Tom Baker, best known to everyone as the Fourth Doctor in Doctor Who, is returning to play the legendary Great Detective, Sherlock Holmes, in a new audio production… that could be turned into a series of audio dramas!
Baker will star in Sir Sherlock, playing the lead role for the first time since being on-screen in the BBC’s 1982 production of The Hound of the Baskervilles and on stage in 1985’s The Mask of Moriarty.
Tom has admitted in the past that he wasn’t happy with his BBC portrayal, and so was eager to give it a different flavour this time. He says:
“Thanks to AUK Studios for letting me have another go at inhabiting the super sleuth! Third time lucky! I hope I did his pipe proud this time. Enjoy my return to Baker Street – very aptly named, I think!
“After I was asked if I’d like to reprise the role, I knew I needed a trusty sidekick and when John Leeson was suggested, I was transported back through time (and space). We’d both had such fun as the Fourth Doctor and K9 in Doctor Who, that essaying Holmes and Watson would feel very natural. And it did.
“Though he did insist on being on all fours again, when we did the readthrough.”
John Leeson said:
“It was a delight to work with Tom again and – at last – this time I was playing the Doctor!”
The potential series begins with The Red Letter Day, written by Gary Hopkins, who previously wrote four television episodes for Granada’s Sherlock Holmes, starring Jeremy Brett. Here’s what to expect from The Red Letter Day:
It is 1924 and the former consulting detective finally accepts a knighthood.
Drawn back to London, away from a quiet life on the Sussex Downs, he is joined by his friend Doctor John Watson when a mysterious red letter leads them back into a murder investigation.
What is the secret of Cleopatra’s needle? Who is the second detective, seemingly always one step ahead of him?
Between the ancient past and an uncertain future, are Holmes and Watson still the right men to stop a killer in his tracks?
Plus, there’s a new detective wannabee on the block – the mysterious, young Norton — played by Young Sherlock Holmes himself (from the Steven Spielberg-produced 1985 film), Nicholas Rowe!
Aside from producing a CD of this new Sherlock Holmes audio drama, there is an expanded and standalone novelisation of the new story, written by Kenton Hall, with internal black and white illustrations by Andy Hosegood; written to match the original Sir Arthur Conan Doyle books in tone and in first-person narrator.
What’s more, Sir Sherlock is directed and produced by a good friend of the DWC: Barnaby Eaton-Jones!
He says:
“It was a good chum called Ian Kubiak who had the initial idea to do an older Sherlock Holmes, with Tom Baker in the lead role, from a conversation he had with writer Gary Hopkins. And that germ of an idea grew and multiplied and infected us all, after I talked more with Gary. I persuaded Tom to don the deerstalker again, worked out who to cast in the rest of the roles, script-edited, and got to oversee a new mystery for the detective duo to solve. But none of that could have happened if head honcho of AUK, Paul Andrews, hadn’t liked the idea as well and agreed to commission Sir Sherlock.”
