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The Other Baker Street Detective
 Blake’s radio debut came in 1939 in a BBC serial: ENTER SEXTON BLAKE. Just as in the films, George Curzon played Blake, with Brian Laurence as Tinker. The serial was adapted by Ernest Dudley who later went on to create his own celebrated radio sleuth, Doctor Morelle:
"I happened to know the chap who ran Amalgamated Press at the time, who owned, as you know, Sexton Blake and Nelson Lee and all those schoolboy detectives, and I’d been doing quite a bit of work on BBC radio and I suddenly though what a wonderful character he’d be, you see. And I went to them and they were very dodgy at first because they were very jealous; they owned it, they owned the whole thing and the writers never got a look in. It took them about a month to make up their minds but in the end they said yes and I did it, of course." THE DETECTIVE WEEKLY trumpeted its imminent appearance: Only two weeks! And then begins the great new wireless serial play bringing our famous Sexton Blake over the air to you for the first time! There have been Sexton Blake films and today this grand character stands out as the most famous detective of fiction still in existence! When most of our fathers were young they read and were thrilled by the adventures of Sexton Blake of Baker Street and today this great man and his assistant, Tinker, are more popular than ever! And with the father as well as the sons and, indeed, with mothers and daughters too, Sexton Blake is a personality everyone enjoys reading about… and now everybody will be able to hear him in one of his most thrilling cases broadcast by the BBC! But Ernest Dudley deemed it a failure: "It may have been because it wasn’t very well written by me, of course! That’s the point! But, well, this was the first time it was done on the radio. Sexton Blake, as you know, had been running for a long long time, of course, and he was a character in print and to transfer that to radio, to sound, was asking a hell of a lot. And perhaps it did work but I never thought it did. I think really it was, in a way, like Sherlock Holmes; it was stuff for the printed page." Was George Curzon perhaps too old and too staid an actor to play the part? "Yes, that’s a good point. Radio acting is totally different from stage acting; it’s an art on its own and you can either do it, I think, or you can’t." And you thought Tinker was a slightly odd bit of casting? 
"Yes, I did! He was a well-known dance band leader and I don’t now why he was cast for it. He was slim and short and boyish-looking, I suppose, but to play a young boy like Tinker on radio you need a youngish actor for a start and certainly what’s-his-name wasn’t a youngish actor." Nevertheless, audiences must have liked it well enough for it was followed in 1940 by A CASE FOR SEXTON BLAKE adapted by Francis Durbridge, the creator of Paul Temple, from a story by Ted Holmes and starring Arthur Young as Blake and Clive Baxter as Tinker: "It’s a story set in a castle on an island in remote Northumberland. The atmosphere is wonderful… murderer wearing the legendary iron mask created by Alexander Dumas… it’s a shame we can’t hear any of that." Sadly, nothing from either serial remains in the archive. |