It’s the crime of the century!
How they turned once magical Sherlock into self-indulgent twaddle
WHERE did it all go wrong? and to think, it started so well — amid such glamour and promise, such hope and high expectation. Then, gradually, the doubts started to creep in and we began to worry that the early promise would be unfulfilled — and how right we were.
no, not Barack Obama’s presidency. i mean the BBC’s new version of Sherlock holmes.
The first series was superb. Fast, slick, intoxicatingly clever, and in a way that made you feel clever, too. an endless series of ‘Oh i see’ moments, when everything fell into place and, like poor, plodding Dr Watson, we the viewers finally caught up with how the great Detective had been thinking all along, and the jigsaw puzzle gave a satisfying click as the last tricky little piece popped into place.
all this was just how it should be — just how Sir arthur Conan Doyle’s superb, timeless, original books felt as well.
and Benedict Cumberbatch was great, too. you certainly wouldn’t mistake him for gregory Peck, not even in a London pea-souper. he might politely be described as ‘not conventionally handsome’.
But he was perfect for the part, and soon had his hordes of adoring (and self- described, we should add) ‘ Cumberbitches’ following his every move.
intense, charismatic, fashionably geeky and slightly disconnected, and obviously a wayward genius of some sort. it was marvellous stuff all round, and there was hardly anyone who didn’t love it.
There are still moments that stay with you even now.
That chap mysteriously killed in an empty field, miles from anywhere, with no obvious murder weapon in sight? he was hit on the head by his own boomerang. Of course he was.
admittedly though, that same episode, a Scandal in Belgravia, did feature a completely stark naked irene adler, now luridly a high-class dominatrix, which was hardly in the spirit of the original stories.
and, sadly, this gave us due warning of things to come.
NOW, we are limping through an ill-judged fourth series, and it’s all gone horribly wrong. mark gatiss and Steven moffat’s update of the great detective is starting to look as clueless as holmes himself in The adventure Of The yellow Face. (The only original in which holmes fails to deduce the right answer, by the way. it comes as rather a relief to see him getting it wrong for once.)
The series has turned from clever into clever- clever, smart into smart- a** ed. Once brilliantly baffling, like a cryptic crossword puzzle, now it’s become downright weird or, worse still, utterly implausible. not to mention melodramatic and way over-thetop, like a bad soap opera.
The most recent episode, about the horrible serial killer Culverton Smith, was a prize example.
it all turned on the need for Dr John Watson to be jolted out of his profound grief for his dead wife and his estrangement from holmes, whom he blames for her death. ( mrs Watson had jumped in front of a bullet meant for holmes at the end of another episode. ‘implausible’ indeed.)
The idea now is that if Sherlock himself were to be nearly murdered, but not quite, then Watson would have to come galloping to his rescue, and they would soon be bezzies again. it was beyond implausible, it was just silly. One can almost hear Sir arthur Conan Doyle harrumphing crossly all the way from late Victorian Britain. as for the sudden appearance of Sherlock’s sister, never previously mentioned . . .
Worse till, Sherlock’s character has started to be tampered with. The brilliant, icily controlled and slightly terrifying detective created in the original tales has gradually been turned into a gibbering, drugaddled wreck. although still in a £ 1,000 designer Belstaff coat. Junkies are glamorous, you see.
you always knew they were going to make a big thing of Sherlock’s drugs habit. in Doyle’s stories, there’s little more than passing reference to holmes’s use of cocaine to stimulate his braincells when working on a particularly difficult case, and his refusal to go to bed at a sensible time. he certainly isn’t much of an advert for healthy living. (Sigmund Freud took cocaine as well — which might explain some of his more excitable theories.)
But the key thing to remember here is that, in the 1890s, bizarre as it may seem, cocaine wasn’t illegal in Britain. not until 1920. But the moment you make an updated Sherlock a drug addict with needle marks all up his arm, you change him utterly.
you make him an abject addict, a ‘smackhead’, as Dr Watson says, or ‘off his t**s’, as Sherlock himself tastefully puts it. yes, indeed, the show really has become very 21st century, hasn’t it? and the great detective has lost all his glacial dignity as a result. Worse still, he has become a common criminal for the sake of mere self-indulgence, something the original Sherlock holmes would never have done.
For all his maverick tendencies, he had the utmost respect for the law of the land, only playing a little fast and loose when it was essential to solve a crime. now, he’s become an unwashed, self-pitying yob.
There were more fashionably sniggery drugs references in the revelation that mrs hudson was actually the widow of a major drugs dealer herself.
mrs hudson! hence that fact that she drove an aston martin, which she could take round corners and handle like The Stig. Perfectly plausible, eh? But perhaps we were being told something about 21st- century female empowerment, i don’t know. along with aston martins we have had helicopters, terrorists, bombs, torture scenes . . . and everyone seems to have shot everyone else at some point or another. it’s all getting rather James Bond, far from the strangely cosy-yet-thrilling world of the original. are its creators pitching for their next project, perhaps? in a recent interview, gatiss said: ‘i would love to do something with Bond. i once went to the pub with Steven moffat on the condition that we didn’t speak about Doctor Who or Sherlock. So we ended up talking about James Bond all night. We actually came up with a really good story.’ Finally, we have seen this new, self-indulgent Sherlock revealed for what he really is — a weepy millennial, giving his friend Watson a big, tearful manhug in a scene that would make Basil rathbone run a mile.
THE original holmes was an admirable symbol of Victorian Britain at its toughest and most supremely self-confident. But perhaps every age gets the holmes it deserves. Benedict Cumberbatch’s version has even started using Twitter, we learned, at which even Watson sighed: ‘he really has lost it.’
Cumberbatch remains a compelling screen actor — although both he and martin Freeman must be itching by now to move on to pastures new, having really exhausted this one.
and Toby Jones as the repulsive Culverton Smith was quite the most hypnotically horrible screen villain we’ve seen for ages — as you might expect from such a superb actor.
The very incarnation of human evil, he even seemed to be able to communicate nastiness with his snaggly little teeth. and his smile was the stuff of nightmares.
Of course, he was loosely based on Jimmy Savile — although as Sherlock is a BBC production, obviously Culverton Smith wasn’t depicted carrying out his multiple crimes under the cover of the Beeb.
But, like many TV series, all good things must come to an end. it’s really time for Sherlock to put down his needle, make himself a cup of Ovaltine and go to bed.
Or, perhaps, in a respectful final bow to the original, he should retire to the Sussex Downs and take up bee-keeping.