David Burke died May 10 at ninety-one, the Guardian recorded in its May 19 obituary, and the entry the British press will keep returning to is the one he played for two seasons opposite Jeremy Brett: John Watson in Granada's Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1984-85. [1] He was a Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre actor most of his life. He was the best Watson on television for less than two years of it.

The Granada series had decided to take Conan Doyle's narrator seriously — not as a comic foil, not as a cipher to whom Holmes could explain himself, but as a doctor with his own intelligence, his own scepticism, and a soldier's bearing. Burke's casting was the production's working argument. He answered Brett back. The viewer who first met Watson through Burke met a man Holmes had reason to talk to. [1]

The career around that performance was the larger one. The Guardian lists Stalin in Reilly Ace of Spies, decades of RSC and National work, a long marriage to the actor Anna Calder-Marshall, and the kind of theatre cv that survives in cast lists and prompt books rather than in clips. [1] When he handed Watson to Edward Hardwicke after two seasons, he went back to it. That is the discipline the obit should honour.

Television rewards repetition. Burke gave the medium two seasons of work that earned the repetition without asking for it.

-- CHARLES ASHFORD, London