Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets

by David Thomas Moore (ed)

  “We spent the rest of the day talking about ourselves. Different worlds. I’d grown up in Edinburgh, son to a drunk and a woman who wanted her child to be better than his father. She pushed for me to be a doctor. I wasn’t interested. Head full of stories of the war, I wanted to run off and join the army. TB put paid to both. Lucky, as it worked out, I suppose.

  “Holmes grew up on a country estate. Son of a squire. Silver spoon. Kicked out of Eton for blowing up the chemistry lab.4 He claimed he had been so suffocated by his parents’ wealth and expectations that he had run away from home. Wanted to go to theatre school and a life on the stage. He always did love dressing up. I remember he once stole a doctor’s coat from the office and paraded around the sanatorium, hair whitened with talc, false moustache made from trimmed hair and glue. He had half the place convinced he was a visiting specialist until he coughed his guts up over a set of medical notes and the moustache went skew-whiff.

  “If there had been anyone else there my age I likely would never have become friends with him. We were almost complete opposites: I liked sport, he loathed it. He read the classics, I read Dennis Wheatley and Agatha Christie. He liked science, I was baffled by it. There was only one thing we agreed on and that was ITMA. Probably don’t know it, do you?”

  Of course I did. While most men my age might be baffled by the acronym, I was only too aware ofIt’s That Man Again, the long-running radio vehicle for fast-talking comedian Tommy Handley.

  “Well, most buggers have forgotten it,” he said.“Product of its time. We used to listen to it on the hospital radio, the monotony broken up for half an hour every week. Holmes would mimic the characters, Colonel Chinstrap, Ali Oop.5

  “After a while I joined in. We’d create new adventures for the characters. A way of occupying the time. Inventing fictional conversations in silly voices, because there was nothing the real Sherlock Holmes and John Watson had left to say to one another.

  “Then it became a challenge. We wanted to outdo the show. The other residents started to laugh at our jokes. They’d ask us to do a turn. So we wanted to get more laughs than the radio. Not be second fiddle. Holmes never could stand being second fiddle.

  “Eventually we came up with characters of our own. Based on residents and staff to begin with, then just people we invented.”

  “Was one of them the detective?” I asked.6

  “He came a little later.”

  Watson thought for a moment before continuing.

  “In interviews, Holmes aways claimed it had been his idea. Said he’d seen me reading a Poirot.7 He said that turning it into comedy seemed obvious. I never used to argue. No point arguing with Sherlock. But actually, it was me that first thought of it.

  “I’d been reading Auguste Dupin. The Poe. Murders in the Rue Morgue, C. stuck-up rationalist, solving cases by analysing dust and bootprints. I liked the idea of someone so pompous, so full of their own cleverness being used to comic effect. This absurd brain that was so hopeless in everyday life. The idiot savant. Pure comedy. Thinking about it I suppose Sherlock inspired me himself; he had that same way about him. Full of unbeatable confidence. I never cared enough to correct him, but I may as well be honest now. The idea was mine.

  “Still, what Sherlock did with it, the character he developed, that was all him. All him. They blurred into one, eventually. He’d played it so long, so well, even I struggled to find where the character stopped and the man started.”

  I’d heard this in other interviews. Tobias Gregson, the director of the first series of Holmes and Watson on TV, had talked about how difficult Holmes had been to work with, a man so lost in the role that he was impossible to reach.

  “We should have changed our names,” Watson continued. “That would have helped. The character, the detective,wouldn’t have been Sherlock Holmes, it would have been someone else, someone he could take off and put away after recording. But the name worked so well. Sherlock bloody Holmes; enough to get you a kicking in the playground, but perfect for a Victorian detective.

  “A lot of people said it was a good idea to use our real names. It was fairly common. The Tony Hancock who lived in East Cheam wasn’t the same Tony Hancock that sat in the BBC canteen, but listeners knew who you were. They’d always remember you. They’d call it brand recognition these days, I suppose. Good PR.”

  “Did it make it more difficult,” I asked,“when you tried creating new characters?”

  I was thinking in particular of A Case of Identity, the 1969 movie featuring the double act as Pete Huggins and Teddy Hardwicke, a pair of actors who decide to cross-dress in order to get work. Unfavourably reviewed,8 it was a flop at the box office.

  “We were typecast from the word go,” Watson agreed. “Sherlock Holmes and John Watson were the characters, not the actors. Whatever else we did, people weren’t interested. They wanted adventures on Baker Street. We bumped the characters off for eight years when the radio show finished, but it didn’t work. Eventually we gave in and brought them back on the telly.”

  I realised we were running a risk of skipping past their entire radio career and decided to bring things back onto a chronological track.

  “So, how did you go from amusing patients in a sanatorium to amusing the nation on the radio?”

  “Years of hard work and pure bloody luck. Always the way in this business.

  “Holmes left the Sanatorium a couple of months before me. I’d developed complications, tuberculosis of the reproductive tract.”

  He picked at the surface of the desk, perhaps uncomfortable with such personal details.“Killed my chances of ever having kids. Of course, at that age, I was just glad to get out alive; who thinks of being a father at eighteen?

