AM ALWAYS HAPPY TO SUPPORT THE ARTS, and especially any well-regarded play in Canada that also appeals to Holmes fans. At the Diesel Playhouse is running an award-winning play called Antoine Feval:

Meet Barnaby Gibbs: an incurable optimist, Sherlock Holmes fan, and a man who knows he’s not particularly good at anything. One night, while checking on a friend’s empty house, he encounters a stranger, dressed entirely in black, holding a bag full of stolen belongings and attempting to write a poem about sapphires. There is only one conclusion a reasonable man could come to: this is the notorious cat burglar / con-man known as the Rhyming Bandit! However, Barnaby is not a reasonable man, and when the stranger explains he is actually the famous detective Antoine Feval, a new crime-fighting duo is born.

The comedy is running in Toronto from the 15th to the 25th of this month. More information is available at the Diesel Playhouse. Next up are runs in New Zealand and New Mexico.

HIS PARODY IS A REAL ENIGMA. It was originally sent to me a several years ago from a friend who claimed he had heard it on a local radio station in Ohio, many years before. It occasionally winds up in CD-ROM collections of OTR shows, but with little or no attribution except its name, “Sherlock Holmes, 1965″, and the company that apparently produced it, Midnight Productions.

It’s difficult to deduce much about its origins. As as educated guess, I’d certainly say it was an American production –the jarring accents certainly give that away– and it was produced by an amateur-grade production company with decent studio access. The sound is clear, and while the show does have a few funny lines and situations, it’s far from top quality writing or acting. No web searches, ranging from Google to eBay to copyright databases, I’ve done have led me to any further information about the recording, nor the production company, which leads me to believe it is probably defunct. As for dating this, it does appear to be a recording from the sixties or seventies, but most shows produced from the late sixties to the early eighties do have a certain “sound” that is indicative of the equipment and effects common across that time period. Owing to the obvious, most people just assume the production date of this is 1965.

At any rate, this is a rare play that does have an interesting premise (pre- Austin Powers), wherein the very aged Holmes and Watson go searching for a new case in the mid-sixties. The jokes are no funnier nor worse than most other parodies, and so should fit nicely into the library of most Sherlockians who collect such things.

Download: Sherlock Holmes, 1965, by Midnight Productions

If you do know anything more about his recording, I’d love to hear from you.

NE OF THE GREATEST “FEUDS” OF OLD TIME RADIO was that between Jack Benny and Fred Allen, resulting in constant comedic jabs at each other on their respective shows for nearly a decade. Fans of the shows were often completely convinced that the two harboured deep resentment for each other, but the truth was far less interesting: they were the best of friends, and played up on the feud to get laughs, and –when one was guesting on the other’s show– would even pass along the best gags of the night to the “rival.”

Allen himself was quite a sharp wit, and was frequently embattled by the censors because of his political and social commentary, often ad-libbed to cover flubs in the program. (Most shows had to be carefully scripted before being approved by the overly nit-picky network censors.) Although his shows don’t today carry the timelessness of Benny’s, it’s usually because his references to American and world events were more frequent, and barely covered by a thin veneer of satire, unfortunately lost on most modern audiences.

Since we profiled a show of Benny as Sherlock, it seems only fitting that we offer his rival as yet another incarnation of the sleuth, this one named Fetlock Bones. This episode of the Texaco Star Theater certainly falls under the zany madcap category. (Those wanting to skip ahead to the parody can find it around the 18 minute mark, but will miss part of the set-up.)

Download: Texaco Star Theater - Fetlock Bones with Fred Allen, originally aired April 9th, 1944 (6.4 MB)

NE OF THE MOST BELOVED and long-lived of Old Time Radio performers was the incomparable Jack Benny. Among the thousands of other, often dismally-written, shows polluting the airwaves, audiences always knew that they could tune into Benny and lose themselves in the comedian’s sharp wit, his knack with timing, his many foibles (especially his propensity for clinging to his pennies), the memorable plots, and the more outré gags that slipped under the radar of the censors and his sponsors. (After all, words on paper often take on a whole new meaning when performed.)

Benny was also known for his trenchant parodies, often far more entertaining than the pieces he spoofed, and so, when the much-lauded Rathbone/Bruce film The Hound of the Baskervilles was filling the theatres in 1939, an obvious target was the master detective himself.

