only mystery I couldn't solve," he said shortly before his death,

"was the same one Conan Doyle had -

"how to get rid of the damn man."

Rathbone cast a long silhouette.

Who would be bold enough to don the deerstalker next?

In 1959, Sherlock Holmes came home,

as the British Hammer Film Studio

did what they did best,

in pumping new blood into

a classic story.

The trailer for the film showed expectant audiences

"a new and exciting Holmes"

for the very first time

in rich, lurid Technicolor.

What do you want me to do?

Identify anything I may find.

Strange things are to be found on the moor.

Like this, for instance.

'I like the fact that it plays'

rather fast and loose with it.

It introduces the idea of human sacrifice

and some sort of Dartmoor black magic -

of course it does, it's Hammer!

They were desperately striving to make it an X

and only got as far as an A.

And reunited after their successful pairing in both Dracula

and The Curse of Frankenstein were those two stalwarts of Hammer films,

Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.

He was a wonderful Holmes, he really was.

He had a certain habit, Peter,

which I used to kid him about,

the finger.

And also, he very much pronounced his consonants.

And after the first take, I said,

"There you go, the finger again."

The finger.

"On no accoun-t, Sir Henry,

"are you t-o go ou-t on the moor t-onigh-t."

Sir Henry, I am not a man

to overestimate danger,

but I most insist upon one thing.

Under no circumstances

are you to venture out onto the moor alone at night.

Very well...

'Cushing was a huge fan of Doyle and of Sherlock Holmes.'

He employed all his customary delicacy,

subtlety, and his meticulous nature into the script and the performance.

He changed lines which he felt were wrong, he put lines in.

There was a line in the original script about

what he was going to get paid and he put in the line

from Thor Bridge,

"My professional charges are upon a fixed scale, I never vary them

"save for when I remit them altogether."

You will not find me ungenerous in the matter of fees.

My professional charges are upon a fixed scale, I do not vary them

except when I remit them altogether. Good day.

Good day, Mr Holmes.

He annotated his script with drawings.

He wanted it to resemble as far as possible the Paget illustrations.

I think he's clearly having a ball in that film.

It's a very, very persuasive interpretation.

The problem with that film,

and it's the major problem in that particular story,

is the hound.

Described in the book, if I remember correctly,

being almost as big as a donkey.

With their limited, if enterprising resources, Hammer had employed

a Great Dane called Colonel, and a production artist called Margaret

to fashion a mask of latex and rabbit fur

to create the hound from hell.

I was the one who was responsible for making

the mask for the Hound of the Baskervilles.

I was rather ashamed of the mask I made.

It was the worst one I ever made and the only one people know about.

There's Colonel, the hound.

There he is on the miniature set,

about to leap off onto Christopher Lee.

Colonel was in trouble.

There was a lawsuit. He'd bitten a barmaid,

and had a bad reputation for temper.

So I was feeling rather apprehensive.

However, the dog took one look at me

and if ever a dog fell in love at first sight, it was that dog.

I was his sort of woman.

With such a temperamental dog,

the thrilling climax at the Great Grimpen Mire

had to be very carefully choreographed.

The dog would only allow me to put the mask on.

I crouched behind a rock, holding the dog.

A man called Danny, a prop man, had to climb a ladder

because the dog didn't like Danny, an inoffensive man.

He also didn't like crumpled paper,

so Danny had to crumple the paper

at the bottom of the ladder, shin up quickly, before the dog got to him.

And, of course, by the time he was supposed to assault me,

they had to goad him, and he did in fact grab me.

A small boy had been dressed in a replica of Christopher Lee's costume

in order to make the dog look bigger,

but the dog didn't like small boys.

When the dog leaped towards little Robert, the boy,

a look of terror was on his face.

When the hound is dead, shot by Holmes,

he does lift the mask off the face to show why he was so terrifying.

They use this mask to make it look more terrifying.

He was starved for weeks,

kept down the mine till the time was right,

then given the scent.

With the hound dead,

so ended Hammer's brief foray into Baker Street.

Possibly dismayed that they'd failed to gain an X Certificate

for their version of Conan Doyle's gothic creeper,

Hammer now went in search of other beasts

to bolster their growing horror reputation.

The Conan Doyle Estate,

now controlled solely by Adrian Conan Doyle,

would have to look elsewhere for screen adaptations.

Adrian was not an easy man, not at all.

I mean, he lived off the name.

He lived in a castle in Switzerland

which I think belonged either to his father or the trust.

And he was the final arbiter, judge,

of what could or could not go on the screen.

