Sherlock goes back to character’s roots for TV special
The man who thrust our esteemed Sherlock Holmes into modern day on PBS’s version of “Sherlock” is guilty of regressing him back again to Victorian times.
When next we see Sherlock on Jan. 1 he’ll be in top hat and waistcoat with the intrepid Dr. Watson sporting a handlebar moustache and bowler.
Steven Moffat and cowriter Mark Gattis decided to make the change “just because we can,” says Moffat who also writes “Doctor Who.”
“Mark and I were having a fun day on set because he was doing some second-unit shooting with some evil monks ... Because I think we found an old prop that was on the original ‘Titus,’ so we were having a geek day. Gosh, what a surprise. And then we just thought, ‘Could we ever just do ‘Sherlock’ maybe one scene or some dream sequel or something (in the Victorian era)?’
“And then we just thought, ‘Why don’t we just do it? Why don’t we just do a Victorian one?’ We never bothered to explain what we were doing in modern-day London. So why do we have to bother explaining what they’re doing in Victorian London, when that’s where they’re supposed to be? So can we increase our normal massive run of three episodes to a record-breaking four, and do the special, which is separate from the rest of the series, and done in the correct period?’”
They did just that, as the 90-minute special, “The Abominable Bride,” airs Jan. 1, repeated Jan. 10
There were few difficulties acclimatizing to the late 1890s, says Moffat. But one of them was dealing with the female characters. “Suddenly we realized, the women, the women don’t speak. They don’t speak. Mrs. Hudson, I think has got one line of direct speech in the whole bunch of stories. And we sort of got to the point where we thought she was always like Una Stubbs (who plays Mrs. Hudson on the show). She is nothing like that at all,” says Moffat.
“And Mary, after her first story, really doesn’t say anything, except for in one story, where she gets her husband’s name wrong in one of the great continuity errors in history. And of course … there is no Molly Hooper in the original, a tragic omission on their part. One of our problems was to try and see what we were going to do with these very important characters, who actually don’t really have a place in the original,” he says.
When they were planning the show they were always determined to place it in contemporary, bustling London.
They didn’t really do anything about the idea until Moffat mentioned it to Sue Vertue, who is the producer on “Sherlock” and also his wife. “She said, ‘Well, why don’t you do it?’”
Moffat says the most unexpected problem with modernizing Arthur Conan Doyle’s books was that spooky stories seem much more suited to the murky shadows of the late 1800s.
“Ghost stories work better in a Victorian setting,” he says. “Doyle’s original stories that are creepy and scary, and the chillers, we haven’t done much with in the modern show. But putting it back into Victorian times, you think it’s a chance to do a ghost story, really a creepy, a scary one.”
And will Sherlock himself (as played by Benedict Cumberbatch) be any different? Only as far as his comportment, says Moffat. “Sherlock Holmes has the manners of the Victorian gentleman, which he doesn’t have in the modern version. ... and Dr. Watson is a bit more upright. They’re the same people, seen through the prism of a different time ...”
As for Cumberbatch, he admits playing the analytical Holmes has affected him. “You get hypersensitive to detail. You do get sort of tuned into it. But that takes a lifetime of work and a whole lifetime of eschewing other pleasures, such as being a sociable human being, which I’m far too sort of seduced by to eschew,” he says.
“On the first series when I was going to and from London on the train, I got very interested by smudges on people’s lapels and indents where rings should be and scuff marks and bits of mud on shoes. I knew (nothing) about what that meant, but I thought, ‘Well, there’s a clue.’”