Mark Gatiss
‘We don’t want Sherlock to become a sort of gang show’
In the first episode of the series, six busts of Mrs Thatcher are attacked by a mysterious assailant
MSherlock, Doctor Who The League of Gentlemen have seen him exploit his passion for the absurd and the out-ofthis-world to dazzlingly successful effect. But the 50-year-old writer and actor might have gone too far with his latest venture. In The Six Thatchers, the first episode of the new series of Sherlock, which starts on New Year’s Day and which Gatiss scripted, six busts of Margaret Thatcher will be smashed by a mysterious perpetrator.
The great detective is rightly convinced that the incidents relate to a wider, complex case. Critics, however, have already interpreted the plot (an adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story, The Adventure of the Six Napoleons) as a typical example of BBC bias, with one writer calling it a “snide, Left-wing” political message.
Is this Gatiss taking revenge from his liberal perch? He insists not.
“I do not relish the idea of smashing up six busts of Thatcher,” he says. “The parallel is expressly drawn that she has become an icon like Napoleon. It was the natural thing to do as modernisation of the original story.”
I can’t say I am entirely convinced. Gatiss has, in the past, been vituperous in his opinions on the Conservative government, and it is clear when we meet that he is deeply unhappy about the world’s political shift to the Right. He says the UK’s “mask has slipped [since the EU referendum]” and that “there is a snarling jackal underneath”.
He also believes the “essential” British qualities extolled by the Doctor and Sherlock Holmes – “decency, a slight amateurishness and a respect for cleverness over brawn” – are starting to erode.
It’s a rather bleak outlook and I suggest he might be about to write a state-of-thenation polemic. He says not, although he intimates that his next project for the BBC, which he won’t disclose, will have a political tinge. In fact, there is quite a bit Gatiss won’t disclose, owing to the fact that details of Sherlock are closely guarded by the BBC: who will die? Is there a third Holmes brother? Instead, I ask him about the hype. “I just screen it out, otherwise it would drive you crazy,” he says. “Benedict Cumberbatch went to China recently, and it was like a state visit, so you can’t not be aware of it. You just have to be sensible.” In the series, which he co-created with Steven Moffat, Gatiss plays Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock’s mysteriously powerful older brother. Mycroft is a shadowy figure and I ask Gatiss why he doesn’t allow himself more screen time. “You have to remember that Mycroft is only in two of the original stories,” he says. “We don’t want Sherlock to become a sort of gang show, it has to feel right.”
I imagine that the series’ radical updating of Conan Doyle’s original stories incurred the wrath of the Sherlock Holmes Society, but Gatiss insists they were accommodating.
“[The stories have] been filmed so many times in so many different ways. There has been one set in the future, there is one which is genuinely very faithful except for the fact that Holmes is a little sausage dog… He is an imperishable character. In fact, the only resistance was press resistance. I cherish one preview of Sherlock before the show started which said you can’t do Holmes without hansom cabs and deerstalkers and gaslights, and in protest he was going to go home and watch a Basil Rathbone film.
“I thought, well you can watch two out of the 14 [Rathbone films], because 12 are set in the present day. The journalist, to his credit, did a total volte face.”
Gatiss is a very relaxed interviewee, slightly owlish in appearance due to some fashionable looking specs, but endearingly boyish in his enthusiasm. I only sense irritation once, when I ask him why he didn’t apply for the top job at Doctor Who, now Moffat is about to bow out.
“What do you mean apply? It wasn’t advertised. Listen, I am genuinely thrilled that Chris Chibnall is taking over. Having seen how it works up close, working with Steven and Russell [T Davies, who was in charge of the show’s triumphant 2005 reboot], I can tell you that it is the most demanding job on television. Steven hasn’t had a day off in six years and I’m not joking.”
I don’t think Gatiss is being disingenuous. After all, he has plenty of other things to offer. There is the return of The League of Gentlemen, the surreal comedy series set in the freakishly insular town of Royston Vasey which he co-created alongside Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith.
And, in February, he is due to make a little bit of history when he appears with his husband Ian Hallard in a transfer of The Boys in the Band. They will be the first gay married couple to act on the West End stage together.
The Boys in the Band, a drama by the American playwright Mart Crowley about a party in a New York apartment, is a bleak account of the realities of gay life in the Sixties. Are the play’s issues still relevant in today’s more liberal society?
“We took it to the West Yorkshire Playhouse [in Leeds] and discovered, very movingly, that the play talked to younger people,” he says. “A young guy in the audience came up afterwards and said: ‘Well that’s just my Saturday night.’ People think our freedoms have been won but they haven’t.”
Gatiss says that, as a gay actor, he has always found Britain very welcoming, but sees no sign of the situation improving in Hollywood. “I know a couple of actors who have ‘gone back in’ [after getting an agent] and they are going to end up miserable. Whatever you think is high on that hill, it is just not worth it. You would think it straightforward, but it isn’t. Even actors who are never going to play square-jawed leads are frightened. I know that some managers still advise people not to [come out as gay], and you wonder how much progress we have really made.”
In the past, people have presumed that Gatiss is a workaholic, so many and diverse are his projects. Yet, the truth is that he is a hobbyist rather than a careerist, whose work just happens to involve his passions. Indeed, there’s one passion which has yet to benefit from the Gatiss effect – James Bond.
“I’m deadly serious,” he says. “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.”