THE MOVING PICTURE BOY ARCHIVE

THE BAKER STREET BOYS

Title: The Baker Street Boys
Production Type: TV Mini-Series
Year of Transmission: 1983
Director: Marilyn Fox directed episodes 1, 2, 5 and 6, and Michael Kerrigan directed episodes 3, 4, 7 and 8.
Screenwriter: Anthony Read, who devised the series, wrote episodes 1, 2, 7 and 8; and Richard Carpenter wrote episodes 3, 4, 5 and 6.
Country of Production: Britain
Genre: Drama, Mystery, Crime, Adventure
Length: 8 episodes of approximately 26 minutes each, a total of 3 hours and 29 minutes
Language: English
Availability: This series has never had a proper full release, only four episodes (edited) being given a VHS release in 1985. The series can be viewed in its entirety on Youtube here in somewhat poor quality (episode 4 of the linked video has no sound, though most of episode 4, minus the opening 10 minutes, can be viewed with sound here).

Principal boy actors: The main child characters of the series are four boys and two girls. The Baker Street boys are Arnold Wiggins (played by Jay Simpson, front row, second from left in publicity photo below), his lieutenant, Beaver (Damion Napier, back row, second from left), Shiner (Adam Woodyatt, back row, left), and Sparrow (David Garlick, front row, left). The two girls who are also members of the Baker Street 'Boys', despite their sex, are Queenie (Debbie Norris, far right) and Rosie (Suzi Ross, leaning on Jay Simpson).

Synopsis
Wiggins and his gang, Sherlock Holmes' "Irregulars", have learnt a great deal from the master detective, and put their knowledge to good use, solving cases that Holmes himself is too busy to deal with.

The series comprised four two-episode stories, and was the creation of Anthony Read, who had previously worked on two adaptations of Sherlock Holmes stories for the BBC in the 1960s, and said that he had long wondered what the Irregulars got up to when they weren't in the service of Holmes. At the time of series transmission, a novelisation, by Brian Ball, of two of the stories was released by the BBC. Anthony Read himself subsequently returned to his characters, and wrote a series of seven novels about the Baker Street Boys which were published by Walker Books between 2005 and 2012.

The two girls in the series are somewhat supporting characters who make the boys' meals and so forth; and the boys evince not the slightest hetero/romantic interest in them. For small mercies we should be grateful; on both these counts, a series made today might be somewhat different. It should be mentioned that this is a very fine series indeed, with excellent acting (particularly on the part of Jay Simpson), and an attention to period detail at which the Beeb certainly excelled at this time, and which shows the care that the BBC would put into their production, even when it came to a series primarily aimed at a juvenile audience.

Still, it seemed that the Beeb didn't really appreciate what they had on their hands, since, to Anthony Read's disappointment, they declined to commission a second series. Read later said: 'I have a feeling that the Children's Department, as it then was, were a bit miffed. It wasn't their idea, and they didn't regard it as being 'wholesome' or educational enough. Also, it didn't sell as well as we'd hoped - as well as the American co-producers had hoped - in the States, because the cockney accents were unintelligible to Americans. I'd said all along to the producers. "Make them speak slower! This is period stuff, so it's got to be more stage cockney." It was very difficult. When the Guild Awards came up the next year, the BBC didn't enter the series for them - they entered a dramatisation that had been made completely in-house called The Machine Gunners. Someone on the awards committee had seen The Baker Street Boys and wondered why it wasn't on the list, and so they called it in. It won.' (Quote from Sherlock Holmes on Screen, Alan Barnes, Reynolds & Hearn, 2002, p. 31.)

Below: front of dust jacket of hardback volume of TV tie-in novelisation, showing Jay Simpson as Wiggins

Below, left: listing for episode 1 in Radio Times 5-11 March 1983; below, right, article on series in same edition of magazine (Editor's personal collection, click on pictures to open full size image in new tab)

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