After a generally good start in the thirty years since Holmes first appearance on television, the Seventies turned out to be a decade that is probably best forgotten in relation to Holmes on the small screen.

Following the repeated series with Peter Cushing as Holmes in 1970 on BBC2 the next appearance of Holmes on the small screen was in the USA in a 90 minute adaptation of The Hound of The Baskervilles on ABC-TV on the 12th of February 1972. Stewart Granger played an unconvincing Holmes with Bernard Fox as me.

It was not well-received by the critics. Would you be convinced by a Holmes wearing a string tie living in a Baker Street on top of a hill overlooking St Paul’s Cathedral? Perhaps the most interesting cast member was William Shatner as Stapleton, three years after his role as Captain James T Kirk in the original Star Trek series. There will be more direct link with Star Trek as we shall see later.

But worse was to some. Back in Britain, the BBC’s Comedy Playhouse was a series of one-off 30 minute comedies, the idea being to see which the audiences liked that could be made into their own series. John Cleese had fallen out with the rest of the Monty Python team and was looking for “something completely different”.

So, on the 18th of January 1973 , the same day as the last of the current series of Monty Python was being shown on BBC2, Cleese appeared as Holmes with William Rushton as me (all is forgiven, Nigel Bruce) in “The Strange Case of the Dead Solicitors”.

A more serious attempt followed on the BBC late the following year though this should really be excluded from “Holmes on Television” as he wasn’t in it! “Dr Watson and The Darkwater Hall Mystery: A Singular Adventure” as its title suggests leaves everything up to me (played by Edward Fox). Its 73 minutes is like a foretaste of the recent BBC Sherlock series with many canonical references (including STUD, BLAC, MUSG and SPEC). I appear to have some fun with a Spanish maid but as the “action” appears to pre-date SIGN I had not met my future wife at that point.

Nearly three years pass and then, in 1976, “Holmes in New York” appears on NBC-TV with Holmes being played by James Bond, I mean, Roger Moore with John Steed (Patrick Macnee) of the Avengers impersonating Nigel Bruce impersonating me. Nevertheless, the plot has some points of interest. Just what is that statuette on Moriarty’s desk and what might it have to do with the person playing Moriarty in this two-hour (too) long television movie?

The following year, in the series “Classics Dark and Dangerous”, came a 30 minute dramatisation of Silver Blaize with Christopher Plummer as Holmes and Thorley Waters as me. This was one of a series of six adaptations of horror and mystery stories. It was broadcast on ITV in Great Britain on the 27th of November  1977. Christopher Plummer is a cousin of Nigel Bruce and portrayed Holmes in a dry, distant manner and chose to stress Holmes use of cocaine by wearing a pale foundation. Thorley Walters plays me as “an overgrown schoolboy” according to one review.

This was preceded on the 18th September by John Cleese, this time with Arthur Lowe (of “Dads Army” fame) as me in “The Strange Case of the End of Civilisation As We Know It”, another parody on ITV lasting 54 minutes. Best forgotten is the general view.

Then in 1978, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore appeared as Holmes and me in “The Hound of the Baskervilles . . . Yet another adventure of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson by A Conan Doyle”. This 84 minute parody is also best forgotten!

The BBC TC series “Crime Writers” covered “The Great Detective” later in 1978 with Jeremy Clyde as Holmes and Michael Cochrane as me.

The Seventies was somewhat redeemed at the very end with a series of 24 pastiches, essentially a reworking some of the same scripts as were used in the 1954-55 Sherlock Holmes series starring Ronald Howard. This time Geoffrey Whitehead played Holmes with Donald Pickering as me.

Generally speaking, none of what occurred in the Seventies has made it to DVD which may say something about its quality, so much of what I have written is based on what others have told me about these programmes.

The exception is the last series with Geoffrey Whitehead as Holmes. Some of these episodes have appeared on YouTube and a good search engine should help you locate them.

If anyone can advise on the availability of any of the programmes on video, here or in the USA, I will be happy to pass on the details.

So, the Seventies came to a close with little to recommend it to Holmes fans. But the Eighties would eventually bring us a fresh approach to my original stories and a Holmes, who on the television screen, would rival, and some say surpass, Basil Rathbone’s portrayal on the cinema screen.

The first appearance of Holmes on television was in the USA.

