No S#!t Sherlock

I watched the BBC's latest leaden Sherlock Holmes last night, a "new and original" tale: "Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking". To call it woeful would be to flatter it.

The problem isn't to be found in the petty details, though there are plenty of problems there: Holmes enjoying a pipe of opium (a vice he specifically rejects in "The Man with the Twisted Lip"), his taking of heroin/cocaine during a case (a vice we are repeatedly told he only indugles in when bored), his saying "Elementary, my dear Watson" (when, as every good pub quiz member knows, he never once uses the line in the original stories), having Watson rather than Holmes make the vital imaginative leap (something clunkily set up to show Watson's understanding of human nature and Holmes's lack of it) &c.

The problem isn't the characterisation (though the characters are uni-dimensional even for a Holmes adventure, and the relationship between Holmes and Watson is reduced to that of a squabbling married couple).

The problem isn't the casting (though Rupert Everett is truly awful as Holmes: all lassitude and no energy, his voice a constant public schoolboy's monotone, which - though it is sprinkled lightly with mid-Atlantic vowel sounds - repeatedly gave me the impression he was actually investigating the theft of Tompkins Major's postal order from the prep room).

The problem isn't the decision to set the stories in the early 1900's, after Holmes and Watson have gone their separate ways (though it seems to be there not to give freedom to the writer but to allow him to show telephones! and use fingerprints! and involve King Edward VIIth! coo-er gosh!).

The problem isn't the liberal scattering of cliches: the evil identical twins, the trail of blood (unaccountably ignored by all and sundry for 15 minutes), having our detective arrange matters so that victim and criminal will confront each other in the police station ( a favourite of "CSI: Miami" which at least has the excuse of having to produce twenty-plus shows a year and not just a one-off special), or the detective seeking to distract the criminal by revealing their dark side ("I understand too, it's an addiction" - oh piss off while I yawn myself to death) et al.

The problem isn't even the fact that, due presumably to total failure of dramatic faculties, the writer can't even be bothered to be consistent: at the beginning of the "drama" Holmes can spot Watson despite the fact that he's walking 50 yards behind him through a smog-ridden and filthy alleyway near the Limehouse docks filled with as many extras as the budget will allow, at the end he's unable to tell when a murderous slightly-less-evil twin is galumphing around a foot to his rear.

No, this alleged drama has one overriding problem: the plot is a substandard police procedural of the type normally knocked out for minor TV channels as pale imitations of "Prime Suspect" with a dash of "Cracker"-style cod psychology and sexual dysfunction (clumsily introduced via Watson's "feisty" American fiancee (all American fiancees are feisty, it's the law). The programme has nothing to do with Holmes - like James Bond a cartoon superhero without the cartoons - at all, and everything to do with a writer needing to use a name to get his flimsy idea commissioned or, perhaps, the usual crew of anencephalic BBC commissioners leaping at the 'imagine Sherlock Holmes meets Jane Tennyson" pitch.

The whole team behind this have robbed me of a couple of hours of my life. If they'd wanted to show an averagely-entertaining detective drama they could have put on an old episode of Bergerac. If they'd wanted to annoy Holmes fanatics they could just have dropped their trousers outside 221B Baker Street and crapped on the pavement. If they wanted to annoy anyone who could give a toss about decent telly... well, if that's what they had in mind they've found a pretty good method.

The programme was expensively shot, expensively made and cheaply thought out. British TV doesn't get much more depressing.