The Beginnings.
Few can deny that Jeremy Brett's performance as Sherlock Holmes in the Granada Television series was uniquely accurate and exceptional in all respects. Brett's companion was first played by David Burke; also a fine and accomplished Watson.. Sadly Burke left the series but was replaced by and equally capable actor: Edward Hardwicke.

The Granada series with Jeremy Brett weaned many fans away from their attachment to Basil Rathbone. Brett's features, like Cushing's, were suitably hairlike: an obvious improvement on Douglas Wilmer's more oval face. His
playing suggested real intelligence, as Rathbone's and Cushing's had. But to it he added the melancholy sensitivity that made Doyle's character so memorable. Jeremy Brett was genuinely sensitive to his surroundings.

Granada TV Series Locations.
When location filming for the series took him to Carn Galver on the West Penwith moors, he was so struck by that eerie, romantic landscape, its desolation relieved by the huge crags of the Great Galver, the minestacks of Ding Dong West and Greenbarrow, the broken toothed stone circle of the Nine Maidens, and the sea to north and south, that he decided on the spot that one day he would have a house in the district. Unhappily, he did not live to realize the ambition.

The excellent use of locations in the series was a mark of the distance television had come from cardboard studio scenery with the microphone boom Casting its occasional shadow. Direction was by professionals who had progressed well beyond the old sneer of elm-makers that television didn't know how to pick out a character from a crowd without using close-up. Sets and costumes were created with a serious eye to the period and the illustrations in The Strand. This Holmes wore top hats and soft hats and elegant frock coats, not just the familiar deerstalker and ulster. And Watson retreated back from a comic mainstay to being the simple and straightforward companion in adventure. It was possible for the role to be recast in mid-series, David Burke and Edward Hardwicke respectively taking the part.

Basil Fans.
Had Basil Rathbone lost Nigel Bruce the fans would have been appalled and half the audience could have been lost. The Granada series was truly the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and it was the adventures and the Sherlock, 170th admirably true to the originals, which held attention. One more actor was to become noted as a great Sherlock Holmes. Christopher Plummer took the part in a television version of Silver Blaze in 1977. This succeeded so well that he was Cast in the role again, two years later, in the film Murder by Decree. But this went as far beyond Doyle as Universal had done in pitting Rathbone against the Spider Woman and the Creeper. It was one of the most successful thefts of Sherlock Holmes.