While I wouldn’t consider this a rare recording among OTR fans, it’s one that several Sherlockians of my Internet acquaintance haven’t yet heard. And, as always, Benny delivers where lesser comedic characters like Miss Sherlock fall flat on their deerstalkers.

Download: Jack Benny - The Hound of the Baskervilles, originally aired June 11, 1939 (6.6 MB)

HESE PAST FEW WEEKS, I’ve been wrestling with the age-old question, “How does one fit 20 boxes of books, three bookshelves, an audio/video suite, a large air exchanger, a men’s mountain bike, and a medieval arsenal into an office measuring 8 ft by 8 ft?” The teeter piles threatening to engulf me (and possibly impale me) any moment require my next posts to possess a certain urgency….

This next week, I’m doing something a little different on this blog. While my dead-tree Sherlockian library pales by most (just two of the aforementioned bookshelves), I do have quite a hefty audio library, mostly digital nowadays. I have to re-catalogue my collection fairly soon, but my recordings –including radio plays, audio books, interviews, and the like– number well over a thousand. For the next few days, I’m going to provide downloads of some of the more rare and unusual files, along with short introductions and source notes, whenever possible.

First, a note about copyrights. Most collectors of Old Time Radio shows (known simply as OTR) follow a general rule of thumb: shows publicly aired before 1978 are generally considered to be in the public domain, especially in the United States, as there was no copyright protection issued for such broadcasts under the then-extant copyright laws of 1909. The Berne Convention, which took effect January 1, 1978, officially accorded these rights to radio broadcasts, and retroactively accorded certain limited rights to recordings made within the five years previous, but only if official application was made, which was very rare. (It was not possible to make works in the public domain copyrighted ex-post-facto.) Now, I’m not a lawyer, nor do I play one on television, so I’m walking this well-worn path, which is allegedly in accord with the staff of the U.S. Library of Congress. (For more information about OTR copyrights, please see the information on the RadioLovers.com copyright page.) Many other recordings (that weren’t publicly broadcast) have fallen into the public domain because there was never an application for copyright, the copyright has expired, or the copyright was never renewed. If you or your organisation have any copyright claim to the materials I present here, please contact me and I’ll rectify the situation and give due notice.

Whew.

Today, we have a true rarity, and what’s more, a blazing example of terrible OTR. It took me a few years to find the two episodes I know to exist, and once I finally found them, I chalked the effort up to completionist obsession. Wrote the radio expert Jack French, in an essay on Lady Crimefighters:

During World War II no more women sleuths arrived on the scene but 1946 was a banner year when three new ones debuted on network radio. One was as much comedienne as crime solver, Meet Miss Sherlock. This was a CBS summer sustainer that recounted the adventures of Jane Sherlock, a scatterbrained amateur detective, and her boyfriend, Peter Blossom, a civil attorney who occasionally fainted.

There were two separate versions of this show; the first ran from July 3, 1946 to September 26, 1946 while the second one ran from Sept 28, 1947 to Oct 26, 1947. Both series were produced and directed by David Vaile, with scripts by E. Jack Neuman and Don Thompson. The announcer was Murray Wagner and the live orchestra was headed by Milton Charles. Sondra Gair had the title lead in the 1946 version, Captain Dingle of the NYPD was a youthful Bill Conrad and Joe Petruzzi played Peter Blossom.

When the series resumed in the fall of 1947, Betty Moran did the first epiosde but her voice was not “dithery” enough so Monty Margetts was brought in and she played the lead until it went off the air two months later. Barney Phillips was the voice of Captain Dingle. This series was more comedy than adventure, although crimes were eventually solved. Only two episodes have survived; both feature Gair in the 1946 version.

The scripts are insipid, the acting mundane, the jokes lousy, and the political incorrectness worthy of a good burning in effigy. Still, I did promise you some unusual recordings. I promise that tomorrow’s entry will be less likely to affront your sensibilities. (It shouldn’t be that difficult.)

