Sherlock Holmes - The BBC Collection Box Set [DVD]

I have a personal reason for buying this set.In the 60's as a child I watched with my grandfather,as Peter Cushing played Holmes on tv.The minute I seen this on amazon I had to have it.Now that's out of the way let the chase begin..
The aforementioned Cushing episodes will appeal to those of a certain age and display story-telling from a different era.The newer show's have broader audience appeal but the beauty here is you can compare and contrast portrayals of Holmes
and story treatments from different elements of time.It's a fair package some ok extra's not too expensive and more importantly
very entertaining

This collection assembles several of the BBC's takes on Doyle's great detective over the years, from Peter Cushing (though not, sadly, his predecessor Douglas Wilmer) to the more problematic modern productions with Richard Roxburgh and Rupert Everett and an intriguing drama from David Pirie.

Despite huge success on its initial run in 1968, only five of Peter Cushing's sixteen BBC adaptations that saw him resuming his role as Sherlock Holmes (who he had previously played in Hammer's superb Hound of the Baskervilles) are known to exist and are collected here. As with so much popular TV of the era, the others were wiped to save storage space or to reuse the tapes, so it's perhaps a little unfair to judge the whole series on these stories, which are distinctly hit and miss.

All five have the BBC 'look' of their day - a lot of studio work on videotape with some location work shot on 16mm film - and the sometimes theatrical approach to performances that seemed to automatically come with it. Often the style makes the show seem stilted and uninvolving, especially with Cushing making Holmes such a precise and distant character, at others it works well. The adaptations are similarly inconsistent - The Hound of the Baskervilles suffers badly from inevitable comparisons to Cushing's previous Hammer version, but the theatricality in the Christmas episode The Blue Carbuncle works a treat (and also features James Beck in what seems to be one of his few surviving non-Dad's Army performances as a hotel floor manager). As such the show is certainly worth a look, but the surviving episodes veer more to the average than the inspired and don't encourage a second viewing. No extras.

It's easy to tell where the 2002 version of The Hound of the Baskervilles goes wrong because so little goes right. There's little fault with the script, which does a decent job of retelling a by now overly familiar tale and even throws in an intriguingly gothic Christmas Eve party for good measure. Some of the supporting performances are fine - John Nettles and Richard E. Grant in particular. But the leads are so very wrong that they sap the life from the thing.

Ian Hart's Watson is surly and obnoxious, all too easily offended and trapped in a deeply distrustful relationship with Holmes. Since Watson has to carry much of the drama, this keeps us at arm's length from involvement, especially since Matt Day is such a dull Baskerville. However, where Hart is a good actor giving a misjudged performance, Richard Roxburgh gives every indication of being a bad actor giving a bad performance. He may not quite be the worst Holmes in the way that he was definitely the worst Dracula (in Van Helsing), but he's certainly the dullest and blandest despite his overstated distance and eccentricities, while the attempt to make him more of an action hero simply ends up making him a very ordinary figure instead. With all displays of Holmes' deductive reasoning dropped (even the famous scene with Dr Mortimer's walking stick is gone), his disguises omitted (he just appears on the moor as if he were still dressed for Baker Street) and his drug use wildly overdone (rather than resorting to narcotics when bored, he even jacks up in a public toilet while working on the case in this version), he's such a blunt bull in a China shop here that rather than pay the cabby for information, he beats him up instead as if he were a 19th century Popeye Doyle.

Although David Attwood's direction throws up the odd good bit of composition, the grotty lighting and perpetual green tint on the original TV broadcast version sap any signs of life before they can bloom. And the less said about the shoddily animated CGi hound the better - despite the impressively populated London street scenes, it's hard to believe that this is probably the biggest budgeted version since Rathbone and Bruce strode the Moor.

