A Weaker, But No Less Impressive Collection- By: Mr. I. Clarke, 29 Nov 2006 As time went on with Granada's productions of Sherlock Holmes, two things happened. First of alll was that as the original creative team left for pastures new, the scripts were subject to more & more padding out, sometimes out of neccessity (The Dying Detective being a prime example), sometimes to create a different feel, with mixed success. The Casebook is mainly loyal to the canon in it's dramatisations, but The Memoirs does feature an awful lot of window dressing (The Three Gables being a case in point).
The second was Jeremy Brett. The further you get into these collections you can see just how unwell he was becoming. Indeed he died not long after the completion of the series, & was so unwell during the filming, Charles Gray as Holmes's brother Mycroft was forced to take on the sleuthing in The Mazarin Stone. The performance is no less fine, however, & we do see an aging detective struggling to deal with his darker demons, yet posessing no less of the faculties which make him the finest sleuth of alll time, & no less of the qualities in Brett which made his performance definitive.
Still wonderfully produced & acted alll round, but less faithfull to the original stories.
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