I have spent most of the winter watching Sherlock Holmes DVDs, curled up in the front room with my honeys. Shirley Coombes! Kay and I bought a boxed set of the complete Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce series from the 1940s and we watched all 14 of them. These films are addictive and watching them makes you feel as though you've entered another world, a place where villains always look foreign or shifty, women are virtuous or dangerous, and where there's always an elementary deduction that solves the case. Made in America, often featuring wartime propaganda, nothing perks up a dreary afternoon better than a bit of Rathbone and Bruce banter in the study at 221B. Here's a little conversation about them:

How did we get into these films? It feels as though I've been watching them forever.
Kay: One of my channels that we don't have any more, Granada Plus, was showing the films and we watched one on a Saturday afternoon at my house and we loved it. I can't remember which one it was but it was really great. I started looking out for them and whenever they were on I'd phone up and say: "Charlotte! Quick! I'm coming round."

What's your favourite one?
Kay: Spider Woman is fantastic, I think it probably wins because I think it was the first one that we realised that it was set in the Word War II period instead of the Victorian period. We'd seen other ones that were set in the contemporary period but you could still believe it was Victorian, but Spider Woman made us gasp when there were references to Hitler and Mussolini and Hirohito. So wrong!

Simon: My favourite was the last one, Dressed to Kill. It's one of the ones where he has a formidable lady adversary, which gives him lots of opportunities to make references to the devious ways of the female, and indulge his innate distrust of ladies.

I think my favourite one is Spider Woman as well, because it's just crazy. It's got everything in it, including a midget in blackface called Obongo, it's got a poisoned sweetie wrapper, great lines about how poison is a woman's murder weapon, there's loads of homoerotic episodes in it too.

Could you tell us about whether or not you think Holmes and Watson are gay?
Kay: They definitely are and there's quite a lot of homosexual actors and homosexual villains throughout the series which is pretty exciting. In Pursuit to Algiers there's an evil homo. Watson often makes references to pretty ladies but it's really obvious that he only has eyes for Holmes and Holmes is always defending Watson, protecting him, calling him his "good friend" even though Watson is obviously a bumbling liability. It's like a love is blind type situation.

Simon: Holmes teases Watson about leaving him too, sometimes, he suggests that he's not going to be around. Watson always goes "Oh Holmes! Oh no!"

There's that great scene in Spider Woman where the poisoned chocolate wrapper has threatened their lives and Holmes saves the day and they stand clutching each other and gasping at the window.

Could you talk about Holmes' hair please?
Simon: We watched many different varieties of Holmes' hair and there doesn't seem to be much logic to it other than, towards the very end, he just has it swept back in a more streamlined style. In some of the earlier films he has quite funny Julius Caesar wispy bits coming out from the side of his head.

Kay: It's in Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon where his hair is at its most flingaway and he's got a very bizarre look where his hair curls right across his forehead.

What do you think of the films' depictions of Limehouse?
Kay: Holmes often goes and to Limehouse to get information from his criminal informants. There's always lots of fog, foggy London, and really bizarre cavernous places that look nothing like a real place. The pubs in Limehouse are small, most buildings in London would have been very small and poky and labyrinthine. But in these films they go into these gigantic two-storey open-plan pubs. Quite often there'll be an American actress doing a really terrible Cockney accent, which I always enjoy.

All of the films are set in either London or Scotland so Holmes will go on holiday to Scotland, or the train on which a murder takes place will be going from London to Scotland, and there's nothing inbetween the two places. When crimes happen in Scotland it's always the police from London that have to come and sort it out, Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard, and it makes me laugh, those American ideas about what Britain is like.

Simon: I always enjoy the fact that when they go to Scotland they just grab their coats and Holmes goes: "Watson! To King's Cross! We must get the first train to Scotland!" and they just rush off without picking up their bags or anything.

Sometimes they have little bits of footage of London scenes that have been shot on different bits of stock to the rest of the film, so you can spot them very easily.

