If there ever was an episode in which the series transcended Arthur Conan Doyle's original, it is this one. At the end of the short story, after rescuing the eponymous interpreter, Holmes and Watson merely read that the villains were murdered by their unwilling accomplice once having reached the continent. Here, after sticking to the original for the first forty minutes, we end with a breathless chase to the train on which the villains have fled, with Charles Gray's wonderful portrayal of Mycroft Holmes's distress, as a man not suited to dynamic action.
We then have an encounter with the first villain and his prospective wife, whose brother has just been murdered, after which the villain unwisely tries to flee the carriage by opening the outside door with fatal consequences. Then the second villain, a wonderful display of sadism and psychopathy by George Costigan, bursts in, only to be stopped by Mycroft, who had disarmed him when they met in the dining carriage.
All right, so we never really learn what it was that the villains wanted to extract from the woman's brother, nor how they got hold of him, but Derek Marlowe does not flinch from changing the woman to a much more pliant figure, indifferent to the murder of her brother, but able to walk free, despite her "cold heart and not a single shred of compassion." It may not please the purists, but it's gripping stuff.
I almost placed this one in the top three, apart from the fact that there is not much of a story – and what there is, is fairly ludicrous. But it gets into my top five because of the most completely appropriate performances in what is a classic bit of (overblown) Victorian melodrama – those of Natasha Richardson as the courageous Violet Hunter and Joss Ackland as the most loathsome of all of ACD's villains, Jephro Rucastle.
In the scene where Violet unwisely ventures into the locked turret of 'Copper Beeches' and is confronted by Rucastle, Richardson ably conveys how Miss Hunter is clearly disturbed by the atmosphere of what turns out to be Rucastle's daughter's prison and Ackland slips from his unnerving cheerfulness of the previous forty five minutes and threatens to feed her to his vicious dog if he finds her there again.
It's a little let down by a rather swift and neat resolution, in which we are left with almost more questions than answers, a rather unsatisfying reprieve for Rucastle and the sense that Holmes and Watson were rather superfluous to the whole thing.
The last truly great episode, in which Mycroft once again removes himself from the Diogenes Club and assists his younger brother in the resolution of a potentially disastrous security leak. Brett and Charles Gray are clearly having a ball, which makes the straight playing of Amanda Westbury as the (dead) chief suspect's distraught fiancée and Denis Lill as the terrier-like Inspector Bradstreet all the more effective.
The much-underrated Jonathan Newth, who was so impressive in The Nightmare Man, is a very effective villain who manages to make his character's sudden volte face highly believable. Perhaps it rather fizzles out at the end, Watson is a bit of spare part and Geoffrey Bayldon is wasted in his tiny role as the 'silent, morose' senior clerk, but this is very good work by the director, John Gorrie.
What a cast. Jenny Seagrove, Ronald Lacey, Emrys James, Robin Hunter and, perhaps the series' greatest coup – the unmatchable John Thaw as the villain. It has nearly everything – central London locations, fog, a devilish murder, a dramatic chase and a flashback exposition that leaves one entirely on the side of Jonathan Small, owing to Thaw's impeccable performance and Brett's subtle responses as he shifts from disdain to acute sympathy.
Why is it not number one? Well, like all the 2-hour adaptations it does drag a little – especially in the final river chase scene which needed a bit more dramatic editing. Then there is the rather 'cor blimey guv' child-acting of the Baker Street Irregulars and another one of Brett's less than convincing disguises. And finally, there is no getting away from the appallingly racist depiction of Tonga, who it is impossible to believe is not completely conspicuous, even in the East End, and who appears, for some reason best known to the make-artist, to have green skin. It is no excuse to claim that ACD's depiction in the original novel justified this, as he was writing at a time when it was believed that non-white peoples were culturally inferior – possible even genetically different to their colonisers. Such a pity.
This so very nearly hits the top slot. Peter Barkworth at his blustering best as an unsympathetic client, Russel Hunter (Callan's Lonely and 'Robots of Death's Uvanov) who is only in two scenes, but is completely Brett's equal in his confrontation with Holmes. And yes, Brett even manages to deliver the immortal line about 'the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime' without turning it into a grandstanding performance.
The filming in the Trough of Bowland (standing in for Dartmoor) and at Bangor racetrack is top notch (even if the photographer at the end could not have taken an image of the Colonel with all those people milling around behind him). John Hawkesworth even corrects ACD's plot error – as Silver Blaze would have been disqualified had he run in disguise, as the original story has it. And Holmes wins a bet on the horse with the greatest show of undisguised happiness that Brett ever depicted – outside his moments of cocaine-fuelled euphoria that is, of course.
Yet the weak performances of many of smaller roles does make one fear that Granada's infamous cost-cutting had started with the fees to the lesser actors; it's only once they are off-screen that you can really luxuriate in the episode.
Not merely a great episode of one of the greatest TV series ever made, but a piece of drama that will stay with you forever once you have seen it. The cast is marvellous yet again – Ian Marter's wonderfully phlegmatic inspector, Michael Culver's milquetoast Musgrave, Johanna Kirby's hysterical Rachel and James Hazeldine's scheming butler whose love life proves his undoing.
But it is the location which turns this fascinating investigation of a seemingly trivial incident during a shooting weekend that Holmes is not even bothering to hide his disdain for, into a gripping search for a lost treasure that seizes the imagination and chills the nerves as well as anything that M. R. James devised. It would be enough that the interiors and exteriors (including the moat and the lake which both figure so centrally) were shot at Baddesley Clinton House, just seven miles from Solihull (!), but so were the trees on the estate.
Of course, in ACD's original, although the elm has died, the oak remains for Holmes (and Brunton) to solve the puzzle – but the crew in 1985 faced the problem that there was no oak of sufficient size anywhere near the house, until the designer came up with the idea of putting an oak tree on a weathervane and, with such ingenuity, perfection was achieved. I could watch it every day and, having just written this, I may well do so.
With thanks to guest writer Ian Cawood for this article.