Do BBC bigwigs give a fig about viewers?
After enduring last night’s shockingly self-indulgent (and much-hyped) Sherlock finale, our exasperated TV critic asks ...
What a mess. What an abject, flailing, noxious mess. the muchtrumpeted finale of
Sherlock (BBC1) was shockingly bad, so dire indeed that questions have to be asked — about why the Corporation feels it can foist such self-indulgent rubbish upon Sunday night viewers.
If you’ve woken up this morning with the angry feeling that you were robbed of an evening’s entertainment, I share your sense of betrayal. Sherlock was, quite simply, the most nonsensical, verbose piece of television I’ve ever sat through. and that’s being polite. to call the show self-satisfied barely begins to convey how delighted it is with its own puerile posturing, its superficial cleverness, its tedious campery. Never have two writers been more intoxicated on the fumes of their own shallow talent than Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss.
the plot was incompetent. the dialogue was dreadful. the scenes were disjointed, the premise absurd, the ending made me want to reach for a plastic bucket and, most heinous of all, a classic creation was ruined.
Gatiss and Moffat may just have done what Moriarty never could, and finished off the marvellous character of Sherlock holmes.
they’ve got form — making Doctor Who all but unwatchable. In their hands, a cult children’s show was turned into an in-joke for the kind of people who think they are too bright to watch tV. as a result, Doctor Who lost its audience. aside from Christmas specials, it has been off our screens for more than a year, and no one has missed it.
I watched the climactic episode of Sherlock with a growing conviction that BBC bigwigs have such contempt for licence-payers that they don’t care whether normal families enjoyed or could even make sense of it.
the implication is that anyone who isn’t enraptured by the torrent of pretentious quotations and high-falutin’ philosophy doesn’t deserve to be watching.
For a State- funded broadcaster, this attitude is fatally arrogant.
But Lord, didn’t the cast love the sound of their own voices — especially Gatiss, who plays the older holmes brother, Mycroft. he spouted more words than hamlet. half the scenes involved him tiresomely explaining the plot and the back-story to other characters.
they stood in grey concrete rooms, supposedly on a prison rock in the North atlantic, and listened to him go on and on, before one of them cut in to talk and talk some more.
and there was so much to explain, starting with the previous week’s cliffhanger, in which Sherlock’s secret little sister, Euros, shot Dr Watson in the face at point-blank range with a pistol. We left him staring at a bullet bearing down on him in slow motion.
Only, surprise, it wasn’t a bullet, but a tranquilliser dart. Watson slept it off, went home and was fine.
that’s a cheap and lazy get-out, on a par with those Saturday serial stand-bys ‘With one bound he was free’ and ‘It was all just a dream’.
Sherlock’s heroin addiction was dismissed, too. Last week, he was at death’s door, but now he was as fit as an Olympic athlete.
ASkING viewers to suspend their disbelief is one thing. It’s quite another for the writers to expect the characters to be anything they say, at any moment. that’s not drama — it’s made-up nonsense.
More pointless cheats and fake thrills chugged past.
Mycroft was at home enjoying a favourite film in his private cinema when supernatural forces took control of his projector. his family portraits wept blood and a malevolent clown stepped from the shadows with a meat cleaver.
It was as if the writers were playing Stars In their Eyes: ‘For the next five minutes, I’m going to be a hammer horror movie.’
then it was a different genre of horror film, the Stephen king kind: a little girl was trapped on an airliner filled with dead or comatose passengers and crew. When she picked up the stewardesses’ phone, it connected her to . . . Sherlock!
after that, the writers apparently began auditioning for the James Bond franchise. the holmes boys and Watson were talking cascades of drivel at 221b Baker Street when another kind of drone took over. It was a flying toy, with a hand grenade balanced on top.
Luckily, it was the type of grenade that waits till everyone has dived through a window before exploding, so we saw Sherlock and Watson (Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman) hurled through the air in bad computer-generated imagery amid flames and broken glass.
and they landed . . . on a fishing boat. In the most jarring piece of editing I have ever witnessed, we went from a fireball to a pair of sailors in sou’westers, grumbling about the shipping forecast.
Suddenly, there was a man standing on their cabin roof. ‘I’m Sherlock holmes the pirate,’ he cried and pointed a gun at them.
how he got there, nobody even attempted to decipher, but Mycroft arrived soon after in a false beard and yellow oilskins.
then Moriarty (andrew Scott) came back, arriving on the atlantic rock in a helicopter.
he posed like rocker Freddie Mercury and, in case we didn’t get the gay subtext, went into a spiel about which of his bodyguards was better in bed. Yes, the master criminal is revealed as homosexual. a daring twist, I suppose . . . if it was still 1957. Moments later, we realised it was all just a dream. Or, at least, a flashback, to 2012.
Moriarty’s return, awaited by fans for two years, was yet more gimcrack trickery.
Meanwhile, Sherlock was meeting his sister, held prisoner in a maximum- security glass cell for being a weirdo. Last week, the Great Detective had such intense powers of observation that he was able to deduce exactly what people would be doing, a month in advance.
this time, he was so dim that he failed to notice the glass walls were missing. his sister Euros wasn’t in a cell at all. that explained how she was able to escape and roam London, shooting tranquilliser guns at people and balancing grenades on quadcopters.
In truth, it didn’t explain how she got off the island, or why nobody noticed she was gone, or where she got money to live, or why she bothered going back to her prison.
