Sherlock Holmes - Private Investigator (1984)
Inspired by this publicity still of Brett and David Burke as Holmes and Watson in modern dress.
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Interview with Michael Cox, TV Zone, 1990
"Originally, we wanted to go back to the books, and do what we had done with Brideshead and do a lush, opulent period piece, but then the Sherlock Holmes Classics with Ian Richardson and David Jason [1} were announced and put into production extremely quickly, and then the BBC were considering doing another serial with Tom Baker [2],and it was a bit galling. Because we had spent quite a bit on pre-production, and we had essentially already cast Jeremy and David for the roles. Scripts were written, and there had been a feeling that because the Richardson shows had been made without a station, that they'd disappear. But then HBO in the US decided it needed original product, and then Channel 4 got involved, eventually. But because we had presold the project, we couldn't abandon it. John Hawkesworth was adamant that it should be a period piece. Because that's what the Americans like. To the Americans, London is Sherlock Holmes. And Sherlock Holmes is, well we say Victorian, but it's really anything between 1870 and just up to pre-First World War. But I was looking through various books on Sherlock Holmes, and I remembered that the 40s films with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce eventually shifted Holmes and Watson to the 40s, to World War Two. And I then thought, what if you had Holmes and Watson alive for World War Three..."
"So, I got all the writers back. And eventually I convinced John (Hawkesworth) that . We discussed how do you contextualise the character in the 80s. Is he a grandson? A reincarnation? And in the end, we left a few ambiguous hints. We decided that Holmes should be an enigma. When we meet him, he's a dropout from society. There's a line when we first meet Mycroft, where he says that the Holmes family has a distinguished history of interfering with the secrets of British society. But Doyle didn't write them as period pieces. He wrote them for the modern world. They weren't intended as gothic fantasies, but mysteries rooted in the modern world. And that was the key for me. The fog, the deerstalker, the hansom cabs, we wanted to drive a sledgehammer through that. That's why in the first scene of A Study in Scarlet, Watson is seen in period dress, walking through fog where he meets a chap in a deerstalker. And then the fog clears. A car drives by.. And we learn he's going to a fancy dress party, and the man in the deerstalker is not Holmes but Stamford, dressed as a country squire. And then, on top of that, we're not even in London, but in Hong Kong!"
"Initially, we presumed that you couldn't get away with doing A Study in Scarlet as Jeremy and David were both pushing fifty. But Alan Plater{3} suggested that they could be past acquaintances. That Stamford had introduced them before, as young men. But they didn't get on, and soon after Watson left the country. And I liked that. It made Watson seem desperate. In the books, Dr. Watson is back from Afghanistan. And we did thinlk about having him be a Falklands vet. But we then decided to set A Study earlier so it would be a prologue. So five years pass between episode one and two. Though we never quite advertised it. And so the idea was that he was a UN medic, with a military background, who'd ended up in Hong Kong, but was now getting tired. We also decided that it would be a TV movie before the series, to act as a launch point. We had fun putting the thing together. Especially as it translated quite well, what with the Mormons. Casting Jeff Hope was quite hard. We looked at a lot of young American actors as we knew it was an opportunity to get a name but David Warner turned out to be perfect."
[1} IOTL, the Sherlock Holmes telemovies with Richardson and David Healy and Donald Churchill as Watson ended after two installments in 1984, due to Granada announcing their project simultaneously with the Weintraub/Otto Plaschkes/HBO productions with Richardson. Apparently, in Alan Barnes' Sherlock on Screen, there would have been a third one made later on with Richardson and Jason reuniting in Porterhouse Blue. I decided to have Jason play Watson from the get-go to add a sense of continuity ITTL, where the Richardson Holmes runs to twenty TV movies, some in anthological form. Because of the success of these movies, Only Fools and Horses ends in 1986, becomes Hot Rod as planned IOTL when Jason got cold feet, it was planned that Del would leave for Australia in the episode Who Wants to be A Millionaire? leaving Rodney to have his own sitcom with Mickey Pearce as the new partner. The Sherlock Holmes Classics end in 1990, though there is at least occassional special.
[2] Baker's Hound of the Baskervilles for BBC One was 1982. Reports vary as to it being a pilot for more mysteries.
{3} ITTL, Plater becomes one of the real architects of the series, with the same sense of genre intersecting on dreary 70s/80s Britain as Juggernaut and the Beiderbecke Tapes.