IAN BELL July 28 2005
The Strange Case of Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle BBC2, 9.00pm
The World‚s Most Photographed BBC2, 7.30pm
The Strange Case of Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle was, as promised, a strange and rather wonderful piece of TV. It guessed at an explanation for the relationship between a writer and his overwhelming creation. Then it attempted to turn Doyle's life and career into an explanation for "my detective" on somewhat flimsy evidence. But it told a good story well: there isn't a lot of that on TV.
Doyle had a hellish childhood. His father was a drunk, possibly mad, certainly locked up. His mother and the young Arthur were saved from the workhouse by a "friend", a doctor who turned the child's mental landscape upside down. But did drunken violence and family secrets lead, somehow, to the creation of Mr Holmes, the character of whom Doyle had become sick and rather frightened by the 1890s?
In the age of Joanne Rowling, we think we know all there is to know about literary celebrity. J K may yet kill off Harry Potter as a character, but the chances of her receiving death threats for regicide are probably remote. Doyle's decision to tip Holmes, clutching Moriarty, into the Reichenbach Falls caused a sensation that seems incomprehensible, even in these celebrity-obsessed days. As the writer (wonderfully played by Douglas Henshall) observed: his detective enjoyed "more obituaries than a king".
David Pirie's marvel of a script invented a biographer-detective named Seldon – the "real" Holmes – who unpicked Doyle's life to justify his own, fictional yet real, existence. As in all good thrillers, there were layers within layers, truths hidden but falsehoods and the blending of fact and fiction that is, more most of us, our best guess at reality.
Tim McInnerny as Seldon/ Holmes had a degree of icy mystery that tends to be lacking in the usual Baker Street impersonations. Sinead Cusack, as Doyle's evasive but loving mother, brought all her skill to play on a fragile sketch of a part. It was just a version of a writer's inner life, a version turned inside-out by stories that are so well known, but it established the distinction between the deeply personal and the horribly public without a single wrong note.
Holmes was partly Dr Joseph Bell, the brilliant Edinburgh University mentor who became the real father Doyle never truly possessed. Seldon/Holmes, in funereal black – "Of course you feel me, I am your heart" –was a kind of emotional substrate within the writer. The writer himself haunted seances in an attempt to contact his dead father. Instead, wracked by guilt, he found new love as his wife succumbed to consumption.
This was pitch-perfect drama. It doesn't matter much that biographers might differ. It doesn't really matter, indeed, that no biography or drama can ever hope to capture a life in full. This was, and Doyle may have approved, a story, rich in its own sort of truth. You could deduce as much from the look in Henshall's eyes.