In the sixties I was very fortunate to join the national theatre when Lawrence Olivier was running it and it was a kind of golden age for a bit. And sadly spoils you for everything else because all of us who were in that company look back now and think, ‘My God, how lucky we were.’ And Jeremy was part of that company. It was a very large group of actors, something like ninety of us, and we were divided into two separate companies and Jeremy was not – he and I were in different companies. So I never actually acted with him, though I used to see him a lot around the theatre. And, umm, he was much more a senior member of the company, really, he was very different to the Holmes that we all came to recognize as a great performance.
Yes, I was, luckily enough, doing a BBC Shakespeare of Titus Andronicus with Anna Calder-Marshall who is David Burke’s wife. And David suddenly came in one day and said, “Listen, umm, I can’t do – they may do another series of Sherlock Homes,” he said, “I can’t do it because I’ve accepted an offer to go to Stratford-on-Avon to work with Anna. We want to work together and we – it means we can have Tom,” their son, “with us. So, I’m gonna ring Granada and speak with Michael Cox and suggest that, perhaps, you might be considered.” So I said, “Oh, that’s fantastic!” And he rang Jeremy and it came - that’s how it happened. David couldn’t do it, because he wanted to go to Stratford, and so it fell to me.
I had seen them and I knew how the standard was hugely high. But as an actor it was thrilling to be asked to do it. Because we knew how good it was. And, umm, you know, I was familiar with the stories, not familiar enough as I subsequently became but I knew there was a, you know, a possibility of another ten or fifteen being done. And that was very exciting.
“The Abbey Grange” was the first one I was involved in. And a director called Peter Hammond, who subsequently did a lot of them, umm, did it and he gave a couple of notes which were hugely important to me and they made a lot of difference to the way I looked at the part. And I think it had been a deliberate choice, I think somebody thought, “He can help.” There was a sequence in “The Abbey Grange” where Holmes is pacing around trying to work this thing out and Hammond said to me, uh, “I want you to smoke.” And I-I said, “Yes, what, smoke what?” He said, “Cigarettes, I want you to smoke cigarettes.” So I (took a) cigarette and he said, “No, no, no,” he said, “Keep the cigarette very close to your face, don’t move it away too far.” And, it doesn’t really mean anything in its explanation but in the context of what we were doing it immediately made me think, “Yes, that suggests time and concentration.” And it somehow triggered something in the back of my head that made me think “Watson”, I don’t know why and I couldn’t explain it to you today.
But I remember saying to Jeremy, “I feel” – before that happened I remember saying to him – “I feel I’m disappearing inside my costume.” I just felt everything was too overwhelming and there wasn’t an awful lot for Watson to do and I do remember David saying that he found it very difficult to have to react a lot without having a lot of text. Jeremy subsequently found that he got a bit fed up, and I think understandably, with having to learn huge amounts of text and tried to get the writers to dispense a bit of it to Watson. So I picked up some of the kind of (begins to laugh) bits that Jeremy didn’t really want to do.
I remember one major problem which I had which was that I was always having to read things out of newspapers. And because I don’t – I have to wear glasses to read and couldn’t do it as Watson, so I was always learning vast quantities of newsprint, which I found very tedious.
The biggest compliment I had paid to me was, on several occasions, I was called “David”. People said, “David, can you move that way?” and I thought, “Well, there aren’t too many ripples here if they think I’m David Burke.” I really don’t know how I differed from David, I mean we were different. Subsequently I’ve read, people said I seem to be an older, graver Watson. That always worried me a bit because I thought – what I did feel very strongly about playing Watson with Holmes is that two people who work together in those circumstances have to have a lot of humor, there has to be a lot of laughter.
I consciously remember thinking every time there was an opportunity to bring out that sense of humor between the two people, the fact that you could smile about certain things that Holmes would say, or laugh at things that he would say, umm, seemed to me very important. It seems to me people who work together in a rather difficult job tend to laugh a lot.
There was a wonderful file which was passed around, The Baker Street File, which had, I mean, every single detail that appeared in the stories. And I remember, at one point, I think I had to use a fountain pen and, umm, I questioned, I said, “This seems very modern.” They said, “No, no, it’s not, it’s in the file,” and we looked it up; there it was. And I think somebody actually wrote and said – made some comment – and they were able to write back and say, “No, this is absolutely accurate.” And it was an amazing document, I think I’ve still got it somewhere. Umm, but it was a measure of the immense care that Granada took at that time with that series, I mean, there was just nothing that wasn’t studied and examined. It’s not easy doing period drama in modern England, I mean, you’ve got endless problems. The camera’s got endless problems with television aerials. And they had the most wonderful set of quickly remedied things, like I remember at one point we were filming in London and there were yellow lines on the road which you could see through that back window of the carriage which Jeremy and I were sitting in. So somebody came out and they had a roll of cobblestones, like a sort of – and they just went *fshh!* like that.
I think Michael Cox deliberately held back “The Empty House” until we’d done, I think, done two together, and felt sort of reasonably comfortable. Umm, I think “Empty House” is quite a tricky – uh – it’s tricky for Holmes because he’s got this kind of way-out disguise and then Watson fainting and everything, so it’s a bit – it’s a wonderful story but quite difficult and I was very grateful for the fact that it was kept back. And, and, by that time I’d got much – I’d felt much more confident about playing Watson.
Well, at least at the beginning of “The Empty House” it’s Watson with Lestrade and Holmes is not there so you have a chance to kind of establish something before the star appears, as it were. And so it was good that I had a bit of a chance to get into it before that.