steven.gough

This flashy po-faced hokum has clearly been built to milk the appeal of Sir Patrick Stewart to the bobble-hat brigade, and it's not as terrifyingly bad as some of writer Stephen Gallagher's other work. But why-oh-why-oh-why hasn't anybody flagged the significant debt to other and - in my nostalgia-loaded opinion - better series?

It obviously re-treads ground covered in the equally watchable but improbable perils-of-science 1970s BBC melodrama "Doomwatch" - created by Doctor Who writers and Cybermen creators Kit Peddler and Gerry Davis.

"Eleventh hour" writer Stephen Gallagher is also a former Doctor Who writer. What, then, do you think inspired the format of a slightly unworldly trouble-shooting "Government Scientific Adviser" with a younger and slightly feisty but unthreatening girl "companion"?

There's a certain amount to enjoy here, not least Jean Luc Picard trying to pretend he's not posh, as he flattens all his vowels and clearly has to be restrained from saying things like "Ay-up", "By 'eck", and "Ah grew oop round ear". That he's supposed to be a boffin is probably funnier, as in last week's episode which had him talking about quantum probability and Chaos theory to a Government accountant before charging off to put down a virus pandemic.

That girl from "Extras" as his sidekick also gets to wave a gun and run down endless stairs in Lycra tops without the benefit of a sports bra, which may offer younger male viewers some light relief.

Despite the slick presentation and casting coup, this isn't ever going to be great and memorable TV. The man who gave us budget-shy early nineties genetic engineering scare-fest "Chimera" (aka "Monkey Boy" - the clue's in the title) and international drugs corporation paranoia in "Oktober" is clearly going to carry on grinding out un-taxing soft-target science-gone-wrong potboilers. The only real social issue in the second story about a killer virus loose in England's Manchester, was the obvious question, "Well, would they really bother?"

This short-lived quality action drama series deserved a better fate, but sadly suffered for being either 10 years too early or 15 years too late. Its heritage is the classic UK commercial TV action shows of the 1970s and early 1980s, like the Avengers or the Professionals, cross-bred with the classic espionage world of Deighton and le Carre and updated for the touchy-feely mid-1990s. The result was a show with gun-toting super-cops tumbling away from exploding cars, who still worried about missing their daughter's birthday, while thin-lipped middle-aged men made tough decisions, compromised their principles, and regretted necessary betrayals. Too late to surf the original wave of home-grown action classics and over before it could enjoy the current curious renewed popularity of the slick spy caper, it's my sad duty to report Bodyguards was a better show than many of them. It might suffer now because it relies quite heavily on the tensions and narrative conventions of cold war spy fiction, but somewhere there's a pilot movie and six 50 minute episodes of a more intelligent than average TV show which deserves a DVD release.

Apart from the names Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, there's really nothing to connect this original BBC TV movie to the original Conan Doyle stories. It's a return to the old wartime Basil Rathbone films, set in the wrong period, packed with anachronistic detail, and which fails to pay even lip service to Holmes's famous method. It's a poorly written modern police drama right down to the obligatory, clunking serial killer plot. It's just dressed in period costume. Even the plot twist about the killer's identity comes in Edwardian dress, as it could only ever possibly fresh and original in disguise pretending to be a story written a hundred years ago.

The story constantly forces modern elements incongruously into Holmes's necessarily, fundamentally low tech world. The story is set some time after the Victorian era of the classic Holmes stories, apparently to justify the use of telephones and modern police techniques like fingerprinting. Watson is about to marry an American psychiatrist, which opens the door to the modern serial killer psychodrama whose emphasis is on woolly sexual motivation and grotesque patterns of behaviour, worlds away from the traditional Holmes story where logic and deduction solve single victim locked room murders. The oddly un-Edwardian London police set up an incongruous, modern incident room to collate the information about their spiralling body count. In one scene Holmes spins around this room staring helplessly at photographs and maps, unable to connect fact and incident, which reduces the finest logical detective mind in the world to the level of "Inspector X" in any paint-by-numbers police series. Eventually Inpector Lestrade himself time-travels to the 1970s to give a suspect an Sweeney-style kicking to make him talk.

Rupert Everett as Holmes drifts through the first half of the story like someone on a mixture of recreational drugs, which is clearly the writer's deliberate intention. Trying to exploit the radical elements in Holmes's character the story inflates his drug use out of proportion. Conan Doyle saddled his creation with a habit of injecting cocaine, but there is never any suggestion that Holmes had a narcotic monkey on his back. He claims his 7 per cent solution stimulates his mind in times of boredom, a world away from the use of soporifics to deaden his brain.

Ironically it seems that in order to make these seasonal specials featuring Holmes himself the BBC abandoned its own excellent Holmes homage, the quite superb Murder Rooms, which succeeded in every respect that this film fails, injecting modern style and sensibilities while still honouring the source material. They were faithful in period detail and in many respects to the type of detective story which suits the Holmes character, and where they took a post-modern approach were able to underscore rather than undermine the quality of the original. It begs the question, as they clearly have access to writers with the talent to produce this kind of work, why didn't they use them here? Even more ironically, in the UK while this film was one of the main planks of the BBC's Christmas 2004 season evening schedule, the BBC have also been showing daytime repeats of Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes. The strength of this performance, and the faithfulness to the original material, casts the poor work here into sharp relief.