Download: Meet Miss Sherlock - Case of the Deadman’s Chest (MP3, 6.9 MB), originally aired July 7th, 1946

F, LIKE ME, you watched Sesame Street in the seventies, you should be quite familiar with a character whose propensity for trifles is even greater than that of Sherlock Holmes, and who too has a faithful sidekick called Watson. See the Muppet Wiki entry for Sherlock Hemlock:

Sherlock Hemlock, a Muppet spoof of Sherlock Holmes, first appeared on Sesame Street in Season 2 (1970), and was last seen in Season 23 (1991).

Sherlock is the self-appointed “World’s Greatest Detective.” He solves mysteries by concentrating on the little clues and overlooking the big ones. When he finds a clue, he shouts, “E-GAD!”

I’ve recently been watching some Sesame Street with my two-year-old, and wondering about this Muppet’s mysterious disappearance. Perhaps there was a Moriarty Muppet too?

Oh well… I guess a “Tickle Me Sherlock” toy wouldn’t have been a very hot Christmas toy.

T seems that one of the most maligned Holmes films (with the exception of any picture starring Dudley Moore) is the 1975 Gene Wilder auteur comedy The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother (see the IMDB entry). I’m haven’t actually seen this film for nearly twenty years (and even then, it was a chopped-apart television version), but I might soon get my chance again. Last month, it was finally re-released on DVD. R.J. Carter at the media review site The Trades has a mostly positive review:

When crucial papers are stolen from Queen Victoria’s trusted aide, the world turns to Sherlock Holmes to solve the case.

Unfortunately, he’s not available. But Sherlock delegates the case to a lesser known S. Holmes — his younger brother, Sigerson (Wilder). An inventor, a fencer, and a darned fine singer, Sigerson is nonetheless bitter about the fame heaped upon his older brother, “Sheer Luck” Holmes.

Read the rest. Holmes fans, of course, will no doubt recall the name Sigerson from a complete different context….

HEAR this is what every fashionable Sherlockian is wearing this year.

NE thing I love about most Sherlockians is that they are aware of the line that exists between serious scholarship and self-parody, and cross over it frequently. Ironic cartoons, terrible limericks, and –of course– silly songs then become the order of the day, as you’ll see with Craig Hilton’s mash-up of Gilbert, Sullivan and Sherlock entitled The Very Model of a Modern-Day Sherlockian:

I am the very model of a modern-day Sherlockian,
I rank Sir Arthur Conan Doyle with Asimov and Tolkien,
I’m versed in all the works, both imitative and canonical,
Through setting each to memory by strategies mnemonical;
I hold the view from Reichenbach of Holmes’s spark unstoppable,
Believe in all remaining things, no matter how improbable,
I’ll proudly tell you how to pace the ritual Musgravian,
And why you get a limp from being shot in the subclavian.

(And why you get a limp from being shot in the subclavian.
And why you get a limp from being shot in the subclavian.
And why you get a limp from being shot in the subclavi-avian.)

Read the rest (from The Sherlock Holmes Society of Western Australia).

thank the many people who have contacted me, wanting to know if I had ever heard the “great Holmes joke,” and so I figure I had better mention it. There are a few versions of this going around, and a few are accompanied by a more erstwhile build-up or a cartoon (although I can’t seem to find them online), but I’ll just link to the version that was finally knocked from first to second place at the UK’s Laugh Lab: Holmes and Watson go camping:

Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson go on a camping trip. After a good dinner and a bottle of wine, they retire for the night, and go to sleep.

Some hours later, Holmes wakes up and nudges his faithful friend. “Watson, look up at the sky and tell me what you see.”

“I see millions and millions of stars, Holmes” replies Watson.

“And what do you deduce from that?”

Read the rest….

f you’re familiar with the Grenada television series with Jeremy Brett, have a high-speed Internet connection, and are possessed of a strong bladder, wander on over to the Sherlock Holmes Literary Song Videos site. These are scenes from the series re-cut into music videos, and some of them are quite clever indeed. In particular, I can recommend “Everything I Own”, a touching tribute to the relationship of Holmes and Watson set to the sappy 70’s song from Bread, and “The Boxer”, the story of an oft-destitute Holmes seeking work in a world full of hardships, set to the classic Simon and Garfunkel tune.

Note that these videos are in MP4 format. If you have problems playing them, I can wholeheartedly recommend VLC, a free media player which handles almost everything flawlessly. It performs much better than QuickTime, even on my Mac.