Gatiss and Moffat got round that by endowing her with superhuman mindpowers. She could enslave any man just by staring at him. her telepathic gift worked on anyone, except holmes and Watson, because Sherlock was too clever and the Doctor was . . . oh, never mind. Who cares? Unbelievably, it got even worse. First, Euros set our heroes some turgid little moral dilemmas. Could Sherlock persuade his besotted admirer, Molly, to say ‘I love you’ before Euros blew her up?
Should Watson shoot the prison governor in the head to save Mrs Governor from a similar fate?
It was all so callow, so contrived, so undergraduate.
FINaLLY, we discovered why we had never heard of Euros before. Sherlock had forced himself to forget her, by ‘rewriting his memories’. as a child, she had killed his dog. Only Sherlock couldn’t remember having a dog, either — in fact, it was his best friend, a boy called Redbeard.
By now, I was utterly lost. astoundingly, there was time for it to be even more irritating.
John Watson’s wife, Mary (amanda abbington), popped back from the dead to give her ‘boys’ a mumsy peptalk about how she wanted them never to stop solving their exciting mysteries and having wonderful adventures.
all this was so nauseatingly twee, it should have come with Sherlock-branded sickbags.
and then, like that classic Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid scene, holmes and Watson burst out of their front door at a sprint and were frozen in mid-stride.
at this moment, around the Uk, I felt I could hear several million people say ‘that didn’t even make sense’ and wonder why they hadn’t gone to bed an hour ago.
alternatively, they could have been watching another channel. On ITV, Endeavour, the Inspector Morse prequel set in Sixties Oxford, was proving once again that a good detective drama can be playful and ingenious, yet still gripping.
When Cumberbatch and Freeman first joined up for Sherlock in 2010, the series was furiously watchable.
More than six years on, we’re told no further instalments are being planned. hallelujah!
Sir arthur Conan Doyle himself once mused about his stories: ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’
Last night’s finale of Sherlock betrayed that wisdom. I never want to see such appalling, immature claptrap again.
CArry on, Morse. The opera- loving detective isn’t celebrated for his bawdy sense of humour, but Endeavour (ITV) was stuffed with saucy asides and rigid with double entendres.
‘The permissive society?’ snorted anti-porn campaigner Joy Pettybon (Sylvestra Le Touzel). ‘Nobody asked my permission, and I’m sick of having it rammed down my throat.’
And when Morse (Shaun evans) was lured into the bedroom of Mrs P’s sexually desperate daughter, Bettina, he found himself struggling to open her window while she quivered and panted. ‘It’s a little stiff, that’s all,’ he gasped.
As Carry On star Sid James might have said, there’s a lot of it about... if you know where to look. And Mrs Pettybon certainly did.
The leader of the Keep Britain Decent campaign was fuming over a BBC drama that featured ‘14 bloodies, six bleedings, two bleeders and a b*****d’.
And this was in the days before pause and rewind. In her ruched hat and horn-rimmed glasses, Mrs P might have cut a ridiculous figure, but she could certainly keep tally of profanities. She was modelled on the crusading Mary Whitehouse, of course, though the subplot about how she’d goaded her hubbie to suicide over a sexual misdemeanour was sheer dramatic licence.
The episode opened with her tirade about the tide of filth swamping television screens and wireless sets — intercut with scenes of a very discomfited Morse with his trousers round his knees, getting an innoculation jab in his bare backside.
All this was merely a diversion from the main storyline: the investigation into the murder of a bricklayer at a pop star’s orgy.
The depth of detail in endeavour is a great part of its appeal, and this time the show was packed with echoes of rock’s golden era.
It served up two songs that sounded like Sixties rareties but were clever new compositions by Matthew Slater — the psychedelic Jennifer Sometimes, and a choreographed number with dancers in macs and brollies that was pure Dusty Springfield.
Some camera- work mimicked classic album covers, such as a sun-dappled image of the pop group lounging in a summerhouse doorway. Pink Floyd fans will have spotted the reference to 1969’s Ummagumma.
Another was the climactic twist when an LSD overdose sent the band’s poet Nick into a nightmarish mental breakdown — exactly what happened to Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett. Nick was treated by a terrifying quack, wielding a syringe and murmuring words that sounded very like the lyrics of the Floyd’s hit, Comfortably Numb.
Am I reading too much into all this? That’s the joy of endeavour. you can let it wash over you in a warm blur, or you can watch again and again to peel away layers and expose fragments of clues. It’s just as fiendish as you want it to be.
Other pleasures are its jokey surprises, such as the look on Morse’s face when his boss, Inspector Fred Thursday (roger Allam), remarked that in the desert during World War II, he whiled away days smoking dope. ‘Kiff, we used to call it,’ smiled the pipe-chomping family man.
There’s much talk of drugs and the ‘narco gangs’ in Walking The Americas (C4), but, so far, longdistance hiker Levison Wood hasn’t seen anything more than a man with a cannabis plant growing in his front yard. Lev’s voiceover constantly threatens drama that it doesn’t deliver. ‘San Pedro Sula,’ he intones: ‘It’s one of the most violent cities in the world, but Alberto and I are heading... straight for it!’
When he gets there, of course, the scariest character is the pastor, who joins him for a chat.
And when he meets a man on a mule with a Smith & Wesson in his waistband, Lev is thrilled to tell us he’s in the original Wild West, confronting gunslingers.
The element of danger is rather diluted five minutes later, when he is welcomed by the cowboy’s mum, a little old lady who grows bananas.
If Levison weren’t so intent on looking macho, he would be better company, and this trek from Mexico to Colombia would be a more engaging journey.