What's the worst film in the series?
Kay: Secret Weapon. I've no idea what's happening in that film, it's completely unintelligible. It's the one that's most clearly about Word War II as well and is full of propaganda. It doesn't have much of a murder mystery aspect to it.

Simon: Sherlock Holmes in Washington.

I liked that. Watson chews gum, reads the funnies, drinks a milkshake. The baddies' secret intercom hidden in a fake vase, the whole scene where Holmes deduces that the villains are using an antique shop as a front for their operations because of a splinter of a Louis XIV chair that's found on a ratty old blanket, and the stock footage too.

What do you think about the wartime settings?
Kay: There are only two films that are Victorian anyway, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Hound of the Baskervilles, but there are others that could pass as Victorian, like you can't really tell when The Pearl of Death is set, and the later films as well, when they gave up on trying to reference the war. I think those later films are much better. Having said that, the references to the war in Spider Woman are what I like most about the film because I think it's really interesting to see that kind of propaganda, it gives an insight into the contemporary culture of the 1940s.

Simon: Even in films that don't reference the war, there's often a little speech at the end where Holmes sums up something about different countries working together for the greater good.

What about the depiction of disabled people in these films?
Kay: The criminals are always "a criminal type," which usually means that they're disabled. It's usually a club-footed man who's responsible for the heinous crimes, who's caught because his footprints are easy to trace. And of course we have the faux pygmy Obongo, played by Angelo Rossitto in Spider Woman, and Rondo Hatton, who had some kind of growth disability, plays the Hoxton Horror in The Pearl of Death. The villains are also weasely little men, with limps and glasses, homosexuals, people who look a bit foreign, or a beautiful lady.

Tell me about Holmes' disguises
Kay: In the earlier films Holmes tends to get into disguise quite a lot. There's a great moment where Watson believes that somebody else is Holmes in disguise and tries to pull of their nose because, you know, he's always doing it! Quite unbelievably, he manages to disguise himself so effectively with a false nose and a bit of a funny accent, and by doing his hair a bit differently, to be completely convincing as somebody else. His best disguise ever is when he dresses up as an Indian guy in a turban. And there's a really bizarre one, the one with the evil mariachi band in it, where he dresses up as a music hall performer and does a whole song and dance act in a striped blazer and a boater! He's completely unconvincing, you can spot him a mile off, though Watson is always convinced.

Simon: I like the way that, when he's finished with his disguise, he always clues Watson in to what's going on whilst he takes off his makeup.

What's the appeal of these films?
Simon: I was talking to someone at work about them the other day and she said that she always watches them when they're on but she knows that most people don't like black and white films these days, but the old films are the best. They're a different sort of pace to modern films, they're based on these really two-dimensional characters, and it's bizarre that they should invest so much in them. My favourite aspect of them is when Holmes comes up with some incredibly arcane bit of knowledge, for example about types of tobacco that he's written a monograph on.

Kay: I enjoy the opening credits that are the same in every film in the series: the fog, Holmes and Watson standing together in the fog, Watson's got a kind of shocked expression on his face and Holmes looks very wise. I really enjoy the way that the films start. I like it when Holmes celebrates having an adversary that can match him intellectually, whether it's a beautiful lady, or Professor Moriaty, and they have some kind of back-and-forth banter. I enjoy the science and the cod science as well. I really enjoyed the one with hypnotism in it, The Woman in Green, with Holmes believing in the power of hypnotism and Watson rubbishing it. I also really like seeing their room at 221B Baker Street, that's been the same in every film. I like the little outline of a man painted on the wall with the bullet holes shot exactly around his lapels.

Simon: Do you identify most with Holmes or Watson?

I think I'm Holmes but I'm actually Watson.

Simon: Holmes is so ridiculous that I don't identify with him, so I suppose that only leaves Watson. But I like the way that Watson is unexpectedly resourceful from time to time and not just totally bumbling.

Kay: I relate more to Professor Moriaty.