  “Holmes had tried to get acting work, but got nowhere. I met him in London, listened to him rage about the lack of opportunities for his talent, and ended up moving in with him. He couldn’t manage the rent on his own.

  “We decided to try our hand at more performing. We spent a miserable few years getting nowhere on the circuit, trying out different characters and sketches. Then we bumped into Harry Stamford. He’d been a fellow patient. His brother worked at the Windmill Theatre in London. You know it?”

  I did. A great number of post-war comedians had made their names there.

  “We got ourselves a few slots in the revue. The place was thick with talent scouts and BBC producers at the time. They liked the girls. The tableaux vivants.9 Tits filled seats.

  “One night we did a sketch featuring the detective; a producer liked it and asked if we’d work with a couple of script writers to make it a radio series. Holmes was precious about sharing a script credit, of course, but I convinced him to keep his mouth shut before he cost us the opportunity. Within twelve months, we were on the air.”

  “That first series is now missing from the archives,”10 I said.

  “Just as well. It wasn’t very good. It took a couple of series to find our feet, I think. To begin with, we were all over the place, trying things, seeing if they’d stick. Holmes having a girlfriend...”

  “Your dog?” I suggested. It had been a running gag; a bull pup that would bark at the most inappropriate moment.

  “Christ. Ridiculous idea. A stage hand shuffling around on his hands and knees barking. The live audience didn’t know where to look. Too many cooks. We worked with good writers, but they all pulled in different directions.”

  “Series three was just the two of you with Ray Simpson?”

  “That’s right. He was a rising star as far as the BBC were concerned. Done a few gags for Life with the Lyons and Much Binding-in-the-Marsh.11 They wanted to give him a show of his own, but he was slow. Struggled with deadlines. So they thought they could team him up with us. We met him in the bar. Always doing business in the bar, back then. He and I hit it off and Holmes didn’t hate him, so we got him.”

  “‘Holmes didn’t hate him.’ Was he that difficult to work with?”

  “A nightmare. But, as much as it might no
t sound like it now, he was my friend, so I put up with him. I spent a lot my time trying to stop fights breaking out. He hated any form of interference; directors or producers telling him what to do. You’d have thought he was a star from the first moment he stepped on a stage, determined to get his own way. He was so often right, mind you. That was his saving grace. He never missed a trick. Well, almost never. But you didn’t get far with that attitude as a newcomer, took a lot of charming from me to keep things on track. Politics.”

  Watson looked past me and out of the window. For all he talked about his ‘wailing wall’ of past glories, and a study filled to the brim with relics from the past, this was the first time he showed any sign of losing himself in it. His speech was often as percussive and brutal as a man offering the last few kicks to a felled enemy. Words were facts, no more; they weren’t intended to portray any emotional depth. Rather than try and drag him out of his reverie to continue our organised wander through his career, I decided to keep him on the same subject, hopeful—and I’m quite aware of how hateful this sounds—that he might be end up sharing something scandalous about his deceased partner.

  Not that the memory of Holmes was exactly sacrosanct. His predilection for drugs was well known, cocaine in particular, but that seemed to be his only vice. There were no stories of affairs; indeed, no mention of women at all, which naturally led most commentators to assume he had been gay and circumspect, common enough at the time.

  “When did those problems become more than you could handle?” I asked, hoping I was phrasing the question with suitable diplomacy.

  “In 1984,” he said.“I could tolerate everything up until then. Not like it, tolerate it. I grew to dislike him, yes. Tiring of his constant bloody attitude. But hate him? Really, utterly, loathe him?1984.”

  “When he died?”

  Watson smiled.

  Hadn’t I said that once he’d shown a glimpse of good humour, I’d consider getting my book out for him to sign? Not a chance. That smile didn’t relax me. If anything, it made me even more uncomfortable.

  “The third series,” he said, returning precisely to where we had been before our digression.“That was good. Excellent, in fact. I sound as arrogant as Holmes, but it was. Ray was just what we needed. He took Holmes’ wilder ideas and my love of word play and built a bridge between them. We weren’t a double act, not at our best. We were a trio, the silent partner tapping away behind the drapes. Those five years saw us at our best.

  EFFECTS: The sound of a champagne cork being popped, the champagne being poured into a glass.

  HOLMES: Ah... Champagne and petit fours. Could it get any better?

  WATSON: Yes. It could be us out there, enjoying it.

  EFFECTS: Watson rattles on the bar of his cell.

  WATSON: Damn you, John Clay! You can’t keep us locked up forever!

  CLAY: [Drinks] True. But I can certainly keep you in there until I’ve finished my dinner. Yours is on the floor.

  EFFECTS: Watson kicks the tray of gruel.

  WATSON: You expect us to eat this slop?I’ve just seen a fly die after landing on it.

  CLAY: I know how it feels; the canapes are positively heavenly.

  “RAY STAYED WITH you until series seven,” I said,“then there was a falling out?”