Louis (or Luis)  Hector, who had played Holmes on the radio from 1934 to 1935, played Holmes alongside William Podmore as me in “The Three  Garridebs” an adaptation of the story from The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes”. David Stuart Davies’ excellent book, “Starring Sherlock Holmes”, gives a fairly detailed account of this black and white, 30 minute, first appearance broadcast by NBC on the 27th November 1937.

It was another 12 years, in 1949, before Holmes appeared again on television. Again this was in the US and was an adaptation of “The Speckled Band” with Alan Napier as Holmes and Melville Cooper as me in a 28 minute broadcast on CBS. Alan Napier would later play Batman’s manservant Alfred in the Adam West Batman’s series in the 1960s.

Three years later on the 29th July 1951, Holmes appeared for the first time on British television on the BBC in a children’s programme, “For the Children – The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone” with Andrew Osborn as Holmes and Philip King as me.

Later that year Holmes appeared in in six 30 minutes adaptations on the BBC in a series entitled “We present Alan Wheatley as Mr Sherlock Holmes in …”. Alan Wheatley would be later remembered for playing the Sheriff of Nottingham in the televison series “Robin Hood” alongside Richard Greene (who played Sir Henry Baskerville in “The Hound of the Baskervilles” with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce). This series included “The Empty House” (broadcast on the 20th October 1951), “A Scandal in Bohemia” (27th October), “The Dying Detective” (3rd November), “The Reigate Squires” (17th November 1951), “The Red-Headed League” (24th November) and finally “The Second Stain” (1st December). I was played by Raymond Francis, whom British readers may remember as Chief Inspector Lockhart in the series about Scotland Yard called “No Hiding Place”.

A couple of years later in the US, Basil Rathbone appeared as Holmes in a 30 minute pastiche (the first television programme to stray from the Canon). This CBS broadcast on the 26th May 1953 was entitled “Suspense: The Adventure of the Black Baronet” in which I was played by Martyn Green as Nigel Bruce was too ill (he died later that year). The story was written by John Dickson Carr and Adrian Conan Doyle, son of Sir Arthur.

The following year in the US there was the first major series of Holmes adventures on television. This starred Ronald Howard as Holmes and Howard Marion Crawford as me (he had played Holmes on the radio in Britain). These are mainly pastiches with one story, “The Red-Headed League”, from the Canon. All 39 episodes were about 25 minutes long and were broadcast weekly stretching over a whole year from the 18th October 1954 to the last episode on the 17th October 1955.

Nothing was seen of Holmes on television for the next nine years until Douglas Wilmer appeared as Holmes in “Detective: The Speckled Band” on BBC1 in the UK on the 18th May 1964. Nigel Stock was Watson. This was one of a series of stories featuring different detectives. The BBC was looking for something to follow their succesful “Maigret” series, which had starred Rupert Davies who introduced each programme in the Detective series. The following year, twelve more Holmes adventures, all from the Canon, appeared on the BBC in 50 minute episodes with the Wilmer and Stock pairing.

Then there was a three-year gap before Holmes appeared again in the BBC series “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes” series of 16 adaptations from the Canon. Peter Cushing replaced Douglas Wilmer as Holmes but Nigel Stock was Watson again. All sixteen were shown on on the BBC1 in 1968 and 12 of them were show again, this time in colour, on BBC2 in 1970. The really sad fact about this series is that only 5 episodes remain (A Study in Scarlet, both parts of  The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Boscombe Valley Mystery, The Sign of Four and The Blue Carbuncle). It was BBC policy at the time to wipe and re-use tapes once they were judged to be of no further use. This seems very short-sighted now but the first domestic video recorders were still a couple of years away.

In the next part of this series, we enter the 1970s and we come across some rather questionable interpretations of Holmes’ adventures, as we make our way to the mid-1980s and encounter what some see as the best portrayal of Holmes on television or maybe on screen anywhere . . .

DVDs available in the UK:

The Sherlock Holmes Collection [DVD] [1968]“>Peter Cushing – The Sherlock Holmes Collection (only 5 of the series)

DVDs available in the US:

Sherlock Holmes“>Douglas Wilmer – Sherlock Holmes

Books used in compiling this series:

UK: Sherlock Holmes on Screen“>Sherlock Holmes on Screen by Alan Barnes; Starring Sherlock Holmes: A Century of the Master Detective on Screen“>Starring Sherlock Holmes by David Stuart Davies; Sherlock Holmes: A Centenary Celebration“>Sherlock Holmes – A Centenary Celebration by Allen Eyles