Ashley Cross

Just finished watching a documentary about Stonehenge, featuring a recent excavation whose team leaders think the stones were ‘a prehistoric Lourdes’. I disliked it on two points. First, BBC documentaries are in a dire state. Secondly, Stonehenge has not been well-served by the grand claims made for it on the scantiest evidence.

BBC documentaries have been flailing for years, popularising various topics in exactly the wrong way. They have an uncanny ability to dumb-down and talk-up. The venerable Horizon strand, which started a new series today with a documentary about those silent Wiltshire stones, has long since lost its authority.

The voice-of-god narrator announces some upcoming revelation only to disappoint: the announcement that the results of a chemical analysis are ‘unexpected and startling’ makes you sit up, until you quickly find that it only confirms the site is a few hundred years older than previously thought. Given that, as the documentary said, we have had to make educated guesses about the age of the circle, putting the supposed age back 300 years seems fairly underwhelming, as much as we may appreciate the new accuracy.

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Watching the re-runs of ITV’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, I have become mesmerised by Jeremy Brett’s portrayal of Arthur Conan Doyle’s misanthropic detective. Originally made between 1984-1994, the Granada Television productions have impressive scripts, sets and casts. The attention to period detail and the specially-built Baker Street at Granada Studios, made this a classy and unprecedented production that seems faultless even in the age of digital retouching. It set a benchmark for all adaptations of the Sherlock Holmes stories as well as for television drama generally. The pinnacle of the production was the choice of actor to play Holmes. Jeremy Brett became definitive.

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