1. A Study in Start-up, from Monday, May 20, 2019

Welcome to the Watsonian Weekly for Monday, April 20th, 2019.

The Watsonian Weekly is the John H. Watson Society’s look at the week just past and your week ahead. In the tradition of Watson himself, we don’t promise to give you every bit of data surrounding John H. Watson and his friend Sherlock Holmes, but if you just want to hear someone say the name “Watson” a lot for about for about half an hour, this is the podcast for you.

Bull pup Calder reporting, also know as Brad Keefauver.

What was up with Watsons this week?

Well, it’s May. May is best remembered as a month in 1891 where John Watson spent most of the month in mourning. It’s also one of the months with the least amount of recorded cases in it. So original Canon Watson was not a busy boy this week.

On twitter this week, however, the name Moriarty was trending for a bit – and it was a reference to our Moriarty -- after it was announced that Andrew Scott would be in the next season of Black Mirror.

And in its second week, Detective Pikachu, the movie that some consider the Sherlock Holmes of Pokemon and I consider a Watson story, made big bucks at the box office, bringing its total up to even more big bucks for two weeks.  When you consider the total box office for Holmes and Watson earlier this year was around 42 million, that’s pretty impressive. Robert Downey Junior’s first Sherlock Holmes brought in a total of 524 million with a 545 million dollar sequel, though, so we’ll see how Detective Pikachu holds up in the long run.

Your Watsonian Week Ahead

Wednesday, May 22nd, will mark the 160th birthday of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Dr. Watson’s famous literary agent. I don’t know if you want to put that many candles on a cake for him, but if you do, I hope you have a way to light them all very quickly.

This Thursday marks the return of  CBS’s Elementary, which features Lucy Liu as Joan Watson, who is perhaps the best Watson at the art of detection outside of Ben Kingsley’s Watson in Without a Clue. As last season ended with Joan and Sherlock having moved from New York back to Baker Street,

If you live in Sacramento, California, you have a few more days to catch Jeffrey Hatcher’s play “Holmes and Watson” at the B Street  Theater. We Watsonians love it when the good doctor gets equal title billing, so if that play shows up near you, buy a few tickets and support John’s status as an equal partner. The Sacramento staging goes through May 26.

This week marks the 73rd anniversary of the release of Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson in Dressed to Kill, the last entry in that film series. This movie introduced us to John Watson’s old school chum, Julian Emery, also known as “Stinky,” who was a big collector of music boxes. Don’t expect to enjoy Stinky for too long if you decide to watch this film, though.

Also in Dressed to Kill, we learn that this Watson was a failure as a piano player, and his teacher even tried putting numbers on the keys to get him to learn it. Watson can still quote Samuel Johnson, though, and the quote he uses to try to cheer up Sherlock Holmes is a favorite of mine: “There is no problem that the mind of man can set that the mind of man cannot solve.”

For all the guff Nigel Bruce’s Watson takes, he does trigger Sherlock Holmes’s mind to solutions on occasion, and Dressed to Kill is one of those times.

Friday, May 24th, marks the birthday of the John C. Reilly Watson’s major crush, Alexandrina Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom od Great Britain and Ireland, and Empress of India.  Though Sherlockians may fuss about the emerald tie-pin she gave Sherlock Holmes, it’s hard to imagine Holmes having as much appreciation for Queen Victoria as Watson.

And on Saturday, May 25th, we celebrate the 85th birthday of the first Granada Watson, Mr. David Burke. Burke was such a great Watson that when he later played Josef Stalin in Reilly, Ace of Spies, we now have to wonder how much Stalin and Watson resembled each other. As Watson was about thirty years older than Stalin, neither of them could have impersonated the other, if you were starting to figure out a way to work that into a pastiche.

Watsonian Book Review

And now here’s our first dispatch from bullpup Beacon, a.k.a. Rob Nunn, with a quick Watsonian book review.

Watson’s Word of the Week

“antennae”

The plural of antenna, which started as a word for the two long, thin sensory appendages of the heads of insects, and later became our word for the metal thing we picked up radio and TV signals with.  Watson used the word “antennae” to describe Dr. Mortimer’s fingers as he rolled a cigarette in The Hound of the Baskervilles.