If he didn't like it, they didn't shoot it.

Four years later, in 1963,

Adrian entered into negotiations

with the BBC for a major new series based on the stories,

one that it was hoped would bring Holmes

to a wide new television audience.

Over 13 episodes, the actor Douglas Wilmer

was to explore the darker recesses of the master detective

with whom he sensed a connection.

I felt a kinship with the character of Sherlock Holmes,

and I have a lot of characteristics in common with him.

I'm extremely untidy, I'm very detailed,

I tend to be obsessional.

I get very depressed and black-humoured.

Those great, jagged rocks.

In a northerly wind, if I were a sailor,

I would keep away from this place.

I am not sure, Holmes, that it is the place for you.

I find it delightful.

There is a savage melancholy in this Cornish landscape.

Which matches my mood exactly.

'His black moods were accompanied by ill temper,'

a lack of consideration,

exasperation with the world in general, and in particular,

with there not being enough crime about to satisfy him.

Another day abandoned to the pursuit of pleasure.

-Mmm.

-Is there nothing of any interest in the papers?

Possible revolution in Spain.

Trouble in Africa.

Ooh, the government could be turned out over home rule.

I was referring to crime, Watson.

Plenty of bag-snatching in the fog.

The London criminal is a dull fellow.

I think it's a very, very good series.

I know that he was frustrated with it,

didn't feel they had enough time to do it properly.

He's extremely compelling,

and does dare to show a slightly grumpier, moodier,

more introspective side,

perhaps before it was really fashionable to do so.

In the most recent television version of Sherlock Holmes,

Benedict Cumberbatch's performance

is steeped in this sense of melancholy and frustration.

Look at that, Mrs Hudson.

Quiet, calm, peaceful.

Isn't it hateful?

I'm sure something will turn up, Sherlock. A nice murder!

-That'd cheer you up.

-Can't come too soon.

For all the bleakness in Wilmer's performance,

on the rare occasion that he allowed Holmes some humour...

..he was rebuked by a critical television fanbase.

"Last night, as I watched The Six Napoleons,

"I gazed with incredulous horror as you, sir, laughed!

"I beg you, sir, if not for your own sake,

"then for the sake of the man himself, do not show your emotions!"

Wilmer's version of Holmes as a brooding, cold-mannered,

gothic antihero was perhaps too faithful

and buttoned-up for the '60s pop generation.

Sherlock Holmes now came to life in strip cartoons,

in league with Superman,

and in true comic book style, his arch-villain ceased to be

Professor Moriarty and became Jack the Ripper.

The John Neville film,

A Study in Terror,

there is an American poster where he is called The Original Caped Crusader

and it has "Bow, Biff, Bang," in a sort of Batman style,

and even though the film isn't camp at all, you can sense that

they're slightly struggling there with where to place a character

who might otherwise feel slightly outdated.

A Study in Terror took Holmes

on a far more sexually explicit adventure.

These were permissive times, and in 1970, one legendary director

finally brought his long-harboured

homage of Holmes to the screen.

Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes

set out to explore the emotional and sexual undertones

of Holmes's character, to explain his addiction, his misogyny,

and give another insight into his relationship with Watson.

That film, it's a masterpiece, I think.

It has an amazing bittersweet quality to it.

And even though Robert Stephens is a very florid,

rather Oscar Wilde-like Holmes,

and Colin Blakely funny as bones, you can imagine,

they both play it so straight, as well as so funny,

that by the time it gets to the desperately moving ending,

you're completely with them.

It really, really is one of my absolute favourite films

and a pinnacle of Sherlock Holmes movies.

It's a very witty film.

There's an initial scene when they come back to Baker Street.

So you've got Sherlock commenting on this unlikely costume

he's been forced to wear, and Watson says, "Blame it on the illustrator."

It's absolutely marvellous.

-A bit of poetic licence!

-You've saddled me with

this improbable costume, which the public now expects me to wear.

It's not my doing! Blame it on the illustrator.

Made me out to be a violin virtuoso.

And in this scene, Wilder also wittily probes

Holmes's attitude to women, and his private vice...

I could barely hold my own

in the pit orchestra of a second-rate music hall.

You're much too modest.

You've given the reader the distinct impression that I'm a misogynist.

Actually, I don't dislike women. I merely distrust them.

The twinkle in the eye and the arsenic in the soup.

It's those little touches that make you colourful.

Lurid is more like it.

You've painted me as a hopeless dope addict, just because I occasionally

-take a 5% solution of cocaine.

-A 7% solution.

5%. Don't you think I'm aware you've been diluting it behind my back?