  “Holmes again. He finally got one of the higher-ups to agree that we could write the show on our own. Ray was fired. Couldn’t believe it. I tried to reverse the decision, begged Ray to come back, but he’d had enough of Holmes by then. He wasn’t going to carry on under sufferance. Horrible. I lost a good friend,didn’t talk to him again for years. It was Mary that built the bridges between us again, she’d worked with him on his sitcom, The Scowerers.12 Told him that I’d love to see him again. We met up for dinner, but it wasn’t the same, too much time, too many regrets. Good of Mary, though. Course, he got some revenge; the eighth radio series was the last. People didn’t like it as much. Too silly.”

  EFFECTS: A rushing sound, the roar of a rocket.

  WATSON: [Shouting] I can see the sea from up here.

  HOLMES: [Shouting] Splendid. If I can’t defuse the warhead you’ll be able to sprinkle yourself over it.

  SERIES EIGHT HAD seen Holmes and Watson fighting the Nazis. While British comedy—particularly The Goon Show—had obsessed over the war during the’fifties, by the’sixties the idea seemed dated and absurd. Listeners had turned off in their droves.

  “Was that part of the reason you cancelled the radio series?”

  “For sure. Holmes never could stand criticism, and I was bored of the characters, happy to try something new. Much good it did us; eight years of floundering and then we were back.”

  “The TV series was a huge success,” I said.“Was that a surprise? After so long off the air, did you worry that people wouldn’t be interested in the characters anymore?”

  “It was all people kept banging on about. Those that had liked it before came back, and we added a new audience, a younger one. I was bored with them, but nobody else seemed to be.”

  “And of course, that was when you met Mary.”

  Watson nodded.“She’d been a production unit manager for a few years, hopping from one show to another. She’d been pushing for a producer’s job, and they gave her to us, I think they thought she’d quit after a few weeks working with Holmes—I’m damn sure nobody else wanted the job—but she always was made of sterner stuff. She would weather his moods. Eventually he grew to respect her.‘The Woman,’ he called her. It started off as an insult, but eventually it was a compliment. To him she was the definite article. The Woman. To me, too, of course.”

  “You married in1976.”

  Watson looked at the picture of Mary on his desk and finally I sensed warmth in him.

  “We’d been a couple for a year or so. Kept it as quiet as possible, but that didn’t last, people talk. You never can keep a secret on a set. We’d been on location for the Christmas special.”

  “‘The Hounds of the Baskervilles’?”

  “That’s right. 1975. Buggering about on Dartmoor, freezing to the bone. Holmes was in a sour mood because Christopher Lee was the guest star and was getting all the attention. Second fiddle again, he never could stand it. He’d flounced off halfway through shooting and Mary was beside herself. She’d come to me, hoping I might be able to calm him down but nobody even knew where he’d gone. We shot around him as much as possible, and that night Mary and I had got drunk in the hotel, taking it in turns to moan about him. We ended up in bed and that was that. I suppose it was Holmes that brought us together, in his own strange way. Just as he would later tear us apart.”

  If Watson saw my surprised look at that, he ignored it, continuing:

  “Of course, he re-appeared the next morning, acting as if nothing had happened, and we managed to get back on track.”

  INT. BASKERVILLE HALL

  SIR HENRY: How dare you, sir! I am a peer of the realm!

  What gives you the right to treat me in such a manner?

  HOLMES: The fact that I’m the only man who can protect you from the lumbering great mastiff that wants to chew on your kidneys.

  “YOU WERE MARRIED to Mary for eight years,” I said.

  I’d thought about asking Watson to clarify what he had meant when he’d said that Holmes had torn he and Mary apart, but we’d get there soon enough. I imagined he’d be more open if I let him tell his story in his own time.

  He seemed distracted now, that sharp, staccato manner of his having softened into genuine reminiscence. It was clear that Mary was the one thing that broke through his cold exterior.

  “Eight wonderful years,” he agreed,“happiest time of my life. We bought this place, our seaside retreat. She’d always wanted to live by the sea. Never went in it, just loved to hear the noise of the tide. In the winter, when all the tourists are gone, you have the place to yourself. Wonderful. An empty beach, haunted by summers.”

  The softness that had begun to creep into his tone when discussing Ma
ry was more noticeable.

  “It’s a beautiful town,” I said.“I used to come here when I was a child.”

  He nodded, though I’m not entirely sure he was paying attention to me. He was lost in memories of his own.

  “I made her happy,” he said.“At least, I think I did.”

  “I’m sure she was,” I said.“I’ve read a lot of interviews with people who knew her and they always remark on how happy she was, how full of life.” That last comment might have been tactless. I hadn’t intended it to be, but once out of my mouth, the words worried me.

  He turned to look at me.“I know she was happy,” he said, with a slight trace of anger.“That wasn’t my point.”

  “Sorry.” I wasn’t altogether sure what I was apologising for. I only knew that the gentle, reminiscent Watson showed signs of slipping away again. “It’s obvious you would have done anything for her,” I said, desperate to bring him back.

  His eyes turned to the window again.“I did,” he said, his meaning far from clear.

  I felt like I was losing control of the interview, and I tried to think of ways to bring it back on track. Before I could say anything, though, he carried on talking.