The Strange Case of the End of Civilisation as We Know It

This essentially forgotten TV programme is a quite extraordinarily bad one-off ITV comedy from 1977, written by and starring John Cleese. In it, Cleese plays a descendant of Sherlock Holmes, and it co-stars Arthur Lowe and Connie Booth as descendants of Dr Watson and Mrs Hudson respectively. Lowe's portrayal is the archetypal Stupid Watson, putting even Nigel Bruce's origination of the trope to shame in how incompetent and oblivious he is. Also, Watson is partially bionic, because this was made in the 1970s.

It is hard to believe that this was made in the same era as Cleese and Booth were in the middle of making Fawlty Towers, so far apart are they in quality that it would take Michael Palin an entire series to travel between them. The theory that Cleese gradually lost his comedic sensibilities between Fawlty Towers ending and the present day is disproved by the existence of The Strange Case of the End of Civilisation as We Know It, which shows he was just as capable of making missteps back then - and I'm not talking about the Ministry of Silly Walks there, mew!

The issue is that, even when it has a good gag (of which there are a few), just about every single joke in the film is laboured until it ceases to be funny, and is then laboured a bit more for good measure. It is dreadful. Quality guest stars are wasted, with most of them - such as Joss Ackland and Stratford "Belkov" Johns - enthusiastically overacting and chewing on the scenery in a way that would make Darrow proud, but the material just isn't there for them to make it actually any good. Denholm Elliott just about gets out with his dignity intact, but I'm not sure anybody else did.

One thing to praise it for is the lack of typical '70s blackface and yellowface. When representatives of the five continents gather, the Asian delegate is played by Burt Kwouk, and the African delegate by Christopher Asante - the latter of whom I most recently saw in Rumpole and the Golden Thread, one of the best Rumpole episodes. This small step in a progressive direction is then entirely undone by a terrible joke about simultaneous translation, where Kwouk's character hears the most stereotypical faux-Chinese imaginable, and Asante hears the sound of jungle drums!

The plot sees Cleese's Holmes gather together the world's greatest detectives as part of a plan to draw out the descendant of Professor Moriarty. This is a trope that was inexplicably popular around this point in the '70s, with resemblances to the film Murder by Death (1976) and a 1976 episode of The Goodies, Daylight Robbery on the Orient Express. Here, in addition to Poirot (called "Hercules Parrot," mew) we get send ups of contemporary detectives including Columbo, Kojak, and McCloud... No, me neither.

The ending sees Moriarty successfully bring about the end of civilisation as we know it, which fortunately prevented them from making any sequels. Cleese, meanwhile, should never be allowed to criticise anything other comedians have done (especially not Monty Python's Flying Circus season four, the one the others did without him) without having this immediately thrown back in his face. 

Although it's still a better version of Sherlock Holmes than the BBC's Sherlock.