Tom Who's Baker Street Blues ... and why Conan Doyle had them

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Publication: Daily Post
Date: 1984-05-07
Author: William Alexander
Page: 14
Language: English

WILLIAM ALEXANDER on the case of Sherlock Holmes and the Forgotten Actor

SUCCESS almost stripped Tom Baker of everything he held dear.

After seven years as the most successful and long-lived Dr Who the BBC ever had, he found himself without television work, without prospects and, eventually, without his new wife, Lalla Ward.

To add to his unhappiness, the BBC made a public apology for his performance as Sherlock Holmes in the four-part serial. The Hound of the Baskervilles, now being re-shown on Sundays on BBC-l.

Now, as he sits waiting for the phone to ring, Baker is having to fight back the bitterness over the way Dr Who blocks his way to the top television casting.

Last week, Tom talked to me for the first time about his marriage break-up and about his months in the TV wilderness.

Wilderness

"In the past eighteen months," he says, sitting on the foredeck of a friend's houseboat in London, "I have been offered lots of stage work, but only one television role.

"And that was in a single episode of Remington Steele, made in Hollywood.

"After The Hound of the Baskervilles went out, the BBC published a statement saying that I and Terence Rigby did not come up to the public's pre-conceived ideas of what Holmes and Watson should be like."

Baker demanded and got an immediate apology, but so far as he was concerned, the damage was already done.

"I have to admit that the Dr Who image does block me off from anything else on television. The producr who cast me as Sherlock Holmes was the same man who hired me as Dr Who — so at least he thinks I'm not stuck with the Dr Who image."

Stage casting has been a great deal easier. He played Long John Silver at the Mermaid in London, and toured with a stage version of now famous play, Educating Rita.

But his telly roles have been restricted to Holmes, a small part in the telly thriller series Jemima Shore, and a trip to the States.

"Even there, they see me as Dr Who," he says. "And the people in the States tend to prefer stage stereotypes to anything.

"Apart from the small role in Remingto Steele, I haven't worked for fourteen months — at all."

In the meantime, his marriage to Lalla Ward, his co-star in Dr Who. went on to the rocks. The couple split up in May, 1982.

"I don't know what really caused it," he admits. "We were ecstatically happy and we always will be amiable with one another.

"Certainly I have only marvellous memories of living with Leila. She is the most talented person, and a really gifted artist.

"People ask me why we got married in the first place. Well. I have to admit that she did laugh a lot at my jokes. I always admire people who agree with me — who doesn't — and there was this person who laughed at my jokes and agreed with me all the time. I thought, well, this is just perfect."

But, he says, he is too set in his bachelor ways to change easily.

"I am too used to a semi-solitary existance," he says.. "One day, Lalla said to me: 'You're bored, arn't you?'

"I said: 'Yes, I think I am.' So she said she would move off and give me some breathing space. I was very sorry that it made her unhappy.

"Now we are coming up to two years of separation. I suppose we are going to have to get together to discuss what we are going to do about it."

These days, they maintain separate London flats — her in Chelsea's exclusive Cadogan Square. his in South Kensington's shabby but cheerful Gloucester Road.

Baker refuses to give in to what he sees as self-pity. "The last thing I want to do," he says, "Is that old Soho thing where you sit around the pubs crying into your gin.

"I think it was Anna Massey who said the way you behave when you are out of work is almost more important than the way you behave when you are in work."

Dialogue

Baker reveals that the more he knew of Sherlock Holmes, the less he liked him.

"I knew the Holmes stories, of course, and I still read them with enjoyment. But, do you know, as I started work acting Holmes I was appalled to find I didn't like him one little bit. "We were concerned to make this version of The Hound of the Baskervilles as authentic as possible. That meant using as much of Conan Doyle's original dialogue as possible.

"But while it might look marvellous when it is written down, it is almost totally unspeakable in real life.

"Holmes is such an insufferable person. He is incredibly cruel to his friend, Watson. He is totally intolerant of other

"And he cheats!"

EVERYBODY knows Sherlock Holmes. The thin, high-bridged nose, the deerstalker hat, the Inverness Cape and the curly, calabash pipe.

Everybody knows he was always drawling: "Elementary, my dear Watson," and calling for drugs with the now-famous words: "Quick, Watson, the needle!"

Everybody knows he was a woman-hater, a drug addict, and that he lived for some years in a highly questionable relationship with his friend, Dr. Watson.

And everybody has been wrong for years.

