The

The I'm. As our story begins, a dead man rests in his funeral bed, surrounded by flowers, but attended by none, save his guard.

Unbidden, a one-legged man and his strange small companion, forced their way onto the premises,

only to affix a message to the corpse, a rough square of paper marked with a C-chiroglyphic

and a crude scrawl which reads,

The Sign of Four.

In his book, a study in celluloid, Michael Cox recalled the origins of this screenplay.

He wrote, John Hawksworth's script was originally intended to be

the pilot episode of our series. But the two-hour TV movie, a form which eventually did

homes a great deal of damage, was not in demand in 1983. So we reluctantly put the script aside and hoped that it would find its time.

When it was dusted off in 1986, very few revisions were needed.

We had chosen the more familiar form of the title, although within the story, Conan Doyle uses

the phrase the sign of the four,

and describes the sign as a line of crosses with four names beside it.

John suggested that we could make this a little more mysterious by using instead the Sikh symbol for the number four,

which looks like a figure eight with the top sliced off.

Watson, of course, being a veteran of the Indian Wars,

would be the first to recognize it.

Another fun piece of trivia here.

The attendant who is knocked unconscious in the opening scene

is a character from the original text named McMurdo,

the prize fighter bodyguard of the Shaltos.

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