Good Night, Mr. Holmes – Details, episodes & analysis

Cryptograms! Ciphers! Strange and threatening Americans! In The Dancing Men, Holmes must translate a series of drawings of stick figures that spell out a message of doom for American Elsie Cubitt, the wife of a wealthy English landowner who knew very little about her before marrying her. An episode of men turning themselves into absolute pretzels rather than ask a woman a question.

The first episode in the Granada series, A Scandal in Bohemia is the story of Irene Adler and how she beat Sherlock Holmes at his own game. Features Watson’s wandering wound, Holmes’s ability to extract information about a person from their appearance, Holmes in a number of disguises (and Jeremy Brett’s astonishing gift of inhabiting a character inhabiting another character), and the smallest pistol ever seen on television.

The slimy, oleaginous Charles Augustus Milverton meets his well-deserved end. Second of two parts.

We're dividing this episode in two because it was a TV movie. A seminal encounter between Holmes and Charles Augustus Milverton - played to perfection by Robert Hardy. 

"Mr. Holmes. They were the footprints of a gigantic hound!" With that statement, Holmes and Watson - mostly Watson - are off to Dartmoor. A horrific, large, possibly supernatural dog is haunting the moorland, and Sir Henry Baskerville is the probable target. Is the moor truly haunted? 

We'll never know who Bruce Partington was, but his plans for a secret submarine are the sole concern of this episode. Holmes becomes a submarine expert, Mycroft is bestirred from his usual rounds, and absolutely nothing is as it seems apart from oysters being in season.

A cartography aficianado, a Spanish visitor (because we can't have an ACD story without the othering of the...other), and a rather sinister Inspector Baynes - and a spirited pair of children - bring Holmes and Watson to Surrey, where they have to solve a distinctly Iberian mystery.

A prominent raceshorse with a magnificent pedigree is missing. His trainer is dead. And...a guard dog didn't bark. The curious incident of the dog in the nighttime provides the essential clue that allows Holmes and Watson to solve the case.

Holmes is supposedly on vacation for his health - but he and Watson are interrupted by a vicar who is concerned about his parishoner Tregennis, who'd been playing cards with his siblings and then arrived the next morning to encounter them all dead or crazed. Is it poison? Or is it poison?

We're racing along Holmes and Watson as they follow Very Good Dog Toby along the Thames. A very slow so-called high-speed race and a mudbath later, and we are back at 221B, where after copious amounts of whisky, Jonathan Small (aka John Thaw, aka Endeavor Morse) tells everyone how he came by the fortune and what he's done with it.