English novelist Kingsley Amis wrote a BBC script in 1974 that's as reverent as any self-respecting parody dare be, teetering on craven nostalgia and hero worship. Even with sly Edward Fox leading a solid ensemble, one's patience with the enterprise is tested.
The whole tone of the production is uppercrust, understated, its relentless tongue-in-cheek all but imperceptible. Maybe that's why I'm the first to review? Or, it's simply been out of circulation - because it doesn't stoop to conquer.
The high-comedy premise is that dull Dr Watson solves a case when Sherlock Holmes is laid up off-screen on a rest cure. All the hypnotic Holmesian elements are re-deployed as variations on a theme, revealing secrets (cowardice, absinthe, conjugal cos play) in the redoubtable country house. Buñuel's Diary of a Chambermaid (1964) more ably dissects bourgeois hypocrisy.
James Cellan Jones, having directed episodes of The Forsythe Saga, could be counted on for a restrained melodramatic style. But this, being a parody of that dryness, might strike some viewers as mere dust. (If only Ken Russell had gotten his hands on it! That would've been a show.)
The costumes, however, are worth 70 minutes of your time. The settings, personnel, decor are all spot on. The subtle, cumulative archness cries out for a firmer comic grasp of the tiller, but that was not to be. By the end, one is bemused by this quasi-Victorian exercise in aesthetic parallelism.
Four years after the 1974 Christmas broadcast, the story appeared in Playboy, and then in a limited hand-printed edition now going for a silly price. So it's a bit of an oddity., a rarity.
