Reality shows on television are a guilty pleasure for those of us that will even admit to occasionally watching them.  You know how it goes: Supposedly ordinary folks are put into competition with each other, usually having to live together and deal with personality factors along the way. Judging can be by experts, the general public, or whatever mysterious criteria the show-runners come up with. And this weekend, Sherlockiana’s own reality show had its yearly season finale.

I don’t know how popular our reality show is this days – not even a blip of interest  in it has shown up on the two major on-line discussion groups as of this morning.  But the times, they are a changing, and maybe this is just a part of it.

The biggest event on the Sherlockian calendar  has long been the annual dinner of the Baker Street Irregulars of New York. The weekend that surrounds it is nominally a celebration of Sherlock Holmes’s birthday, and it’s a time for Sherlockians  from all over the world to gather in New York City and see their old comrades once again. It’s a luxury item for those of us who don’t live in the city, but a goodly number of folks have long chosen it above other vacation choices every year, just as loyally as anyone who hits the same beach in Daytona every summer.

The reality show part of it is that even though every Sherlockian who can afford it can go to the BSI weekend, only a certain number  get invited to the BSI dinner on Friday night. And of those non-BSI that get invited,  only an even smaller number get inducted into the Baker Street Irregulars each year. This year the final cut numbered seven. The big difference between the BSI membership system and a television reality show is the amount of exposure the process gets. A televised version of our reality show would go like this:

Current members of the BSI would come on screen, one by one, in front of a microphone and explain why a certain friend of there’s should be invited to the BSI dinner or allowed to join the group.  As they did so, a montage of their friend’s Sherlockian achievements and life would flash on the screen.  You’d get a clip of the candidate talking about how badly they want to get to go to the BSI dinner and how much they like Sherlock Holmes. Of course, that’s just how a televised version would play – in reality, this part takes place in a letter to Mike Whelan, the head of the BSI.

On a TV version of our show, Mike would be our Simon Cowell and give either encouraging words of happy acceptance or a blunt critique and a rejection. In reality, this is the part that no one ever sees nor hears. Nobody knows whether  they are accepted or rejected until invitations to the dinner are sent out in November.  And while one would think that the Simon Cowell method seems harsh, there are moments when I think our current system just might be a little more cruel. Candidates who don’t get an invitation are left to their own imaginings as to why, or even if they had a chance. Rumors of blacklists pop up from time to time, and the words “Mike Whelan hates me” can be heard from time to time.

In reality-show world, the arrival or non-arrival of the invitations would make some great television.  The elation or bitter disappointment of candidates is the meat of these shows, and we have plenty of that, though nobody ever sees it.

Those candidates who get invited to the dinner, yet don’t get made members of the BSI on the night of the big dinner usually handle the let-down with the stoicism of failed Academy Award nominees. They know they’re in public and have to be happy for the winners. Ah, but give them a sequestered venting area with a mike and a camera like the typical TV reality show does and we might get a different picture, the sort that is currently saved for the privacy of one’s hotel room after it’s all over.

For decades,  many a Sherlockians has publicly accepted this system and privately cursed it. And no matter what your feelings about reality TV, there is a certain honesty to it. Even though it is producer-packaged and overly hyped, the people that you see on it are usually displaying their true hearts for the world to see. That’s the reality part, and that openness has become a big part of our modern world, for better or worse. 

Writer Warren Ellis once had a quote about Star Trek that I think applies to Sherlockiana: ''Trek has turned inward. If it's going to survive, it needs to reinvent the future. The fan base that sat through the episode where Spock's brain is stolen [is] not going away until they die. Don't play to them. Give the rest of us a reason to be interested.''

Yes, sometimes it seems like we need to give someone beside us a reason to be interested. It’s not just the BSI, even though I’m picking on the BSI inductions once again as my example.  The club is our flagship, we always expect much of them. And while we wouldn’t want or expect the BSI investitures to turn outward and open up as much as a reality TV show,  there is definitely room for improvement in the PR department. While Mike Whelan is given the Sherlockian resumes of every candidate for his choices, once those candidates are inducted into the BSI, we aren’t ever given a brief synopsis as to why. Their Sherlockian credentials only show up in their obituary in The Baker Street Journal many years later. 

Scott Monty did a great job of getting the news of this year’s list out on his Baker Street Blog almost the minute it happened,  forwarding it to the net from the dinner itself. He’s been taking Sherlockian news to a whole new level over at his blogsite,  but Scott is just one guy. The rest of us (me included) need to think about getting into the act a little bit more as well.

And while we’re on the subject, why is the BSI investiture list always the biggest, hottest news item to come out of the BSI weekend anyway? As the pinnacle of the Sherlockian year, shouldn’t we have something a little more newsworthy in the field of Sherlockiana?  Is the shilling reality show the best we can do these days? Something to consider.

Your humble correspondent,

Brad Keefauver