It's cut down from several other cases to a sort of minor case

about a Russian ballerina who wants Holmes to father her child,

and then the main case about this spy and the Loch Ness monster.

Billy said, "Play it as if you were playing Hamlet."

He said, "You must play it absolutely seriously.

"I will make it funny. Don't ever try to be funny

"and don't try to tip the wink on anything."

But it was his concept of Sherlock Holmes.

And I thought it was a very delightful and affectionate one.

We see Holmes as something other than

this rather hard, calculating machine.

That forensic side of Holmes that you get so strongly in Peter Cushing

or in Eille Norwood, is replaced by a figure who's capable of suffering

romantic agony, and so you get the possibility of Holmes being in love.

There's this incredible scene where Sherlock tries to get out of

fathering a child by claiming that he's gay.

'Dr Watson, who is a famous lady-killer,

'is having a wonderful time with all these Russian ballerinas,

'and then the word spreads about Holmes and Watson's relationship.

'And as he goes forward in this Russian line,

'all the girls are replaced by very fey boys.

'It's just magnificent.'

And really, that's the joke we've run with in our series.

Sherlock... Anything on the menu,

whatever you want free.

On the house

for you and for your date.

-D'you want to eat?

-I'm not his date.

Billy Wilder described his film as a reluctant love story

between two men, one being unaware of the other's attraction,

later admitting that he'd wished he'd been more daring

in making Holmes openly homosexual.

Holmes!

Let me ask you a question.

I hope I'm not being presumptuous,

but there have been women in your life?

The answer is, yes...

..you're being presumptuous.

Whilst Holmes's relationship with Watson remains teasingly ambiguous,

Wilder makes the relationship with his brother Mycroft

explicitly stormy, pushing the sibling rivalry much further

than the original stories.

And to play Mycroft, Wilder boldly chose an actor who had become

typecast as another great Victorian fictional character,

Count Dracula.

The greatest director I've ever worked with.

He said to me,

"I want you to look unlike any other character you've ever played.

"I don't care what you've done. I want you to be MY Mycroft."

I think at one point during the rehearsal,

we disturbed some bats which flew over

and he kind of looked at me and said,

"This must make you feel quite at home."

Only time.

My version of Mycroft

is entirely extrapolated from Christopher Lee's version.

And what Billy Wilder did was essentially go one step further

than Doyle by implying that Mycroft was the British Government.

They implied that that would probably mean he wasn't very nice,

and as a sort of uber-establishment figure

who regards his little brother as something of a loose cannon.

But essentially, what Mycroft wants to do

is to bring him inside the tent. He can't bear the idea that

he's got this kind of rogue element,

with his surname, running around in a deerstalker.

Holmes's emotions begin to cloud his judgment.

Having come under the spell of the mysterious Madame Valladon,

it is left to his elder brother Mycroft to reveal to him

that she is not all that she seems...

It was essential to keep the information from your client.

You went to all those lengths to prevent Madame Valladon...

'Mycroft tells Sherlock Holmes things

'that Holmes most certainly did not know.

'He said, "You, my dear brother,

'"have been working for the Wilhelmstrasse."'

So they enlisted the best brain in England to help them.

You, my dear brother, have been working for the Wilhelmstrasse.

"Am I going too fast for the best brain in England?"

So there's very definitely a very competitive streak

between the two of them.

The woman who was brought to your house in the middle of the night,

apparently fished out of the Thames,

and apparently suffering from amnesia,

is in fact Ilse von Hoffmanstal, one of their most skilful agents.

Am I going too fast for the best brain in England?

'And Mycroft is very sarcastic,'

saying, "Now, this time, I'm the one who knows what's going on, not you."

They planted her on you quite neatly, I must admit,

so that you could lead them to their objective, the air pump.

Very much like using a hog to find truffles.

And now perhaps you'd care to join me.

I'm expecting a certain royal personage from Balmoral.

Christopher Lee plays it so brilliantly, I think.

It's a very touching performance

because although he's disdainful and kowtowing to royalty and everything,

it's clear that he does care somewhere deep down in his icy heart.

I think he just wants everything to be ordered. He just wants order.

I think really, genuinely, in our increasingly fragmented world,

the reason that conspiracy theories are so popular

is because we all like to believe there is someone like Mycroft Holmes,

because it's quite reassuring to think,

even if they're a dark presence, there is some kind of order.

There is none.

The early 1970s were awash with conspiracy theories.

