Denise has sent me a review of The Hound Of The Baskervilles from Thomas Sutcliffe of The Independent. She adds:

The reviewer comments on two programmes shown back-to-back last night. Hound Of The Baskervilles on BBC1 and on ITV Goodbye Mr Chips. The review starts with the later of these and references it in initial comments.

There won’t be a lot of bookings for Dartmoor holidays arising out of Hound of the Baskervilles either, since it absolutely lashed it down all the way through the BBC’s rival Edwardian pot-boiler. This was aiming for your adrenal glands, rather than your tearducts, and it made its very first shot, a startling image of the hound’s first victim, lying gutted on a mortuary slab with a look of unutterable horror on his face. It made me jump a bit, but it was a while before the next jolt – when the hound suddenly appeared at a farmhouse window. It isn’t easy to make this story scary, since there can be very few people who don’t already know it backwards; it’s also faintly preposterous in its plotting.

What it can be, though, is an enjoyable exercise in style, and Allan Cubitt’s adaptation took every available opportunity for that. In a fine departure from the original, he had Holmes meet up with the villain of the piece (Richard E Grant at his most insinuating). “Such well-marked super-orbital development,” Stapleton said, admiring his opponent’s cranial formation. “Would you mind me running a finger along you parietal fissure?” Richard Roxburgh was pretty good as Holmes, but frankly, how can you compete when the enemy is given lines like that?

Just a further note to U.K. REGimentals – Richard will be on tonight in a repeat of “I Love 1987”.