I said this in reviewing the first season of Van der Valk:
In this household, we watch a lot of mystery series: U.S. (such as CSI: Miami and Law & Order: Criminal Intent), Canadian (Murdoch Mysteries and Intelligence are but two that come to mind), and U.K. (the main fare of our watching with such stellar series as Midsomer Murders and Whitechapel) alike. What we don’t generally watch are the older series done in the Sixties and Seventies, as both production and acting usually leave a lot to be desired. So I was more than a bit surprised at just how bloody good Van der Valk was!
Alas I cannot say that of The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, in which the acting, the mysteries, and even the production pretty much sucked eggs. It’s easily the worst Thames produced mystery series I’ve seen to date. Indeed part of that problem is that it wasn’t really a mystery series. For what I mean by that, go read Kelly’s review of The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana, where he finds Holmes himself classified under the literature of the fantastic, before you continue reading this look at this series.
Back already? And there I was enjoying a Smashing Pumpkins Ale, a lovely seasonal libation we brew here. Oh, well.
What we have here is an apparently random selection of really deservedly forgotten pulp characters of the kind that are lovingly talked about in The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana – characters so minor that barely anyone today would recognize them, let alone be interested in their mostly pedestrian and quite forgettable exploits.
To call them the rivals of The Great Detective is to slur that august personage; for example, two of the characters here are William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki who is a ghost hunter and Guy Boothby’s gentleman thief Simon Carne. Hell, another one is Arthur Morrison’s Horace Dorrington, a rotten to the core private detective! None of these stories make for better than merely awful watching.
Matching the inferior grade as characters is the acting of the performers, who seem more than slightly embarrassed by the scripts that they have been given – the writers use every bad cliché possible and even a few I thought that common decency would have suggested not using.
Despite the fact that it was produced at the same time and by the same studio as the Van der Valk series, even the sets look cheap and tacky.
Do yourself a favor – skip this series and go watch the Van der Valk series; you’ll be much happier that you did so.
(Thames Television, 1971 and 1973; Acorn, 2009)
[Cat Eldridge]