This was bizarrely reflected in the letters sent by fans

to 221B Baker Street, most of them asking for Holmes

to solve a current crisis,

like the Watergate scandal,

or a plane hijacking,

or even rescue Patty Hearst!

Amidst this state of paranoia, in August 1974,

a young American writer decided to probe Holmes's psyche

in what is arguably the best pastiche Holmes novel ever written.

The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, by Nicholas Meyer,

proved a sensation, remaining on the New York Times' Best Seller list

for 40 weeks, and winning the praise of PG Wodehouse,

who was lost in admiration for the way the young writer

had captured Conan Doyle's style.

The Seven-Per-Cent Solution

was written as a kind of protest

against all the Holmes movies

and earlier pastiches that I thought...

..rightly or wrongly, had got it wrong.

Meyer's story, pretending to be a lost manuscript

by the late Dr Watson, promises to solve the mystery

of Holmes's missing years after his Reichenbach fall.

The solution being that he fetches up in Vienna,

where he encounters the father of

psychoanalysis, Dr Sigmund Freud.

Doyle knew about

the life and writing of Freud.

And I thought, well, they're both doctors,

that's kind of interesting.

Then I realised that Holmes is a cocaine addict

and Freud had been an early proponent of cocaine,

starting as a use for anaesthetic during eye surgery,

but he also was a user.

And a lot of people were very angry at my book

because it was a book about an addict.

It's not really a Sherlock Holmes story, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution.

It's a story about Sherlock Holmes, not quite the same,

and that Holmes's addiction is something that he has to overcome

and the fact that he does overcome it and function while chained to it,

renders him more remarkable, and not less.

The prospect of this momentous encounter between Holmes and Freud

was quickly snapped up by Universal Studios, with a screenplay,

adapted by Meyer, featuring Nicol Williamson and Robert Duvall

as Holmes and Watson, together with Alan Arkin as Sigmund Freud.

This is a movie about very smart people.

Freud's a smart person, Holmes is a very smart person,

and Watson is no dummy in this. He's not a buffoon.

So the idea of having three actors where you can see

the wheels turning, all the three dimensionality that I hoped

was somehow in the book on display.

What was this wickedness?

Under analysis, Freud coaxes the images from Holmes's subconscious

and uncovers a deep-rooted family secret that goes a long way

to explaining Holmes's mistrust of women.

My mother deceived my father.

She had a lover?

Yes.

And what was the injustice?

What was the injustice?

He shot her.

Sherlock Holmes goes on the couch.

He's analysed by Freud in the Seven-Per-Cent Solution,

and I think it absolutely reflects people's preoccupations

of that moment. That idea of exploring the self, of finding out

who you really are, of breaking through the barriers of perception.

And in a rare on-set interview, Nicol Williamson offered

a revealing self-analysis of his own.

It's been very difficult sometimes,

but the difficulties have been...

enjoyable because you've had to work

your way through them

'to just let it happen, so therefore,

'Holmes will be perhaps a lot of me,

'and therefore, if you don't like my Sherlock Holmes,

'maybe you don't like me.'

Many people smoke Turkish cigarettes.

True, but only Turks smoke this brand.

'Nicol, who was an enormously gifted man,'

but a very tormented human being,

he was really plagued with all kinds of issues and insecurities

and self-doubt. And this little revealing outburst,

"If you don't like my Holmes, then you don't like me,"

is probably the cri de coeur of every actor who ever,

you know... "If you don't like my Hamlet, you're judging me."

To find him expressing it, I find especially poignant.

And what can this be?

A strand of carpet, also Turkish.

Although glowingly reviewed by the influential New Yorker film critic

Pauline Kael, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution did not do very well

at the box office. It would seem that it caught audiences

on the hop, audiences that didn't want to see their heroes

with the same neuroses as themselves.

By the mid-70s, a Sherlock Holmes revival was well under way.

It seemed that he was being played and parodied by everybody,

from Gene Wilder to Roger Moore,

Christopher Plummer, John Cleese,

and even Peter Cook.

The Holmes in this movie does have the natural urges of any male...

Thank you, darling.

..and he does visit a Victorian equivalent

of the modern

'massage parlour. Apart from that,

'we haven't departed from the original.'

Then what you get in the '80s is Granada coming to this character,

and deciding to do something self-consciously canonical

and definitive, and to, in a way, rescue Holmes from people

who had jiggered with him in the past.

Because this is the era of quality television.

This is the era of Jewel in the Crown and Brideshead Revisited

and those immaculate, faithful, expensive literary adaptations

that prove the seriousness of television, and this is what you get

with the Granada Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

I grew up in Manchester while it was being filmed,

I can remember going down to the studio

before it was open to the public, and trying to peer through the railings

at Baker Street. They built this vast set there.