The BBC have previously had good luck with the tale - both their Peter Cushing and Tom Baker versions, studio-bound though they were, were more involving in their cosy Sunday teatime way. Sadly, this attempt to bring a more modern aesthetic, while marginally better than the dreadful Peter Cook and Dudley Moore spoof, is nonetheless a very poor show indeed. Extras include audio commentary, cast and crew interviews and making of featurette.

After that crashing disappointment, the producers took a positive step in replacing the truly dreadful Richard Roxburgh as Holmes. Unfortunately, Rupert Everett is only a mild improvement in Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking. Less of a crashing ham than Roxburgh, instead he comes across as a rather narcissistic and disinterested confirmed bachelor rather than a master detective, constantly striking brooding poses but never once convincing that there's either a human being or a brilliant deductive machine beneath them. Always an extremely limited actor, he brings little to the part beyond a reminder of how desperately uninteresting an actor he is when given centre-stage.

Thankfully, Ian Hart's Watson has been retained and improved, and he's given a much better part than the moody, petulant and antagonistic reading in Hound. Similarly, the ill-advised mutual distrust and barely submerged hatred grafted onto Holmes and Watson has been dropped in favour of a relationship more akin to the cut 'Case of the Upside Down Room' section of Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, with Watson trying to save his friend from his drug addiction by interesting him in a baffling case (unfortunately they have also carried over Robert Stephens' horrendous white-as-a-corpse makeup job for Sherlock).

The case itself isn't overburdened with originality, at times playing like a more refined Dario Argento giallo without the gore as Holmes is drawn out of a drug binge to find the fetishistic killer of several aristocratic young girls, but it moves along at a decent pace and makes for an entertaining if undemanding 99 minutes despite an abundance of anachronisms and an overuse of the fog machine to hide the lower budget. It's just a shame that once again they've come up short one Sherlock. The only extra is an audio commentary by Simon Cellan-Jones and Elinor Day.

David Pirie's postscript to his superb but all-too-short-lived Murder Rooms: The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes series, 2005's The Strange Case of Sherlock Holmes and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, unfortunately only available in this set is not essential, but it is a fascinating addition to the canon that melds the real life of Doyle with the fictional one he created and grew to hate with an impressive ambition the production isn't always able to match until the strong last half hour. It sees the author (Douglas Henshall) at the height of his fame and of his disillusionment and growing hatred for what Sherlock Holmes has come to represent in his life: Doyle's readers believe in Holmes and find him more real than the grief-and-conscience-stricken author. Desperately attempting to make contact with the `other side' as he tries to come to terms with the fact that his father died alone while Holmes was mourned all over the world and determined to kill off "my detective" once and for all, he's persuaded by his publisher to work on a biography with a ghost writer of sorts (Tim McInnery). But as the biographer uses some of the great detective's own methods and emphasises that Holmes is more than the mere calculating Doyle claims, he cuts a little too close to the quick for the author's comfort, uncovering the way his creation was born of guilt and pain and secrets...

Only broadcast on the BBC's digital channels rather than given a terrestrial airing like its predecessor, it has problems - it's disappointingly shot on rather bland digital rather than the film of Murder Rooms and boy can you tell the difference, other than Sinead Cusack as Doyle's mother the females roles (Saskia Reeves, Emily Blunt) are very under-developed, Brian Cox is no Ian Richardson in his couple of scenes as Professor Bell (you also get the ever-popular Sign of Four watch scene again in a different setting), and the final twist is a bit predictable, but it'll still have you gripped long before one very real character movingly tells another "Of course you can feel me. I am your heart." Well worth a look, but unfortunately I had to return three copies of the UK DVD before getting one that would play, and even then not perfectly. No extras.

Hi,

I've been waiting many months to buy this series and I desperately needed to buy this at once when I saw this .Eventually I was lucky enough to have this.The quality is good than I expected.As each DVD consists with only maximum up to two episodes,the quality has not been compromised. In fact, this was one of the my dreamed SHERLOCK HOLMES SERIES, though I have watched many other HOLMES series.

By the way,thank you very much for the quick shipping.

Dimuthu Dharshana
Sri Lanka