> On Nov 10, 2016, at 3:38 PM, Timothy Collinson <xxxxxx@port.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> Well, Brett was truly brilliant but gree about others and I still have soft spot for Rathbone who was my 'first'.
>
>

The cartoonish Watson of the Rathbone movies kind of spoils it for me; my first ‘tv sherlock’ (I devoured the collected works as a young boy before I ever saw it on tv) was Brett, and his Watson was most like the books; a solid but untrained (in the sherlockian sense) sidekick; he wasn’t clownish in the slightest; he was the one who became the ‘social lubricant’ for the oblivious Sherlock. One wonders why Sherlock hadn’t been drummed out of business by his lack of social skills before Watson arrived to complement him.

(and as I write that I recognize my key dislike for the Nigel Bruce Watson: he wasn’t a complement, merely a foil. Martin Freeman is the one who reminds Sherlock that they have to pay the electric bill, that the refrigerator is not the place to store severed heads and that his ‘useless’ blogging of Sherlock’s exploits is what brings in the customers. )

And yet another thought pops into my head: one common thread through all of the contemporary (and written, although to a lesser extent) incarnations of Sherlock, and a key part of his character is that he gets more than a little crazy when he gets bored.

Something else you could readily transport to the third imperium version...

--
Bruce Johnson
University of Arizona
College of Pharmacy
Information Technology Group

Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs