We’ve slapped on a few nicotine patches and waded through the archives to see how Benedict Cumberbatch measures up against the greatest of Great Detectives…
5. Carleton Hobbs
Before we’re forced to take recourse in a seven-percent solution of chang to drown out the cries of ‘He’s a baldy, he don’t look nuffink like Sherlock!’ it must be made clear that Carleton Hobbs never played the sleuth on the big or small screen. Instead, he spent seventeen years as BBC Radio’s go-to man for Sherlock Holmes, starring in eighty adaptations (first for the Children’s Hour and then for a grown-up audience) between 1952 and 1969.
Ably assisted by Norman Shelley as a Watson pitched halfway between David Burke’s quick-witted colleague and the notoriously tosspottish interpretation of Nigel Bruce, Hobbs played Holmes as warm and masterful, emphasising the Great Detective’s intellect, chivalry and bravado as opposed to his eccentricity, drug abuse and occasional transvestism.
Through the magical combination of audio and drugs imagination, the Victorian era is sparklingly recreated and the recordings remain enjoyable listening today.
4. Robert Downey Jr.
Although he’s only had two adventures so far with 2009’s Sherlock Holmes and 2011’s Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, there has been more than enough to enjoy in Robert Downey Jr.’s performances as the world’s first consulting detective for him to coast effortlessly into the top five.
With an English accent that barely wavers, an adroitness for bare-knuckle boxing, swordsmanship and smashing up half-completed London landmarks, and as close to a perfect depiction of Holmes’s borderline psychosis as has ever been accomplished on the big screen, RDJ is a modern fantasy antihero in a steampunky, unconsciously American reworking of the legend that is almost as good – almost – as the all-time classic (oh yes it is) Spielberg-produced, proto-Harry Potter adventure, Young Sherlock Holmes.
3. Basil Rathbone
Although Peter Cushing was more convincing, Tom Baker was more eccentric and Basil, the Great Mouse Detective was more faithful to Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories than films like Sherlock Holmes and the Spider Woman, Basil Rathbone’s authoritative, occasionally autocratic portrayal of Baker Street’s finest is so instantaneously recognisable it would be unthinkable not to include him in this list.
Visually, his Holmes is definitive; and whatever one might think of Nigel Bruce’s thick-as-Glenn Mulcaire’s-telephone-directory sidekick, the rapport between the two and the simultaneous contradictions in their nature – not to mention the humour derived from their differences – provide the blueprint for all the Holmes and Watson pairings that followed. (Besides, they used Rathbone’s voice in The Great Mouse Detective and Basil is named after him. So there.)
2. Benedict Cumberbatch
Sherlock Holmes’s place amid the other icons of Victoriana (even though over half of the stories were first published after the House of Hanover had reached the end of its noble line) is assured forever. TV, film or 5D-frontal-lobe-injected-hyperreality versions of The Hound of the Baskervilles set at the end of the nineteenth century will still be being made when the Earth crashes into the sun.
However, the problem for modern period portrayals of the gak-guzzling super-sleuth is that there’s simply too much competition. Richard Roxburgh and Rupert Everett both found their early 2000s attempts at jamming their heads into the deerstalker crushed by the weight of what had gone before.
Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss neatly circumvented this problem – and invented a show that had been crying out to be made since the wearing of scarves indoors became less of a social stigma – by chucking out the hansom cabs, gasogenes and preposterous chauvinism and moving the story to the present day.
Benedict Cumberbatch as the titular Sherlock combines Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory, a certain Time Lord and insert-one-of-the-good-Johnny-Depp-characters-here to create something uniquely special: a petulant genius heartthrob whose antipathy towards women, excruciating lack of social mores and boundless malaise simply make him more appealing.
1. Jeremy Brett
For this writer, anyway, it is unlikely that any other incarnation of Sherlock Holmes will ever topple the titanic, wondrous might of Jeremy Brett’s.
Although not all 42 of the Granada Television productions are perfect – extended instalments like The Master Blackmailer are ostentatious and turgid, while the last few episodes, when Brett was ill (and occasionally, unavailable), are difficult to watch – the first four series represent a supreme synthesis of dynamite storytelling, a note-perfect nineteenth century setting, a strong, sensitive Watson (David Burke and then Edward Hardwicke) and – above all – the majestic mania of the main man.
Brett’s Holmes was by turns sardonic and sympathetic, infused with crazed energy one minute and slumped in drug-addled lethargy the next, combining a needlepoint sense of humour with an occasional vulnerability that was more a snapshot of the actor slipped into the detective’s photo album. The sheer range of emotions and characteristics he could invest in a single scene, let alone an entire episode, make Jeremy Brett the finest Sherlock Holmes that ever was.
Who is your favourite Sherlock Holmes actor? Let us know below…