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 Originally made between 1984-1994, the Granada Television productions have impressive scripts, sets and casts.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.
Nothing before or since quite matches Brett’s mercurial portrayal. It is exquisite. Not only is it the best representation of Holmes, but one of the most consistently mesmerising performances by any actor on any television production. Brett’s diction perfectly suits Holmes’s precise, logical mind; each word is said so perfectly that we are spoiled by eloquence and we hang on every word, the modulation that suddenly lifts to emphasise one word over another, to make revelations about an investigation or to reach into Holmes’s melancholy.
In Brett’s eyes one sees the mind of Holmes at work and at times we see Holmes searching for truths despite the melancholy into which he would find himself between cases. Brett captures the melancholy at the heart of Holmes, but also his winsome, boyish, impish qualities. Sedate and pondering in his chair, the orange tint from a roaring fire, Brett’s Holmes seems lost to himself, introspective, almost self-erasing. But when he is challenged by a new case, he can leap over chairs, play with different identities undercover, and chase suspects with youthful energy. Even when recuperating from a serious bout of illness in Cornwall, Holmes finds in the mysterious deaths of an old mining family a sudden source of renewal and challenge.
Under Brett, Holmes is arrogant, sly, misanthropic, pondering, but also vulnerable, empathetic and fragile. It is a human Holmes, but one still tantalisingly removed from most of us in his genius for linking disparate clues — ash in an ashtray here, a footprint there — to solve a mystery. It is this ability to hold together all the contradictions native to Sherlock Holmes that makes Brett’s portrayal so compelling.
Brett died of a heart attack in 1995 after filming 41 of the stories and becoming for an international audience the very mark of Holmes. To some degree, Holmes died with him.