Sherlock Holmes is all the rage these days. Of course, he’s always been popular but currently we have the Robert Downey Jr Sherlock Holmes franchise in cinemas; we have the modernised BBC Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman; and CBS in the US is planning a similarly modernised series of its own.
Taking their leads from Conan Doyle’s The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual, various people have tried to imagine what Sherlock’s childhood would have been like, primarily with the intention of entertaining children. The most famous attempt is Steven Spielberg and Barry Levinson’s 1985 blockbuster Young Sherlock Holmes and The Pyramid of Fear, which imagines Homes meeting Watson (and Moriarty) at school.
There’s also been a recent series of books by former Doctor Who New Adventures writer Andy Lane called – appropriately enough – Young Sherlock Holmes.
But beating them all was Granada TV, which back in 1982 gave us the Sunday afternoon serial Young Sherlock:The Mystery of the Manor House. Here’s about the only set of clips that I can show you.
The British sitcom writing team of Andrew Norriss and Richard Fegen had something of a mini-career in the 1980s of subverting the sitcom genre. British sitcoms had been somewhat dominated by farce, with unlikely coincidences, social embarrassment and unwritten rules of social behaviour the cliches that filled the genre.
Although best known for The Brittas Empire, which took all these concerns to their logical (and sometimes illogical) conclusions while simultaneously subverting them, Norriss and Fegen began undermining sitcoms first in 1984 on the then-new TV network Channel 4 with Chance in a Million. The show’s premise was simple: you know all those coincidences and bizarre events that happen in sitcoms and drive the plots? Now imagine a man cursed with such bad luck that that’s what his life is actually like. What would he be like? How would he cope? What sort of experiences would he have? Would he have a girlfriend? And how would she deal with it?
Starring Simon Callow and Brenda Blethyn, then just beginning their TV careers, Chance in a Million paradoxically saw more romantic mix-ups, rugby teams stuck down sewers, wedding rings catapulted into fires, cases of mistaken identity, bank errors and drug traffickers than any sitcom before and since, and is fondly remembered by almost everyone who saw it. Here’s a trailer:
Nearly three years ago, I wrote up the 1979 BBC series The Aphrodite Inheritance as part of the blog’s ‘Lost Gems‘ series. In case you don’t remember it, it’s about a man going to Cyprus for his brother’s funeral and discovering that despite what everyone is telling him, his brother might have been murdered. Along the way, though, it begins to become apparent that the Greek gods are alive and well have taken an interest in him and the death of his brother.
I illustrated my write-up with the episodes themselves, which someone had charitably uploaded to YouTube. Unfortunately, they were taken down not long afterwards. Now the BBC (foolishly) still hasn’t released the series on DVD, but another lovely person has uploaded the whole series to YouTube again, and I’ve updated the original entry with the new vids. It’s well worth the eight hours to watch them, I reckon, particularly if you like Brian Blessed (Dionysos) or Alexandra Bastedo (Aphrodite). So off you go – enjoy yourselves!
It’s that time of year again and as used to be tradition with the BBC, back in the 70s when it was still great, it’s time for a TV Ghost Story for Christmas. Now, I’ve already covered a couple of these before, notably the magnificent The Signalman and the bafflingly weird The Ice House, and I gave y’all a potted history of them with The Ice House, so I try not to repeat myself too much.
If you recall, the Ghost Stories were divided into two camps: the earlier MR James and Dickens adaptations, which focused on the external and the period horror; and the later modern stories, such as The Ice House, that didn’t really have ghosts at all. Stigma, the penultimate Ghost Story, falls firmly into the latter camp, a modern chiller that fits more in the realm of David Cronenberg’s ‘body horror’ school of scares than the true ghost story.
The first of the series’ original stories rather than adaptations, Clive Exton’s (Armchair Theatre, Studio 64, The Eleventh Hour, Killers, Survivors) Stigma is actually quite simple: a woman, Katherine (Kate Binchy), heads off to her country cottage with her teenage daughter. Some workmen who have been working in their garden have unearthed a large menhir stone and they use an excavator to lift the stone up slightly. That’s when everything starts to go pear-shaped and Katherine starts bleeding, despite not having a wound anywhere on her body. If I give you the clue that ‘stigma’ comes from a Greek word, the plural of which is ‘stigmata’, you can probably work out what’s going on, and what the double-meaning of the story is.
It’s a creepy little tale in all, with terrible things like possession, poltergeists and massive bleeding happening to terribly nice people for no good reason, other than they lifted up the wrong stone – making it as arbitrary as any of James’s tales. Also, as with all the James ghost stories, there’s no real explanation for what transpires: there is a literal explanation of what’s happened (it’s eventually found under the stone), but there’s no revelation as to why ‘the thing under the stone’ has chosen to do what it did or how.
Unlike the relatively genteel previous stories, Exton’s story is full of blood and nudity. At times, it plays like an episode of Casualty, focusing on all kinds of kitchen and household implements, making you wonder exactly what’s going to happen. And it somehow manages to elicit scares from an onion, too. But its disconcerting invasion of the old and terrifying into the modern world, without any way of escaping, should manage to put the frighteners on most hardy people.
It’s not available on DVD and has never been repeated. Silly BBC. But it is available on YouTube, you lucky people, so if you’ve half an hour to spare, gather ye around to have the willies put up you.
Well, they’re not that lost, since most of them are undoubtedly going to be shown on UK tele this Christmas, but here’s a little collection of clips from Christmas-themed movies, TV shows and music videos of times gone past. Enjoy!
Oh, and because it’s Christmas-time (nearly), let’s maintain a tradition and have the theme tune from The Box of Delights to put you in the spirit as well. Ho ho ho!
