The President I'm.. As our tale begins, Sherlock Holmes reads a letter from his friend Dr. Watson, who is vacationing in the Lake District of Cumbria.

My dear Holmes, today I walked 14 miles across rough terrain and hardly a twinge from either my leg or my shoulder.

The landscape is as handsome as it is reported. I still entertain the hope that I can prevail upon you to join me.

I appreciate, of course, that the beauties of nature mean little to you,

but I believe you would have found some of the guests at my hotel most intriguing.

As Watson describes his fellow travelers,

Holmes arranges a series of figurines on the desk before him,

one for each of the characters recounted.

As the doctor concludes his report, it is clear to Holmes

that there is more to this cast of players than meets the eye.

And thus, we are introduced to the

suspects in what will come to be the disappearance of Lady Francis Carfax.

In the nearly two years since the Hound of the Baskervilles aired on ITV,

Jeremy Brett and Edward Hardwick had gone on to enjoy great success with the stage play, The Secret of Sherlock Holmes.

But weary from the strains of regular performances and the road,

the duo were happy to return to the more controlled and routine format of a television series.

However, in those two years, much had changed at Granada.

In 1990, the Broadcasting Act was passed by Parliament in the United Kingdom. The Act, which was

described as a way to liberalize and deregulate the British broadcasting industry by promoting

competition, was in fact a regulatory move by politicians to expand private sector television

production. As a result, both ITV and the BBC were forced to commission 25% of their

programming from independent producers. In the course of this reorganization, a new and younger

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