“He had long, quivering fingers as agile and restless as the antennae of an insect.”

At first you might think comparing Mortimer to a bug isn’t very cool, but it’s a whole lot sexier than when Watson compared Mycroft’s hands to the flippers of a seal.

A Watsonian Puzzle

I’ve got another dispatch here, a puzzle from bullpup Mopsy, also know as Margie Deck. Let hear what she has for us.

Cleri-Who?

Certainly not a quitter

this one raged bitter—

with a ghostly enterprise

revenge came by surprise

I hadn’t thought about show notes before Margie mentioned them, but I will try to get those attached to this. The Watsonian Weekly is definitely going to be an evolving project, and given our weekly turnaround time, that evolution could be quick.

For example, I have a few headings in the show-notes without anything under them.

The John H. Watson Society

Since this is the first episode of the John H. Watson Society’s podcast, we should talk a little bit about the society itself.

The John H. Watson Society was founded in April of 2013 by Don Libey, with its initial energies rising out of the the Napa Valley Napoleons of Sherlock Holmes, a scion society of the Baker Street Irregulars. The John H. Watson Society however, was, as the name implies, not a Sherlock Holmes society, but one focusing on the other part of that partnership who often gets less attention, John Watson.

In the six years since it’s founding, the John H. Watson Society has opened its doors to members across the world with a wide range of contributors to its twice-a-year journal, The Watsonian,  panel appearances at 221B Con, and helping sponsor the upcoming Left Coast Sherlockian Symposium.

This new podcast venture of the society is just one more way we hope to connect with John Watson fans and keep the conversation about him going, maybe even going some places with our good doctor that the podcast universe hasn’t got to yet. If you have any ideas in that direction, let us hear from you.

You can read more about the John H. Watson Society at johnhwatsonsociety dot com, and you can email this podcast at  a very similar email address: podcast at johnhwatsonsocietydotcom.

Our Featured Watson This Week

This week I’ve turned to volume one of Howard Ostrom’s Sherlock Holmes Cyclopaedia – this is the Sherlock Holmes on Screens 1929 to 1939 volume, to dig up our featured Dr. Watson.

This Watson is from the 1931 British production of The Hound of the Baskervilles, and his name is Frederick Lloyd, though all of the reviews you’ll find in Howard’s book seem to refer to him as simply “Fred.”

Reviews of Fred Lloyd’s movie ranged from “a shoddy imitation” and “a total loss” to “Sensitive children will be extremely frightened; unsuitable for Sunday viewing.” But a review in Variety focuses in on poor Fred with their pronouncement: “The Dr. Watson is a flat comedian in the mannerisms of Fred Lloyd.”

The end of the movie was called “careless American slapstick,” and apparently Dr. Watson gets knocked unconscious somewhere in the process.

Fred Lloyd also played in a 1948 adaptation of Oliver Twist with Alec Guinness and Anthony Newley.  If you’re not of a certain age, you may not remember Anthony Newley as well as Obiwan Kenobi, but among Newley’s many TV roles was “Vince Watson” on EastEnders in 1998, so he bears mention on this podcast.

Fred Lloyd’s first wife, Auriol Lee, divorced him about ten years before he played Watson and almost immediately became the first woman pilot to fly across the equator in Africa. Since she was born in England and died in America, I think this Dr. Watson got his “women of three continents” knowledge with just one wife.

Fred Lloyd died in Sussex in 1949, which seems like a good place for a Watson to end his days, and got an admirable obituary from Sir John Gielgud.

Watsonian Wind-up

Was that enough Watsonian work for the week? Well, there’s always next week.

If you would like to write in, you can reach the Watsonian Weekly at our e-mail address:  podcast @ johnhwatsonsociety.com  -- that’s podcast @ johnhwatsonsociety.com   and we will take questions and Watsonian tidbits in both text e-mails and voice memos, if you have a phone or otherwise setup to email a voice memo, as we heard from Rob and Margie this episode.

Since it is our inaugural episode, and I’ve spent my initial podcast days on a much stranger podcast than this, we’re going to close this episode with a little musical number, parodying the theme from an old John Wayne movie to create a new Watsonian song.  Ready?

You probably aren’t, but we’ll hope to see you again next week all the same. Bye!