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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #91: Three Sherlocks

Apr 5, 2025Apr 5, 2025The Barista Collective1 Comment

To many fans of detective fiction, he’s the greatest sleuth of them all: Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. He’s figured in many stories, novels, films, TV series and video games, to mention just a few of Mr Holmes’ exploits. He survived death by Reichenbach Falls, he appeared in the Victorian era and beyond, including adaptations in present-day England and America. And yet: to date, the greatest detective has only appeared on this site very, very rarely. Well, in the podcast episode we’re releasing today, this will be remedied, as Julie, Sam and Alan share their deductions about three cinematic takes on Sherlock Holmes: the 1939 film The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes starring Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce and Ida Lupino; Billy Wilder’s 1970 classic The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, in which Robert Stephens and Colin Lively play the iconic Holmes and Watson; and the 1976 made-for-TV film Sherlock Holmes in New York, which has Roger Moore don the inauthentic yet iconic deerstalker – and John Huston take on the role of Holmes’ nemesis Moriarty. Which of these do justice to Sherlock Holmes? Which are worth watching, and which are better given a miss? Make sure to join our trio of pop culture baristas as they get out their magnifying glasses and investigate the case of Three Sherlocks. The game’s afoot!

And if you’d like to hear more about less-than-successful takes on Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective or indeed other iconic trios, make sure to check out these past episodes:

A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Christmas Special 2017, in which Damn Fine O.G.s Matt and Mege share their dismay at the final episode (to date) of BBC’s modern-day Sherlock (warning: this was our first attempt at podcasting, so the audio quality is… Victorian, one might say)
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #73: Three Draculas, in which Julie, Sam and Matt talk about three takes on another classic figure of Victorian literature, though one more likely to drain your blood than solve your murder

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #228: This movie’s no picnic

Apr 4, 2025May 5, 2025Melanie3 Comments

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

*Key frame of* Stalker *(Copyright: Mosfilm)*

As a Damn Fine Cup afficionado, you’ve probably already seen Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) or read the novel it’s based on, Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers, or both. You’ll probably have informed opinions on each of them. If you haven’t: sorry, there are spoilers coming.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #226: The BBC Radio Lord Of The Rings Part One: The Fellowship Of The Cast

Mar 21, 2025Oct 17, 2025Alan Kuhl Graham3 Comments

I have nothing against the Peter Jackson The Lord Of The Rings films. They’re fine. Not damning with faint praise fine. Actually fine. Brilliantly constructed blockbusters that deliver on pretty much every front. But one thing they are not is a dramatised realisation of my Middle Earth. Because another adaptation got there first, and filled up my headspace with performances and music that will forever be entwined with my love for this story.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #217: L.A. Confidential, revisited

Jan 17, 2025Jan 24, 2025Julie3 Comments

Director Curtis Hanson with Kevin Spacey. Image copyright Warner Bros.

Although I try to avoid plot spoilers, for those who have never seen L.A. Confidential: skip this article and see the film first. It’s worth it, and inevitably there will be minor spoilers ahead.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #211: The book’s the thing

Dec 6, 2024Dec 13, 2024Matt3 Comments

Like Sam, I was a big fan of The Little Vampire as a kid – though, unlike him, I was a Book Firster. I loved the books by Angela Sommer-Bodenburg (at least as far as I read them, stopping somewhere around the fourth or fifth volume), and I think I may have had something of a kid crush on the vampire girl the main character fell in love with, but I couldn’t abide what I saw of the TV series. I’d been looking forward to watching the adaptation, but to me at the age of 10 or 11 it felt deeply silly. To be fair to the series, though, perhaps it was simply that I was growing out of the books at the time, and maybe I minded what I saw as the series’ silliness because it highlighted to me the ways in which The Little Vampire was, first and foremost, a series of children’s books. Not YA, not “for all ages”, but kids’ books. Which doesn’t mean that you’re magically too old for such fare at the age of 10, nor that such books cannot be enjoyable as you get older – but, for me, The Little Vampire stopped being as enjoyable as it had been originally. And, having loved the books dearly until then, perhaps that’s why I pretty much stopped reading them from one day to the next.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #203: A Tale Of Two Christies

Oct 11, 2024Oct 18, 2024Alan Kuhl Graham3 Comments

In 2002 the UK TV Channel ITV announced that it was to begin producing an all new adaptation of Agatha Christie‘s Miss Marple novels. These would be big-budget, high-production-value affairs, with an eye on the global TV market.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #197: The Umbrella Academy

Aug 30, 2024Oct 12, 2024Mege4 Comments

Warning: There be spoilers.

I haven’t read the comics, but have every intention to do so, but I don’t know why I haven’t praised the many great aspects of The Umbrella Academy (2019-2024). I have insomnia these days (or nights, rather), and so it takes something stronger to keep me watching attentively during the small hours. That bunch of ever-bickering unrelated siblings is a treat with comedy, drama, weirdness, psychological depth and the fear of the end of the world (more than once, hehe).

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #173: Go build me a world to my liking

Mar 15, 2024Oct 12, 2024Mege3 Comments

To me, The Lord of the Rings is unreadable. Not because the writing is bad; it’s not. And not because I am not into fantasy; while it’s not my favourite genre, I don’t run for the hills if someone suggests a good fantasy novel to me. I have not yet read a bad China Miéville novel, if that is anything to go on. I am also not afraid of super-long novels, either – behold, I am the guy who read Infinite Jest and loved it. It’s just that investing myself in a heavy brick of a novel, there is a point where the text has to convince me that it’s worth wading through it for the next couple of days or weeks.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #162: The Wonders of Wonka

Dec 29, 2023Oct 12, 2024Mege3 Comments

Yes, I am of the firm opinion that Die Hard (1988) is a Christmas movie, but enough about that. In Paul King’s Wonka (2023), there is often snow on the cobblestones of the old town renowned for its chocolate. It could be Paris or Charles Dickens’ London, while the shopping arcades reminded me of Milan, but it matters little where the story is set: it’s an olden-time dream world where it’s possible to manufacture magical chocolate if you are ready to go and milk a giraffe at the local zoo.

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast Christmas Special 2023

Dec 24, 2023Dec 24, 2023The Barista Collective1 Comment

As the sheer Ho-ho-honess of the season descends on us, here’s a little something for under your tree: our 2023 Christmas Special. This year we’re taking the opportunity to put a Damn Fine fingerprint on the media meme of the year: Barbenheimer. Join us – Julie, Sam, Alan and Matt, but also Damn Fine O.G. Mege and favourite frequent guest Dan Thron of Martini Giant (who took some time this autumn to talk all things Exorcist with us) – as we come up with double bills and mash-ups of wildly divergent and strangely complementary movies, taking our listeners from Paddiface and The Wizard of Chess via a very special Boris Karloff two-header and Wonkas of the Flower Moon to The Sound of Eagles and Under the Hours. (FYI, most of these are working titles that we’ll have to workshop before the final product is pushed out the door, or so Marketing tells us.) So, in the spirit of plastic dolls come to life and Cillian Murphy’s piercing eyes, of learning to start worrying and hate the bomb and of being Just Ken, we at A Damn Fine Cup of Culture wish all of our listeners happy holidays filled with good films, series, books, games and music!