Sherlock Holmes - On The Scent of the Baskerville Hound - Documentary - 1989

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• published: 27 Feb 2015
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Here's an excellent documentary - On The Scent of the Baskerville Hound - Circa 1989 - from TSW aka Television South West. Strangely my google searches have not managed to bring up any information on this documentary about this most loved of Sherlock Holmes stories. The programme features filmed interviews with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Daughter Dame Jean Conan Doyle and a rare interview with the late Sherlock Holmes scholar Richard Lancelyn Green who himself reportedly died a few years ago in mysterious circumstances. The Hound of the Baskervilles is the third of the four crime novels written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle featuring the detective Sherlock Holmes. Originally serialised in The Strand Magazine from August 1901 to April 1902, it is set largely on Dartmoor in Devon in England's West Country and tells the story of an attempted murder inspired by the legend of a fearsome, diabolical hound of supernatural origin. Sherlock Holmes and his companion Dr. Watson investigate the case. This was the first appearance of Holmes since his intended death in "The Final Problem", and the success of The Hound of the Baskervilles led to the character's eventual revival. Air Commandant Dame Lena Jean Annette Conan Doyle, Lady Bromet DBE AE WRAF ADC (21 December 1912 – 18 November 1997), best known as Jean Conan-Doyle, was a British stateswoman and military officer in the WRAF. Upon the death of her brother, Adrian, in 1970, Dame Jean became her father's literary executor and the legal copyright holder to some of the rights to the Sherlock Holmes character as well as her father's other works. She assiduously defended Sherlock Holmes' character. She and her brothers, Adrian and Denis Conan Doyle, Arthur Conan Doyle's children by his second wife (Jean, Lady Conan Doyle) inherited the copyrights with the estate when their mother died in 1940. Dame Jean said that Sherlock Holmes was the Conan Doyle family curse because of the fighting over copyrights.[16] She and the widows of her brothers initially shared control of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle′s literary trust; however, the women did not get along.[17] Denis Conan Doyle had married a Georgian princess known as Princess Nina M'divani and died in 1955.[18] At her death at age 84, her will stipulated that any remaining copyrights she owned were to be transferred to the Royal National Institute for the Blind.[19] According to a 1990 interview, Dame Jean's eyesight was poor from an early age.[20] The National Institute for the Blind sold the rights back to the Doyle heirs. (There are now nine surviving Doyle heirs. None are direct descendants, as neither Jean nor her brothers had any children.) Sherlock Holmes thus passed into the public domain in the UK in 1980, and is scheduled to do the same in the United States in 2023. Richard Lancelyn Green (10 July 1953 – 27 March 2004) was a British scholar of Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, generally considered the world's foremost scholar of these topics. Richard Lancelyn Green was a collector of Sherlock Holmes-related material, and was co-editor of the first comprehensive bibliography of Arthur Conan Doyle, A Bibliography of A. Conan Doyle, with John Michael Gibson, and also a series of collections of Doyle's writings that had never before been collected in book form: Uncollected Stories (1982), Essays on Photography (1982), and Letters to the Press (1986), all co-edited with Gibson. The Conan Doyle bibliography earned Green and Gibson a Special Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America during 1984. Lancelyn Green also published other books on his own. The Uncollected Sherlock Holmes (1983) anthologised Doyle's non-canon Sherlock Holmes writings, The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1985) is a collection of Holmes pastiches and parodies, and Letters to Sherlock Holmes (1985) collected the most interesting of letters to Sherlock Holmes, arriving at the headquarters of the Abbey National Building Society, whose address in Baker Street was the closest to the fictional "221b". He was something of a showman, appearing as a 19th-century music hall master of ceremonies at events of the Sherlock Holmes Society, of which he was chairman from 1996 to 1999, and dressing in period costume to visit Reichenbach Falls, where Sherlock Holmes was thought to have died until Conan Doyle "resurrected" him eight years later. For his encyclopaedic knowledge of Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, and for his masterful scholarly works, he was well regarded among scholars of Holmes.