The new and, for many, permanent

resident of 221b was Jeremy Brett.

Incidentally, I have glanced over

your latest account of my work.

-Oh, yes?

-Honestly,

I cannot congratulate you.

Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science.

Observation, deduction -

a cold, unemotional subject.

You have attempted to tinge it with a romanticism,

which has much the same effect as if

you'd worked a love story or an elopement into

-the Fifth Proposition of Euclid.

-KNOCKING

Who can that be?

'The whole idea of the Granada series was to be as authentic as possible.'

They even go as far as reproducing the Paget illustrations,

and yet Jeremy Brett's performance is a very particular choice.

He said himself that he got the kind of manic energy of Sherlock,

but he never really captured the idea of the man who would sit for two days

while his tobacco ash would tumble down his waistcoat.

It's a really mannered

and rather Victorian performance.

Jeremy is this creature,

this predator lurking beneath

this wonderful thing that can turn very owl-like, then hawk-like.

He's very physical and theatrical at times as well.

But it's completely contained. Something that is utterly his own.

In 41 episodes between 1984 and 1994,

Jeremy Brett lived the part completely

and, like Basil Rathbone,

would forever be linked with him.

I think one of the reasons why Jeremy Brett's performance is so definitive

is because he's the one who got to do them all.

Only Eille Norwood in the 1920s ever came close.

And also, because he became so enveloped in the role.

He was inescapably Holmes.

He is a...dark, recluse, internal creature.

And you can only show him through cracks in the marble, glimmers.

He's totally internal, and I find that's very hard to sustain.

But as the series wore on,

the cracks in the marble became all too apparent.

At the beginning of the series,

Jeremy Brett is lithe and athletic, he's jumping around all the time.

-Sorry, Holmes.

-No, no!

You couldn't have come at a better time!

But as they go on, he becomes more lethargic, he looks less well.

'Everything about them seems to be bearing down upon him.'

'And, of course, it chimed'

very strongly with his own personality,

and I felt, watching him, that you were watching somebody who was

working out their own demons

in public through playing the part.

Jeremy Brett made his last bow as Sherlock Holmes in 1994.

He died the following year. He was 61 years old.

Brett's legacy, for many, was to be the complete Sherlock Holmes.

Yet if the screen history tells us anything,

it is that Sherlock Holmes is not a fixed point in a changing age,

but a protean figure, taking on whatever form

his adaptors and players want,

from Paget's initial branding of his look,

to the embellishments on the stage

and the transformations on the screen.

Now a fresh generation of writers and actors

are drawing on all these previous incarnations

to present us with a new Sherlock for today.

And just as he had done before,

the master detective returned from the dead to take on the world again.

From 2009, cinema and television audiences have been treated

to not one, but two new Sherlocks,

in the shapes of Benedict Cumberbatch...

and Robert Downey Jr.

Their successes mark a huge revival in the character,

not witnessed since the 1970s.

In tune with today's vogue for the superhero,

Downey Jr gives us Holmes the Victorian man of action,

as in this fight scene, where he is able to see in slow-motion

into the future - a device which has been described

by the film's director Guy Ritchie as Holmesavision.

Dislocate jaw entirely.

Heel kick to diaphragm.

In summary, ears ringing,

jaw fractured, three ribs cracked, four broken,

diaphragm haemorrhaging. Physical recovery - six weeks.

Full psychological recovery - six months.

Guy Ritchie offers us a streetwise and swashbuckling Sherlock,

inhabiting a fantasy Victorian world.

It's a comic-strip version of Conan Doyle, with lots of technology.

It's steampunkish, a kind of comic-strip 19th Century.

If Downey Jr is Holmes as a superhero,

then Cumberbatch is Holmes as a reluctant one.

I've disappointed you.

That's good. It's a good deduction.

Don't make people into heroes, John.

Heroes don't exist, and if they did, I wouldn't be one of them.

-PHONE BEEPS

-Excellent.

'They are more fallible,'

it's definitely an uncertain time.

I don't think that our Sherlock

and John Watson solve everybody's problems.

I think they speak more of the time we're living in,

in the sense that they are slightly more on the edge.

The latest Sherlocks, like all those that came before them,

have been able to reanimate the character for our era

because Sherlock Holmes is the man of many faces -

a man who never lived, and so will never die.

No point sitting at home

when there's finally something fun going on!

Look at you, all happy. It's not decent.

Who cares about decent? The game, Mrs Hudson, is on.