Familiar classics ... Michael Williams as Dr Watson and Clive Merrison as Holmes. Photograph: John Green/BBC
A world already awash with old-time TV (frequently available on most digital stations) and old time radio (especially BBC7) has now taken delivery of another station headquartered in Memory Lane: the OTR podcast ("classic old-time radio for the podcast enthusiast").
The nostalgia count here may be stronger for American listeners than for British ones, since much of the material belongs to their memory lanes rather than ours. In a long life of radio listening, I'm not sure I've had the privilege until now of meeting their whacky Roberts family and its whacky butler, Higgins, from It's Higgins, Sir, starring Harry McNaughton. Nor do I recall tuning in, of an evening beside a Yorkshire fireside, to The Halls of Ivy, even though this entertainment (prefaced by lavish tributes to the outstanding beers of Milwaukee, Wisconsin which paid for it) starred Mr and Mrs Ronald Colman. Nor can I even remember rushing to the wireless set to extinguish the opening chorus of the Alka Seltzer Show.
The CBS Radio Workshop ("dedicated to man's imagination - the theatre of the mind") sounds more promising. And The Saint, a series drawing on characters created by Leslie Charteris for his once hugely popular novels featuring Simon Templar, gentleman crook, played here by Vincent Price ("you're as unexpected here" he tells a lady visitor, "as Yankee bean soup on a menu in Moscow, but infinitely more welcome"), may awaken fond memories.
But what's really intriguing here is a set of Sherlock Holmes stories which isn't the long-running series of the 50s and 60s with clipped, precise and cerebral Carleton Hobbs as Holmes and a booming avuncular Watson from Norman Shelley, nor its excellent BBC successor, with Clive Merrison as the detective and Michael Williams as the doctor.
The trouble with the OTR versions is that Holmes sounds too much like John Gielgud and Watson too obviously modelled on Ralph Richardson - hardly surprising since these were the actors cast, but you rather feel the location is Rada rather than Baker Street. Holmes's brother Mycroft sounds as if he is taking a break not from mysterious duties in Whitehall but from work as an elocutionist, and may at any moment turn to Inspector Lestrade and inquire: How now, brown cow?
The truth is that we've been spoiled by more appropriate castings since. Anyone used to the old Granada TV series, still showing on ITV3, which gave us Jeremy Brett's bipolar Sherlock Holmes with his sudden wild flights of fantasy and sepulchral glooms, and Edward Hardwicke as his faithful accomplice, is likely to cherish the Gielgud-Richardson programmes more as museum pieces than as the genuine article. But I really did love the sound effects in their version of The Bruce-Partington Plans, of underground trains emerging from Aldgate station.
