Comedy Playhouse (TV Series) Elementary, My Dear Watson: The Strange Case of the Dead Solicitors (1973) User Reviews

Holmes and the theatre of the absurd

[didi-5 · 2 July 2010]

John Cleese as Sherlock Holmes and William Rushton as Dr Watson in a half hour comedy might not sound like much of a draw, but stay with this absurdist episode of Comedy Playhouse and it may well make you smile.

A letter arrives for Holmes asking for help with a family grudge with a difference: a killer rattlesnake. Holmes' deductions are failing and as he and Watson go to a future of London buses and troubling Intercity trains they are waylaid onto a much greater case, that of the dead solicitors and Fu Manchu.

A side plot has Jack the Ripper phoning the police every few minutes to report a crime, while the tale of the solicitors comes to a head when one becomes mixed up with TV show Call My Bluff. Meanwhile the rattlesnake is steadily sending animals in Lady Cynthia's house to meet their maker, Holmes and Watson heroically push a desk with slumped dead solicitor on it Manchester, and Holmes attempts to get rid of the giveaway deerstalker.

No plot as such allows for such silliness as Bill Maynard dressed in drag as Moriarty, dead carrier pigeons, and the invincible Holmes jumping off a train. Nods to 'reading too much Conan Doyle' and to TV mogul Lew Grade are also clever.

Evidence of talent

[hte-trasme · 8/10 · 25 November 2009]

The Absurdist writer N. F. Simpson penned this piece for the BBC's "Comedy Playhouse," and in many ways Sherlock Holmes is a perfect character to exploit in a theatre-of-the-absurd style piece. The world is a chaotic, unorganized place -- and Sherlock Holmes stories are perfect examples of attempts to represent it as neat, ordered, and resolvable within a few pages. Simpson's script lampoons this, with a mystery that obviously has no logic, a character overtly revealed to be a red herring designed to fill out the script, and Holmes making deductions so far-flung that they cannot be built on a reasonable series of mental steps. In short a lot of the humor comes from throwing the curtain off the machinery of the artificial neatness of a mystery story, and it works.

This Holmes admits that he's a figment of people's imaginations and solves the mystery by unfairly manipulating his medium (as a mystery writer might) and reversing the film. The tension between the bared constructedness of a murder mystery with the illogic of the world is what keeps this going.

Of course, in a very funny sequence, what better way to top the artifice of a mystery story than with the even more artificial mystery of a game show -- so the clue makes its way to the set of "Call My Bluff." Some of the jokes are the obvious ones in a Sherlock Holmes spoof, and some are not -- but they are all mainly funny. The image of Holmes and Watson pushing an office desk with a dead man slumped over it down the road and over a field is a hilarious and unforgettable one.

John Cleese as Sherlock Holmes is as funny as he ever was. He projects the same kind of natural authority and dignity while doing very silly things that made so many of his "Monty Python" sequences work so well. He and William Rushton deadpan excellently, and it wouldn't come off otherwise.

I can't really see this piece as any kind of recurring series, but as a thirty-minute absurdist comedy on the Sherlock Holmes stories, it's delightful.