Young Sherlock Holmes

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s infamous detective, Sherlock Holmes, gets a teenage makeover for this adventure executive-produced by Steven Spielberg. While it bears no resemblance to any of Conan Doyle’s novels, as an idea for a movie it’s kind of cute – Sherlock (Rowe) is at boarding school when he meets young John Watson (Cox) for the first time. Together they investigate a mystery involving a religious cult, Egyptian mummification and murder – the first, of course, of many such crime-solving adventures.
A sleuthing adventure set against a foggy English backdrop, this is part Indiana Jones, part Victorian gothic drama and part tongue-in-cheek comedy, as the duo put their detective skills to the test. Lovers of Conan Doyle’s crime novels may be horrified to see their hero given the Spielberg touch (there’s more swashbuckling than deduction here, and there are some very un-Victorian special effects), but as a piece of entertainment it’s fun throughout. The movie, originally titled Young Sherlock Holmes and the Pyramid of Fear, presumably because the film-makers expected it to spawn a sequel or two, wasn’t a great success at the box office, so no sequel was made. Cox has since appeared in episodes of TV’s Casualty and Midsomer Murders, while Rowe has also appeared in Midsomer Murders, and series including Holby City and Kavanagh QC.