Once the series was underway, new opening and closing titles of The Speckled Band were recorded to better match the ongoing series so the pilot episode could be included in a package to be sold abroad. It would have been hell to share rooms with him." I don't regard Holmes as a sympathetic character at all. People complained that I wasn't sympathetic but I didn't set out to be. Wilmer responded to criticism of his portrayal by pointing out that he played the character as written. I tried to show both sides of his nature. He was rather sardonic and arrogant, and he could be totally inconsiderate towards Watson. And I felt that this was always skirted round which made him appear rather sort of hockey sticks and cricket bats and jolly uncles… a kind of dashing Victorian hero. There’s a very dark side to Holmes, and a very unpleasant side to him.
The part interested me very much because I’d never really, I felt, seen it performed to its full capacity. Wilmer was a lifelong fan of Doyle's stories and looked forward to portraying the legendary sleuth. Wilmer and Stock were secured for a twelve part series (in black-and-white) to air the following year. The hour-long pilot was aired as an episode of the BBC anthology series Detective on 18 May and was popular enough to re-air on 25 September this time under the banner of Encore which was a BBC2 repeat slot. Giles Cooper wrote the adaptation and Douglas Wilmer was cast as Holmes and Nigel Stock as Watson, with Felix Felton as Dr. In 1964, an adaptation of " The Adventure of the Speckled Band" was commissioned as a pilot for a twelve part series of Sherlock Holmes stories. A handful of Doyle's stories were excluded from the deal: The Hound of the Baskervilles because Hammer Films' rights would not expire until 1965 following their 1959 film adaptation, and " A Scandal in Bohemia", " The Final Problem" and " The Adventure of the Empty House" which had been secured by producers of the Broadway musical Baker Street. In 1964, the BBC secured rights to adapt any five Sherlock Holmes stories with an option for a further eight from the Doyle estate.