Saturday, July 24, 2010

Elementary

From this week's Radio Times, on the BBC's new Sherlock Holmes series:

Some viewers will recoil from the very idea of BBC1 updating Conan Doyle's characters to modern London, with [...] a Dr Watson who fought in Afghanistan.

From Wikipedia, on Conan Doyle's Watson:

In the debut Holmes story A Study in Scarlet (published in 1888), Watson, as the narrator, tells us that he had received his medical degree from the University of London in 1878, and had subsequently gone for training as an Army surgeon. He then joined British forces in India, saw service in Afghanistan...


So, in fact, not an update at all. Sigh.

2 comments:

  1. I love it when even those people who like to sound as if they know what they're on about slip up like this. Also, the modern irony - so much information easily at our fingertips, and people do less research than ever before.

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  2. Exactly. I'm no Holmes scholar, yet I knew that Watson was a military doctor, and I vaguely knew he had served in Afghanistan. It took thirty seconds to confirm.

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