Fittingly for a character whose exploits have been translated to film and television more often than any other, there have been plenty of documentaries about Sherlock Holmes, in his many print and screen incarnations. Most of them are pretty awful but some pass muster, including this rather decent television primer first broadcast on Britain’s ITV network on 17 November 2007. There’s very little here that the dedicated Holemesian won’t already be more than familiar with but for curious newcomers, it’s a solid starting point that fills in the details of the literary Holmes, sketches in the influences and social context that informed the stories and looks at some of the very many adaptations of the canon. Made for cable channel ITV3 (which has long been the home of endless repeats of the series), it’s rather heavy on clips from the Granada/Jeremy Brett adaptations and it could have done with licensing clips from a few of the more famous adaptations.

Presented by actor and Holmes fan Richard E. Grant (we get to see him in action as Stapleton in the BBC’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (2002)), there’s the expected collection of talking heads popping up to guide viewers through the world of Holmes, with the usual suspects (Christopher Frayling, Matthew Sweet, Kim Newman) rubbing shoulders with crime writers (PD James, Jeffrey Deaver, Val McDiarmid), academics and expert Holmesians (Dr Own Dudley Edwards, Sir Anthony Richards) and famous fans (Giles Brandreth). Grant gets a few minutes with Edward Hardwicke, the actor who played Watson opposite Brett for most of the series’ run in which he speaks warmly of the character that came to define the later years of his career.

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As noted, the most devoted of Holmesians will already know everything on offer here but we mustn’t forget that everyone has to start somewhere and if the documentary drew in just a handful of new fans then it was a job well done. It would have been nice to see examples of some of the other actors mentioned in action – we get to see still images of Basil Rathbone and a few seconds of Peter Cushing in action but presumably licensing costs prevented the producers from using too many clips and the over-use of Brett extracts gets a bit wearing after a while. But there are plenty of little pleasures along the way – Kim Newman giving Watson his due as the story’s man of action, tales of Brett’s growing obsession with the role and plenty of popular myths are busted (the phrase “elementary, my dear Watson”, the costume et al). The film doesn’t shy away from the inescapable fact that Conan Doyle’s vast canon of Holmes stories is hugely inconsistent (“If you take them as plots,” says Sherlock Holmes Society head Sir Anthony Richards,”there’s probably only about 12 out of the 56 short stories which are good plots”), with The Red-Headed League with its villain’s unlikely plot and The Adventure of the Creeping Man with its man slowly turning into a monkey in particular being singled out as two of the more outre examples.

The documentary features the inevitable run through of the contributors favorite screen Holmes (Brett inevitable comes out on top though Dudley Edwards breaks ranks and chooses Peter Cushing, who we get the briefest of glimpses of in clips from the BBC adaptation of A Study in Scarlet) before PD James bemoans the fact that younger audiences would have been familiar with the name Sherlock Holmes, but may not be able to summarise the stories themselves. Only three years later, Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat would bring Holmes and Watson back to prime time, mainstream television with Sherlock and the characters were suddenly back in the public eye once again, where they’ve always belonged.