In the Footsteps of Sherlock Holmes

Hosted by Patrick Macnee (The Avengers), this obviously made-for-British-television program (which features about a dozen "when we return" breaks) purports to be a guide to the extant Victorian London locales that crop up in the short stories and novels featuring Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's legendary master of deduction, Sherlock Holmes. In setting the stage for each leg of the rather crooked journey, Macnee lets us in on tidbits regarding Holmes' life and habits, yet the narrative is very selective in what it chooses to reveal (there's no mention of Holmes' infamous opium habit, for instance), while comments about the supersleuth's adventures are occasionally borderline contradictory (the remark that "a great number of Holmes' cases did not involve murder," is followed within moments by the assertion that "the majority of his cases involved murder"). Too, while the program offers a generous sampling of film clips featuring various actors as Holmes, the most recent is public domain footage of Basil Rathbone (circa the early '40s), ignoring copyrighted efforts from the last 50 years. Popping in and out of Euston Station, the British Museum, Hyde Park, Covent Garden, and so on, the overlaid narration continually refers to incidents involving famous places, invariably forgetting to cite the original story or novel. This combination of not knowing precisely where we are (no maps or graphics guide our paths) and rarely being aware of the actual piece of writing we're being told about makes the task of taking useful information out of this scattershot guide anything but elementary, my dear Watson. Not a necessary purchase. Aud: P. (R. Pitman)