The Confabulannotated Sherlock Holmes, Chapter 1.2
Featuring Mission: Impossible - Fallout, BBC in-jokes and negging
Previously on my confabulannotations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mystery, The Hound of the Baskervilles: Holmes and Watson found a stick during breakfast.
And now, the story continues…
“I think also that the probability1 is in favour of his being a country practitioner who does a great deal of his visiting on foot.”
“Why so?”
“Because this stick, though originally a very handsome one has been so knocked about2 that I can hardly imagine a town practitioner carrying it. The thick-iron ferrule is worn down, so it is evident that he has done a great amount of walking with it.”
“Perfectly sound3!” said Holmes.
“And then again, there is the ‘friends of the C.C.H.’ I should guess that to be the Something Hunt4, the local hunt to whose members he has possibly given some surgical assistance, and which has made him a small presentation in return.”
“Really, Watson, you excel5 yourself,” said Holmes, pushing back his chair and lighting a cigarette. “I am bound to say that in all the accounts which you have been so good as to give of my own small achievements you have habitually underrated your own abilities. It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but you are a conductor of light6. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it. I confess, my dear fellow, that I am very much in your debt7.”
He had never said as much before, and I must admit that his words gave me keen pleasure, for I had often been piqued by his indifference8 to my admiration and to the attempts which I had made to give publicity to his methods. I was proud, too, to think that I had so far mastered his system9 as to apply it in a way which earned his approval. He now took the stick from my hands and examined it for a few minutes with his naked eyes10. Then with an expression of interest he laid down his cigarette, and carrying the cane to the window, he looked over it again with a convex lens.
Despite Watson’s bold assertion here, there is no evidence in any of the Sherlock Holmes oeuvre that the man has had any formal training in statistics or probability theory. Frankly, he wouldn’t know a Bernoulli distribution from an ergodic Markov chain.
During speaking tours of Leeds and Wigan in the final years of his life, Conan Doyle would often regale listeners with a meandering tale of how, as a schoolboy, a lust-driven prefect had declared him to be ‘originally a very handsome stick, but one so knocked about’, a phrase that evidently stuck with him.
In early radio adaptations of this story, producers would often play what they considered a ‘perfect sound’ at this point. This long-running BBC in-joke proved an inadvertent showcase of the changing times, varying wildly over the years from a soprano hitting a high C (1925) to a laughing baby (1948) to a hippy being set on fire (1974).
‘The Something Hunt’ was also famously the answer Henry Cavill gave in his application quiz for ‘Mission: Impossible - Fallout’ when asked the question ‘Who is Tom Cruise?’. Despite his obvious lack of study, Cavill’s magnificent moustache was awarded extra points, and he was given a conceded pass, allowing him to take part in the film.
Term used courtesy of Microsoft Corporation.
Leading physicists of the era believed that light waves were conducted through a mysterious medium known as ‘the luminous aether’, a jelly-like substance that the more commercially minded scientists posited might be able to be siphoned off, jarred and sold for use as an invisibility potion or, alternatively, a condiment for one’s toast.
Conan Doyle later reveals that this is very much a literal statement from Holmes, who owes Watson tens of thousands of pounds as a result of his previously discussed monstrous cocaine addiction.
In modern parlance, Watson had been well and truly ‘negged’.
Okay, Watson. Let’s calm down.
The reference to Holmes’ ‘naked eyes’ was considered highly titillating at the time, with at least one member of the House of Lords blaming the passage for an erection that required him to be evacuated from parliament.