I can't ever speak.

I can't ever speak you for ever. I'm gonna be able to be. As our tale begins, an attractive young woman rides her bicycle down a lonely country road.

Unbeknownst to her, a strange, dark figure loads a revolver before mounting his own cycle

and setting off in pursuit of the lady,

always staying eerily at a distance. And so begins the adventure of the solitary cyclist.

In his book, A Study in Celluloid, Michael Cox recalled,

This was the first film to be made, though it was never intended to be the first in order of transmission.

Like many other producers before me, I wanted to get this style of my series firmly established before making the

episode on which we would be judged by our audience and the critics. So this film and two

others were made before we embarked on a scandal in Bohemia, which was to be our curtain

razor, just as it had launched the short stories in the Strand magazine in 1891.

But there were problems from the very beginning.

In Granada's greatest detective, Keith Frankel reports on how this classic series

almost collapsed before it even began.

In the weeks prior to shooting the very first adaptation in June 1983, Jeremy

Brett, David Burke, Michael Cox, and director John Davies convened for a lengthy series of discussions

on how precisely to execute a telefilm version of this particular text. Each asserted his own vision and slowly a composite version

took shape, detailing the realization of the major narrative beats as well as development of character.

Then, the future of the entire sequence was suddenly thrown into jeopardy by the 11th hour

departure of Davies from the production.

In Bending the Willow, Michael Cox remembered,

When we set the series up, I asked a director called John Davies to be the first director.

...