My Sherlock

Let’s be honest, given the choice between visiting London 

or Switzerland, where would you go?

Basil Rathbone was always my Sherlock Holmes, just as Nigel Bruce was always my Doctor Watson, and they always will be. 

My affection for these two actors as the definitive Homes and Watson was seeded when I saw their films as a child.  Years later and working my way through the DVD collection, the magic is undiminished which is, I am discovering now that I have had the opportunity to revisit other childhood favourites through the magic of Youtube, a rare experience.  Some programmes were, apparently, very much of their time and have not aged well; maybe one is less discerning as a child, or simply addled with artificial flavourings from Monster Munch.

Now new generations are inheriting their definitive Holmes and Watson.  Jeremy Brett was, for many, the epitome of Holmes.  I’ve never seen the ITV adaptation myself because they are afflicted with the same menace that besets all ITV drama – adverts.  One moment the game is afoot, the next you are confronted with an ad for something called ‘Anusol’ and before you can hit ‘mute’ you hold the answer to the riddle ‘what on earth is Anusol?’, something you can never unlearn.

On the big screen, various big names have taken turns trying on the deerstalker for size, none I think more successfully than Robert Downey Jr.  Is it because he mixes just the right amount of manic energy with the conviction to addiction only somebody with his past can bring, along with a physical aptitude for violence that the books always hinted at?  Partly, but mainly because I saw the first film with my Mum as a Christmas treat and so it’s now embedded deep in the ‘positive association’ wing of the mansion of my mind (which also has a f**king enormous wine cellar).

The BBC reboot of ‘Sherlock’ though, is nothing short of a tour de force in fan creation, as if it’s made of cult.  And it was interesting to see evidence of that the other day when I was near Barts (for reasons, I should be clear, entirely unrelated to the sort of condition requiring something that might be advertised on ITV).

St Bartholomew’s Hospital is in the Smithfield area of the City of London, with St Paul’s, The Old Bailey and the famous meat market nearby, and is famous for a number of reasons, including having the only statue of Henry VIII in London atop one of its entrance gates.  It is also where John Watson studied to be a doctor and where Sherlock abuses corpses in the name of criminal science and where, in the episode ‘The Richenbach Fall’, he apparently jumps to his death.

Red telephone boxes are not an unusual sight in London.  Far rarer than they used to be of course, victim first to a campaign by BT to replace an icon with stainless steel monstrosities with about as much charm as an abattoir floor, and then to the rise in popularity of the mobile ‘phone, which saw a move away from people having conversations in soundproofed boxes on a landline to a fashion for bellowing your business at passers-by.

And telephone boxes with pieces of card in them are not an unusual sight.  Indeed, there was a period when they were prolific as prostitutes advertised their, er, goods, in telephone boxes.  It has to be said that the trend in covering the glass of a telephone box in ‘business’ cards also afforded privacy for that other function of a telephone box so beloved of late night revellers.

The telephone box near Barts though bears not adverts but messages of love and support for Sherlock.  Presumably, these have been left by fans of the show from all over the world who have come here.  It may seem odd that fans would visit the site of the faked death of a fictional character but the notes, if they are authentic and not a prop, are surely simply a continuation of the same fan fervour that seized the readers of ‘The Strand’ when Holmes went over the Falls the first time in 1893.  And let’s be honest, given the choice between visiting London or Switzerland, where would you go?

The wonder of Sherlock Holmes

When one sees real detectives on television, they are rarely smiling. Usually they stand there in a reasonably smart suit and a tie the wife picked out for them because they were going on telly and read out a statement that means some family’s life has, or is about to be, shattered.

This is at odds with the other sorts of detectives we see on television. These ones have very good suits, drive fast cars and have complicated home lives, love lives and so on. They are often very good at their jobs (they must be to wrap up every case in an hour or so) but this professionalism comes at a cost, possibly they are divorced, possibly they drink too much.

Back in the seventies, complex character flaws were not as important as how quickly you could drive through a stack of cardboard boxes. Anyway, back then everyone was drinking, smoking and fooling around – if you had a character flaw back then it was that you were bald or fat. Never both.

Of course fictional detectives exist in other media, in films and books. They all share a common trait – they are all good at their job and solve crimes – this is because if you get to the end of the book and the detective is still doing door-to-doors and having conversations like ‘I haven’t got a fucking clue about this one’, then you might reasonably expect the reader to feel a little dischuffed.

The one place where books have the edge over film and teevee is fruity language. I toyed for a long time with the plot of a novel involving a detective with tourette’s, who was booted off the force after a particularly disastrous episode where he had to break some bad news to a grieving young widow and now lives on a barge (check) has a flirty relationship with his ex (check) and never has anything in his fridge when his spunky young daughter comes to stay (check). However, I abandoned it after a scene where he asked a bartender for some information ran to seventeen pages and involved 156 bloodys, 284 shits, 752 fucks and a monumental 7,000 cocksuckers. Predictably, it also ended in a bar brawl. Come to think of it, most scenes ended in a fight.

The greater the flaw, the greater the genius. This is why a cocaine using recreational sodomite who is lazy to the point of indolence is widely accepted as the greatest fictional detective of all time. Sherlock Homes is fantastic in print (where he doesn’t swear but by Christ, smokes and tokes like there’s no tomorrow), great on film (Rathbone and Bruce. Greatest Homes and Watson. Ever.) good on television (Brett is sublime) and marvellous on radio. Indeed, such are the strength of the stories that if they invented a new media experience which involved enjoying a story by shoving a chemically sodden sponge up your arse that released the story directly into your bloodstream, it’d probably be great on that too.

Homes is the most extreme example of the flawed detective. Detective who doesn’t have anything in his fridge? Fuck that, Homes doesn’t have a fridge, he has a landlady who makes him his meals…which he then doesn’t eat. He’s the perfect imperfect detective for the media age. Yet his imperfections mean that he can only be trusted to investigate the most unusual of cases. Had a run in with the red-headed league? Homes is your man. Relative savaged by an enormous spectral hound? Off to Baker Street. Suspect that people are conspiring to bump you off based on arrival of orange pips in the post? Send for the man in the deerstalker.

Which is why flawed detectives with genius in inverse proportion to their flaws are great in print but less so in the real world, if Homes were on Crimewatch being quizzed how he intended to tackle the Bromsgrove bullion job, then I’m not sure how well the response ‘I intend to take a seven percent solution of cocaine, smoke the very strongest Turkish tobacco, starve myself and scratch out a tune on my violin’ would go down with Scotland Yard.