Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets (16 page)

I raised myself up on tiptoes to read a small, faded newspaper clipping, announcing that the two of them were turning on the Blackpool Illuminations. They stood either side of a confused Mayor, their baggy suits billowing in the wind that blasted its way along the pier. Watson’s eyes were hooded against the sand that was being kicked up, his mouth pulled into a false grimace of pleasure. The Mayor had discovered that his ceremonial robes had become an ostentatious sail that would hurl him into the Atlantic were it not for the ceremonial chain around his neck acting as an anchor. Holmes simply stared at the camera, straight-faced, seeming impervious to the weather.

In a grisly coincidence, a fragment of the adjoining news story was still visible. A holidaymaker had been stung by a Lion’s Mane jellyfish and died. The local authorities were eager to point out that the species in question was rarely encountered so close to shore. Even in the unlikely event a swimmer did so, its sting was rarely fatal. The holidaymaker had suffered an allergic reaction resulting in anaphylactic shock. Many years later, Holmes would die in a similar manner, stung by a swarm of bees that he kept in his home on the Sussex Downs. This indomitable, intimidating man, brought down by insects.

WATSON
: Careful Holmes, we’re surrounded.

HOLMES
: Pathetic! You think you’re a match for me? Idiots! I have the most celebrated mind in the whole world. It was the matter of moments for me to deduce that the Red-Headed League was cover for a bank heist. I have my intelligence, you have a bunch of thugs with cricket bats; what could you possibly do to stop me?

EFFECTS
: The extended sound of several men swinging their cricket bats, grunting and the smacking of skull on willow.

WATSON
: [Weak] You had to ask. [Groans]

“F
ASCINATING
,” I
SAID
, turning away from the news clipping as I realised I was ignoring my host.

“Like the marks parents put on walls, charting their children’s growth,” Watson replied, “but going on far too long. No children for me. Just a dead career. Sit down,let’s talk.”

I did as asked, pulling my dictaphone out of my pocket and holding it up.“Do you mind?”

He shrugged with indifference so I set it to record and placed it on the desk between us, turning it so that the red light was pointing towards me, in case it should decide to spontaneously pack-up.

“Where do you want to start?” he asked.

“The book’s about your entire professional career together, from when you first met, right up until...”

“The bugger died.”

“Well, yes.”

Watson had never tried to pursue a solo career. At the time of Holmes’ death in 1984, Watson had been fifty-four and seemingly content to vanish from public life altogether. He even refused to appear in the inevitable documentaries and retrospectives of Holmes and Watson that would bubble up every time there was a viable anniversary to hang a broadcast on.
³

When I’d first contacted him via his old agent I hadn’t expected to receive a reply, let alone be granted an interview. Being invited to his home had therefore been a shock, and probably the only reason my publisher had agreed to take the book.

“Were you never tempted to carry on without Holmes?” I asked.“After all, you had always played a major part in the writing of the scripts,I’m sure you could have had your choice of solo projects.”

“Nobody wanted to hire me. Not for anything worthwhile. I wasn’t going to fill a seat on panel shows or afternoon chat shows. After a year of failing to get anything commissioned, I decided enough was enough. I didn’t need the money. Nobody to spend it on but myself, and there was nothing I wanted that could be bought.”

“A shame,” I said,“the industry can be so narrow minded.”

He shrugged once more as if it was of no importance.“I’d done enough. Probably for the best.”

“Well, perhaps we should start at the beginning and work our way forward,” I suggested.“You met Sherlock Holmes when you were eighteen.”

“TB,” he said.“We both thought we were dying. Lying up in a sanatorium in Godalming. Coughs and chills. Different times. Now they just throw antibiotics at you, back then you were given food, a bed and a prayer. You might be there for years. Not so bad for the old duffers. For two young men, it seemed even worse than death. We wanted to be in pubs, going to dances, getting up to trouble. At least I did. Sherlock was unusual, even then. Hard not to be when you’re called Sherlock, I suppose. Blame the parents. Called his brother Mycroft. Even worse, sounds like a village in Kent. Met him in the garden, my first week there. Sherlock that is, not Mycroft. He was staring up at an elm tree. Seemed confused by it. He seemed confused by lots of simple things. His knowledge was vast, but the simple, everyday things were baffling to him. He told me he was trying to judge the tree’s height by the length of its shadow. I told him I couldn’t see the point.‘What else is there to do?’ he asked, and I was so bloody bored I helped him. He measured my shadow and correlated it against the shadow of the tree. The tree was sixty-four feet; quite why I remember that, I don’t know. Useless facts cluttered between the ears.

“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 of
It’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 not 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.