A Scion Society of The Baker Street Irregulars
A Second Broadcast of Louis Hector’s Three Garridebs On Television
“… on the second occasion …”
– The Adventure of the Resident Patient (RESI)
It was nearly two years ago when we posted about the first television broadcast of a Sherlock Holmes story. On November 27, 1937 the National Broadcast Company broadcasted The Three Garridebs over its airwaves. Louis Hector portrayed Sherlock Holmes and William Podmore portrayed Doctor Watson.
We came across the above pictured article in the Sunday, September 11, 1938 edition of The New York Times. The article describes how the National Broadcasting Company would be temporarily suspending their transmissions the following Friday night, to make some adjustments. That Friday would be September 16, 1938 and the 8-9 p.m. telecast would be The Three Garridebs.
Joining Hector and Podmore were Arthur Maitland, James Spotswood, Violet and Selma Beeson, and Eustace Wyatt.
Now, the question is was this second broadcast a copy of the November 27, 1937 or a totally new production?
We welcome your thoughts on this. We also encourage you to check out our new post that offers up many “new” photographs of Louis Hector.
[…] the distinction of being the first actor to portray Holmes on television. We discussed this before HERE and […]
American broadcasting was ahead of the UK in many ways, but I think it’s likely that both the first and the second broadcasts of “The Three Garridebs” were transmitted live. Incidentally, Eustace Wyatt was a member of Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre company; he played Professor Moriarty in Welles’s radio adaptation of Gillette’s “Sherlock Holmes” in 1938.
This is a particularly good find, because it dates the production photos of the Holmes show in Lenox Lohr’s book “Television Broadcasting” (1940). Lohr had just stepped down as president of NBC at the time of publication.
The Holmes photos were made sometime after the studio cameras were repainted in aluminum. Going by other production stills, that happened in the fall of 1938. So we knew the photos weren’t shot in ’37 but had no other broadcast date till now.
NBC-TV was going on and off air a lot during that time. Not just due to equipment upgrades, but because third parties were test marketing home sets. RCA did not want even a few people from outside the company looking in until such time as they were ready to announce a public service.
[…] of Holmes on the radio. Only one of the nearly 80 radio broadcasts survive today and neither of his two television appearances as Holmes are known, so it makes sense that many Sherlockians don’t rattle of his name when […]
[…] we took a twist and decided to read the script that was used on the November 27, 1937 and the September 16, 1938 broadcast on the National Broadcasting Company television airwaves. These two broadcasts were the […]