The truth is that the image of Holmes and Watson which the reading and viewing public have in their minds is almost completely composed of bits other people have added since master story teller Sir Arthur Conan Doyle first invented the character.

In the new Granada television series, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Jeremy Brett and David Burke, as Holmes and Watson, are doing their best to bring to life the real Holmes Conan Doyle created — and grew to hate.

Doyle created Holmes and Watson, says Holmes expert Nicholas Utechin, in the story A Study In Scarlet. His original names for the characters were Sherringford Holmes and Ormond Sacker.

You have to admit that "Elementary, my dear Sacker!" does not have quite the ring as the familiar phrase. But Holmes never said either. The words do not appear in any of the 56 short stories and four longer works Conan Doyle wrote.

In the very first story, which was turned down by a dozen publishers and finally published in 1887 in Reaton's Christmas Annual (by the husband of Mrs Beaton of Cookery Book fame) the detective was never described as wearing a deerstalker or an Inverness Cape, either.

Both the hat and the cape are later additions to the legend. The illustrator added them off his own bat, and they have stuck like glue ever since.

According to Doyle's first story, Holmes and Watson met In 1881. Doyle never really liked his creation, and made several attempts to get rid of him. At the end of the second published Holmes story, for instance, he married off Dr. Watson, thereby effectively breaking up the partnership.

When that didn't work, he deliberately "killed" Holmes in a struggle with Dr. Moriarty, his arch-enemy, at the Reichenbach Falls on May 4, 1891. But his public wouldn't have It. Doyle was forced to bring Holmes back to life, and go on writing about him with increasing irritation until 1927. He considered the stories to be potboilers. infinitely inferior to his historical novels such as The White Company. The calabash pipe with which Holmes is now so firmly identified, Is another later addition. Conan Doyle described Holmes's favourite pipes very clearly: a disreputable old clay pipe when he was thinking, and a long, bent cheerywood when he was in what Doyle called his disputatious mood.

The calabash wai actually added by an actor called William Gillette, who played Holmes in a series of stage performances from 1899 onwards.

Gillette was careful to consult Doyle often, which appeared to irritate the writer. When Gillette wrote asking for permission to marry Holmes off in one production, Doyle replied: "You may marry him or murder him or what you will."

Bumbler

Holmes was never intended by Conan Doyle to be a drug addict, though he was what is now called an occasional user, and under present day laws would very quickly be scooped up by the drug squad. He used a seven per cent solution of cocaine, which he injected to "stimulate his mind".

Nevertheless, he never shouted: "Quick, Watson, the needle!" That was added to the legend by the Rathbone-Bruce film, The Hound of the Baskervilles, in 1939.

That film started a whole series of Holmes stories in which Basil Rathbone played the great detective and Nigel Bruce played Watson — and did him the greatest possible disservice. Bruce decided to play Watson for laughs, and it Is from his portrayals that today's image of the man as a bumbling fool comes. In the books. Watson is portrayed as an active man — wounded in Afghanistan — of real ability.

Holmes was never a woman hater. He went out of his way to say so, several times, and actually once was allowed to fall in love — with Irene Adler. But he never so much as kissed her.

Women may well have hated him. however, and they certainly would not have taken to many of his insanitary habits.

It was his practice, says Doyle. to make his first pipe of the day out of the dottles of all the pipes he had smoked the previous day. Any pipe smoker will tell you the disgusting implications of that: a medical man would have hysterics at the very thought of the amount of nicotine and tobacco tars involved.

Perhaps it was that habit that gave him the immense physical strength Conan Doyle describes. Holmes was a keen boxer and fencer and excelled at a sport called single sticks — a kind of fencing with wooden staves.

But he was phenomenally strong in the hands and arms. In The Speckled Band, when a bullying scoundrel tries to impress him by bending the poker in half. Holmes straightens the bent iron with a single tug — a far more difficult feat.

Jeremy Brett. who portrays Holmes, says: "Watson is the man with all the compassion. Holmes teeters at times on the edge of madness. Watson is the man he can lean on to get him back to sanity.

"Holmes is a man who can never say thank you or good morning. Of the two, Watson is the man to be relied upon. Holmes is an erratic and eccentric man."

Caption: REALLY, HOLMES? Sherlock and his doctor friend as played by Brett and Burke (above) and by Baker and Rigby.

Caption: SAD SONG ... now for Tom Baker after career and marriage problems. -You're bored, aren't you?" asked Lalla (left), and he had to admit he was.

Spelling correction: Remington Steele

Tom Who's Baker Street Blues ... and why Conan Doyle had them

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