A new three-part series featuring the popular British historian and lifelong Sherlock Holmes fan who seeks to answer why author Arthur Conan Doyle came to despise the character that made him rich and famous.
Lucy Worsley’s Holmes vs. Doyle airs Saturday, January 4 at 8 a.m. on WXXI-WORLD.
Throughout the series, Worsley explores the parallel lives of Doyle and Holmes in the historical context of their times. From the dying years of Victorian England, through the imperial crisis of the Boer war, the optimism of the early Edwardian years, to the trauma of the First World War, Arthur and Sherlock lived through them all.
Featured in over 60 original stories and countless film and television adaptations, Sherlock Holmes has intrigued and excited fans with his intellect and powers of deduction for more than a century. Over the course of three episodes, Worsley investigates the curious relationship between detective and author.
In Episode 1, “Doctor and Detective,” Lucy unearths Holmes’ origins in Doyle’s early life as a medical student in Edinburgh. She unpacks the early stories, revealing the dark underbelly of late Victorian Britain, from drug use to true crime. She explores how Doyle infused his stories with cutting-edge technological developments and traces the author’s growing disenchantment with his detective, heading to Switzerland to visit the site of one of the most famous deaths in literature.
In Episode 2, “Fact and Fiction,” Lucy explores Doyle’s desire to distance himself from Sherlock after the detective’s apparent death at the Reichenbach Falls. From the delights of the ski slopes to the horrors of the Boer War, she reveals how far Doyle went to make himself the hero of his own story. He even took on the role of detective himself in one of the most important legal cases of the 20th century.
In the finale, “Shadows and Sleuths,” Lucy investigates the return of Sherlock. Doyle began the Edwardian age delighting in all it had to offer, but as the First World War approached, the darkness of the later stories mirrored the reality of Doyle’s life. After losing his eldest son, he became an evangelist for spiritualism, and his star declined after a public spat with a famous magician. Sherlock Holmes, in contrast, found a life beyond his author on stage and screen.