by Justin Lewis
The shooting of Sherlock’s first series was complete by the late spring of 2010. Filming mostly went well, although after weeks of outdoor filming during a bitterly cold winter, Benedict Cumberbatch suffered a bout of pneumonia at one point. Missing a day of the shoot, he was prescribed some antibiotics from the doctor, but then on the next day had to film a key fight scene. ‘I think my opponent could have almost literally knocked me down with a feather,’ Cumberbatch told the Daily Mirror. ‘I certainly wasn’t landing any meaningful punches. I was feeling so spaced-out and flaked out.’
Cumberbatch had a reputation for working hard, and despite his determination to keep himself in trim (plenty of swimming, yoga and honey), sometimes this led to lapses in his health. Not only had glandular fever floored him back at university, but during the Royal Court double-header of Rhinoceros and The Arsonists of 2007, he had developed a stomach ulcer. The pneumonia on Sherlock came from overwork, as he admitted several months later. ‘I was in utter denial,’ he told The Sunday Times. ‘I was throwing myself into it with no rest, having fun because I love the character so much. Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett may be the ideal Victorian heroes, but I want to be the modern one.’
A Study in Scarlet had been Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes story, way back in 1887. Over 120 years later, it had been retitled ‘A Study in Pink’, and would be the first of three feature-length episodes of Sherlock. Holmes and Watson would investigate a series of suspicious deaths triggered by a serial killer, whose murders had been contrived to look like the victims had taken their own lives.
Originally the series had been intended for BBC1’s autumn season of 2010, but the Corporation had a rethink and instead brought it forward to three Sunday nights over July and August. The series creators panicked; they did not feel ready. ‘We were sitting around with our heads in our hands,’ recalled Steven Moffat. ‘“There isn’t enough time to do this. It will broadcast to no one.”’
Summer is generally a poor time for a high-profile new series to launch. The media industry and the general public are either on holiday, or at least winding down. Major television series traditionally launch in autumn, winter and spring. Summer, with the extra hours of daylight, is the time for sporting events, repeats, Big Brother and experiments. The omens did not look good for Sherlock.
To spread the word, the production team took to the social networking site Twitter to try and drum up support for the new show. But they were not expecting mass appeal. They hoped for 4 million to tune in, if that, and maybe some decent reviews.
On the evening of Sunday, 25 July, Benedict Cumberbatch was racing on his motorbike to the home of Steven Moffat and Sue Vertue in South-West London to watch the episode premiere on BBC1 with them. Unfortunately, he was held up. As Moffat wrote on Twitter: ‘B. Cumberbatch coming to my house to watch Sherlock but he’s stuck in traffic. On Baker Street.’
Baker Street? Too much of a coincidence, surely? ‘I think he may have made that up, to be honest,’ said Mark Gatiss, much later. ‘But it’s a really good lie.’
CHAPTER 10
SHERLOCK FEVER
When Benedict Cumberbatch finally made it to Steven Moffat’s house that Sunday night, the party could begin in earnest. They would have to watch ‘A Study in Pink’ on delay. It wasn’t long before everyone present realised that the show and its stars were big news. A casual glance on Twitter found that just about everything about it was trending. ‘People were talking about it with this passion,’ said Moffat. ‘As if they were lifelong fans – when of course, they’d not seen it 90 minutes ago. Everything had changed in 90 minutes.’
Launching a new television series is stressful enough, especially when you’re reinventing well-loved fictional characters. And in an age when users of social media websites and online forums can make their opinions known immediately, it is even more unnerving. ‘I had a certain amount of trepidation,’ said Mark Gatiss, ‘but we were always very confident [that] as soon as you saw a couple of minutes you’d get it. However the extent to which people got it took us all by surprise.’
Gatiss’s expectations towards the reception of Sherlock had already been boosted when members of The Sherlock Holmes Society had reacted approvingly to a preview showing. ‘They all loved it. You can imagine that there wouldn’t be any more ossified or reactionary group of fans. One of them thought it was the best on-screen depiction he’d ever seen.’
Cumberbatch too was amazed by all the praise, even if there was a grudging air to some of it. ‘If I had a penny for every time a fan of the originals had come up to me and said, “I didn’t want to like this, but I did”, I’d be rich.’ He admitted that some had wanted the show to crash and burn: ‘We silenced a lot of the doubters. Knives were sharpened. I think a lot of people thought, “That’ll never work.”’
Almost nothing new is a guaranteed hit in television. Before a frame of footage had been shot for Sherlock, the BBC had conducted some audience research into what sort of following the programme might get. Focus groups tend to be conservative in nature, and nervous about anything too different. The findings regarding Sherlock seemed to bear this out. ‘We were told it would not work,’ said Ben Stephenson, head of the BBC’s drama department, ‘that it would get an old audience, it would get a small audience.’
In fact, the first episode of Sherlock was watched by more people than anything else on TV that night. Rival channels were dominated either by showings of oft-repeated films like Jim Carrey’s The Mask or by series into their umpteenth runs: Coast, Taggart, Big Brother. Next to these, Sherlock at least represented something brand new, and over 7.5 million viewers tuned in, almost double what the makers had been hoping for. Within days, it was being heralded specifically as a reason to preserve the BBC. Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt made a statement that the programme was ‘a very good example of the BBC at its best, investing in new programming’, but maintained a cut to the BBC licence fee was still likely. Moffat hit back. Reducing or even freezing the licence fee would affect the quality of shows like Sherlock. ‘These shows are expensive and difficult,’ he said, ‘and require huge amounts of backing and huge amounts of nerve, particularly on the part of the commissioners.’
The first reviews had surpassed just about everyone’s expectations; the critics were smitten by Sherlock. ‘A triumph,’ announced the Independent’s Tom Sutcliffe, ‘witty and knowing without ever undercutting the flair and dazzle of the original. It understands that Holmes isn’t really about plot but about charisma.’ Elsewhere in the same paper, David Lister branded it as ‘the ultimate buddy movie’ and paid tribute to the decision to cast Cumberbatch and Freeman: ‘…whoever is responsible deserves a BAFTA.’ The Daily Telegraph paid special attention to the portrayal of Holmes: ‘Cumberbatch’s sleuth is just the right balance of psychonerd and winning eccentric, the sort of person you’d love to have as your flatmate, if you could stand the mess.’
Cumberbatch’s take on Sherlock Holmes was undoubtedly compelling as a leading character, if an unlikely hero. Was he cool or simply cold? Flawed and spiky, he was often hard to like, but he had added a humane sheen to an obsessive, analytical being. He accepted that he could be driven when it came to work, ‘but I’m not asexual and I’m not veering towards wanting to achieve everything at the expense of everyone around me. It’s all healthy stuff to play and get out of your system but it’s not stuff I want to take with me into my own life.’ He still found it marvellously liberating to be rude in the skin of the character, ‘because you can’t be in real life. I think people love the idea of someone who’s that hard-nosed and purposeful.’
Rather than making the character an all-knowing one (which risked making him smug), it was important to make Holmes’s knowledge selective. He could be ignorant about things for which he had no passion or interest. The gaps in his knowledge helped make him believable. ‘If you don’t have those bits, he looks like a demi-god,’ argued Mark Gatiss. ‘It is so exciting to have a person that doesn’t know that the
earth goes round the sun or the name of the Prime Minister, because why does it bother him?’
One of the most impressive feats of Cumberbatch’s performance on Sherlock was having to remember and deliver some fearsome and complicated monologues, uttered in a torrent at high speed. He was used to having to get the lines right, having worked in theatre so much, where the first take is your only take. But even so, Moffat and Gatiss’s speeches would test him to the limit. ‘I practise at home,’ he said of the line-learning marathons. ‘There is a lot of midnight oil burned. Sometimes it feels like, rather than acting, you’re being a machine. I don’t mean that in a negative way. Holmes is just very … still. Still, but fast.’
He has revealed that he could not learn these speeches ‘parrot fashion’. Instead, he explained: ‘In rehearsals, repetition, “actioning” the script, a Stanislavski-based method of understanding the why, what and how of the part by applying transitive verbs to each line, association with that action, the cue line and any blocking all act as triggers to remember the line.’ Although he acknowledged that ‘a patient assistant director or girlfriend’ was helpful too.
A maverick and an outsider, then, Sherlock was no superhero. His skills were not otherworldly, or magical, but achievable through effort and wit. It was this drive, rather than inspiration or god-given talent, which was hard to match – and Cumberbatch admitted that his fascination for Holmes made him all the more curious in his spare time about human behaviour and motivation. He would silently analyse those around him in public; he might gaze at train passengers, at their clothing and baggage, and try and gain an insight into what their lives might be like. ‘You can’t help but go there in your mind,’ he said of this casual but compulsive quest into the human condition.
Benedict Cumberbatch’s Holmes was an unorthodox romantic lead, but a romantic lead all the same, certainly in the eyes of many viewers. Certain co-stars agreed. ‘There’s nothing more unattractive,’ said Una Stubbs (aka landlady Mrs Hudson) in the Radio Times, ‘than a man who thinks he is attractive. I think the fact that Benedict doesn’t think he’s attractive is so attractive to women. Discerning women.’ Some press commentators agreed. ‘He is notable as a heartthrob,’ wrote Zoe Williams in the Guardian, ‘for his very un-bestiality, his refinement, his piano player’s hands, his indoor complexion, his humming brain.’
Cumberbatch’s reaction was one of bemusement. ‘I look in a mirror and I see all the faults I’ve lived with for years. Yet people go nuts for certain things about me. It’s not me being humble. I just think it’s weird.’ Still, in terms of career progression, it had its good points. ‘It builds a momentum. I’ve got the most fantastic opportunities, and that attention has been a huge help. As long as it helps me find good roles, my response is, “Bring it on!”’
Nor was Sherlock a romantic icon. ‘He’s not some alpha male who always gets the girl,’ said Cumberbatch. ‘He’s a misfit who hacks people off.’ And he could be obstructive if anyone else might be lucky in love. For example, he gets in the way of John Watson’s dates with a fellow doctor in the second story, ‘The Blind Banker’. ‘Sherlock isn’t socialised, and John likes that about him,’ commented Martin Freeman. ‘But it also infuriates him!’
The enigmatic but profound friendship between Holmes and Watson in Sherlock was hard to explain or quantify. Mark Gatiss made an attempt at explaining it regardless. ‘They form a unit,’ he told The Sunday Times. ‘John Watson is gradually making Sherlock Holmes more human, and Sherlock Holmes has given John Watson his mojo back.’
There were viewers and Internet commenters who interpreted the relationship as going beyond friendship. The Sherlock scriptwriters would often nod teasingly towards these theories, but there was nothing substantial beyond that. ‘Much as Sherlock adores John, and he’s fond of him, there’s nothing sexual – all the jokes aside,’ said Cumberbatch, but said of the quips, ‘the problem is, they fuel the fantasy of the few into flames for the many. People presume that’s what it is, but it’s not.’ Some on the Internet have let their imaginations run riot, wildly and explicitly, on the matter. ‘There are a lot of people hoping that our characters and ourselves are rampantly at it most of the time,’ said Martin Freeman. He brushed aside the fantasies as ‘tongue-in-cheek’, but maintained that, ultimately, their strength as a twosome was the way they complemented each other, as in so many friendships and relationships: ‘They give something to the other that is lacking in their life.’
Besides, Cumberbatch denied there was much sex appeal in the character of Sherlock to begin with, or at least not consciously. He explained that Holmes had abstained from sexual activity because he is busy in other areas of life. ‘Not every man has a sex drive that needs to be attended to,’ he argued. ‘Like a lot of things in his life where he’s purposely dehumanised himself, it’s to do with not wanting the stuff that is time-wasting, that’s messy. To the Victorian eye he’s an eccentric, but I think he has purposely repressed those things.’
The affection and respect between Holmes and Watson, while it could be awkwardly expressed, was certainly there. ‘It is about the things that wind each other up and the things that they genuinely love about one another as well,’ said Freeman. ‘We all certainly saw it as a love story. These two people do love and kind of need each other in a slightly dysfunctional way, but it is a relationship that works. They get results.’
* * *
Sales of Conan Doyle’s original novels trebled after the first Sherlock episode aired, but the series viewing figures dipped by around a million for the second story. In ‘The Blind Banker’, a terrible fate awaited anyone who saw mysterious ciphers on walls around the City of London. The drop in viewing figures was not in itself too much to worry about – most new shows lose a quarter or a third of the audience in the second week – but reviews were lukewarm towards aspects of the plot, especially the portrayal of a band of Chinese smugglers known as the Black Lotus. A warmer reception greeted ‘The Great Game’, the final episode, written by Mark Gatiss, and which found Holmes up against a devious bomber. Not before time, it unveiled Sherlock’s shadowy enemy, James Moriarty, played by Andrew Scott, who introduced an Irish accent to the character for the first time. In Steven Moffat’s view, Scott brought a terrifying coldness to the part: ‘He has this amazing ability to conjure up this sort of blank-eyed desolation of a man too clever. Too clever to exist, almost.’
Scott’s identity in the role of Moriarty was not revealed before broadcast. Gatiss delighted in keeping such secrets from the viewers, which was quite an achievement in an age where news travels faster than ever, especially via social media. Indeed Gatiss had managed to keep his own role (as Holmes’s brother Mycroft) under wraps, and some had been misled into believing he would be Moriarty. