Saturday, 21 January 2012

Impossible, improbable, who cares, I love the BBC Series of Sherlock


I sat down this morning to write this and I have to say a little part of me feels a bit sad. Yes, I do know that I shouldn’t feel sad about the fact that a particular BBC One program that ran for just three short weeks in the 9pm slot on a Sunday night is all over. Yet there it is.

Sherlock is I believe an example of not only brilliant BBC entertainment, but also wonderful writing that brings the stories and the legendary character created by Arthur Conan Doyle up to date and contemporary for today. It is also a display of great acting by all involved.

In my lowly and irrelevant opinion, Benedict Cumberbatch’s take on the master detective and Martin Freeman’s on the everyday man Dr John Watson are fantastic and far surpass the portrayals of the same characters by Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law in the Hollywood big budget Sherlock extravaganzas.

Last week’s episode has caused a media and social networking frenzy of speculation and intrigue. The question being how did Sherlock fake his own death? I love reading people’s theories and ideas and it’s almost as good as watching the program. No it’s really not, but it is pretty good.

I have to say though that I was surprised at the amount of people that think Mycroft is on it. I too thought that the bike rider that knocked Watson off his feet was not just an unfortunate coincidence, but is it really believable that Mycroft orchestrated that? He seems to work on much larger scales than London cyclists. In fact we are led to think that he “is” the British Government.

We also know that Sherlock is not without his own cunning in being able to foil his, I want to say, intellectually superior older brother – I fear this comment make spark outrage. Let us not forget what happened in episode one of this series.

My money, were I gambling woman, would be on backing those tweeting Molly’s involvement. She seems by far the more likely to have helped Sherlock. Yet I think the bigger question to be answered and I am sure that the writers have all the answers, is where does the story go next?

We all know that following the outrage of Arthur Conan Doyle’s decision to kill off his main character that he bought him back, but are the stories that he wrote after “The Final Problem” as good as the ones that went before? Again this may be a contentious point amongst the most loyal of Doyle’s readers.

Yet I wonder after two such short series and with the faked death plot done and dusted and never to be used again, what is next? Also the last episode saw the end of the great, yet without question psychopathic, Jim Moriarty. I have to say as well though, hats off to Andrew Scott, he really pulls off crazy and has played a great nemesis to Cumberbatch’s Holmes.

I suppose I must accept that the series is complete and find another program to fill the void. Yet having eliminated the impossible notion that I will be turning over to ITV’s line up of Dancing on Ice and Wild at Heart, and knowing that despite having hundreds of channels I still rarely find something that I really want to watch and have not seen before, I must accept the truth. It will be a much duller Sunday evening this week without Sherlock on air for ninety minutes to entertain me, and rumours are that a third series won’t be on air till 2013!

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