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Last week, I reviewed the film The Six Triple Eight about the all-black women’s battalion that went to England to sort a huge backlog of mail during World War II. Tina finished The Shepherd’s Life by James Rebanks, a memoir of a childhood on a farm in Cumbria that also includes an education at Oxford.

Lucy Worsley’s Holmes Vs Doyle aired on PBS in December. It was broadcast a year earlier on BBC Two under a different title: Killing Sherlock: Lucy Worsley on the Case of Conan Doyle. As she did in Agatha Christie: Lucy Worsley on the Mystery Queen, Worsley explored well-known aspects of Doyle’s life but also revealed deeper understandings.

Lucy Worsley gives us quite a story. In the beginning, Arthur Conan Doyle feels overshadowed by his own creation and annoyed by it. Eventually, he takes control of his creation in ways that satisfy him but don’t always satisfy his audience. In the end, at the invention of film, Doyle loses control of Holmes.

I was surprised to learn that the catchphrase that we associate with Holmes, “Elementary, my dear Watson,” didn’t appear in any of the stories. Instead, it showed up in a play and, more importantly for its popularity, in the first talking film of Sherlock Holmes.

I always assumed that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle received the “Sir” because everybody loved Sherlock Holmes. But it turns out that it was in appreciation for a book of propaganda that defended colonialism after the Boer War. The British government liked it at the time, but it makes us cringe, today. On the other hand, Doyle recognized racism as a factor in a real-life case of injustice where he championed for the defendant.

The final episode tells us about Doyle’s feud with Harry Houdini over spiritualism. We even get to see a film clip of Doyle himself expressing his frustration that his fans clearly believed that Sherlock Holmes, a fictional character that he invented, was real. Why couldn’t they also believe in ghosts?

BBC published a DVD version of this three-episode series, but it’s not widely available in US libraries, yet. I streamed Holmes vs Doyle with my PBS Passport, a benefit of supporting my local PBS station.