The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (TV Series) The Absent-Minded Coterie (1973) User Reviews

The Absent-Minded Coterie

[Prismark10 · 6/10 · 9 February 2020]

Charles Gray plays French amateur detective Eugene Valmont, who likes to help out Scotland Yard.

Gray was so memorable as Mycroft Holmes, the smarter brother of Jeremy Brett's Sherlock.

In fact Valmont can easily be viewed as a combination of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes with one big difference. You can never win em all.

In football parlance, The Absent-Minded Coterie is a game of two halves. Valmont successfully deals with a group of counterfeiters who have been producing fake coins. Valmont uses his cunning, intelligence and the powers of observation. Everything that eludes Inspector Hale.

However it leads to another scam that the villains have been operating on wealthy vulnerable individuals with memory problems. People paying each week for low value items. Here Valmont meets his own Irene Adler and finds himself outfoxed.

I was disappointed by the ending where the main character seems to have lost all his wits which he so elegantly displayed earlier.

This was a good drama that suffers from being shot in the studio. It comes across as being too stagebound. Look out for character actor David Battley as the butler who is really working undercover.

A lot of fun

[Leofwine_draca · 6/10 · 23 May 2022]

A towering performance from the great Charles Gray lifts this episode of the show. It's mainly dialogue based, but the puzzling is ingenious and our hero is very much like a French version of Holmes. Gray is in his element here and the whole thing's a lot of fun.

Possibly the lowest point of series 2.

[Sleepin_Dragon · 4/10 · 19 January 2023]

French amateur Detective Eugene Valmont is on the hunt for a coiner, someone who's forging coins, but soon ends up investigating a more intriguing series of crimes.

I absolutely love Charles Gray, what a fabulous actor, with the most awesome voice, and of course there's a Sherlock Holmes link, playing Mycroft in several wonderful episodes opposite Jeremy Brett.

However, Gray was not able to single handedly save this episode. Series two has been so good, better than the first in my opinion, but this episode was a real disappointment. The french accent, it wasn't great, and slips on multiple occasions.

Despite some decent acting, I didn't find the story particularly engrossing, and the production was really inadequate. So far in series two, they've managed, for the most part, to make it look as though it wasn't entirely studio bound, this one sadly, looks as though it was filmed on a stage, it's so distracting, it's hard to watch.

Poor, 4/10.

Not so hot

[kmoh-1 · 9 November 2022]

I doubt whether Sherlock Holmes lost much sleep about this rival. Shame about this series - with such a depth of source material in Victorian detective stories, it really should not have run out of steam in its second series. This is a pretty duff encounter, confusing and unsatisfactory. It begins with a dramatic flash-forward, for no good reason at all. Valmont then kicks off in charming style, solving a little mystery for absent-minded Lord Semptam. He is then presented with a forgery case by baffled Scotland Yard. He not only solves this, with barely any detection at all, but he also homes in on another case, although it is not obvious what crime has been committed, or even if it is a crime. Few characters, apart from undercover man Podgers, catch the eye. How Valmont is progressing is never clear, except he says gnomic things that imply that he knows what is going on, even if Scotland Yard doesn't. It is hard to care who did what. The conclusion is disappointing to say the least. Underwhelming all round. Sherlock is safe, if this is the best the competition can do.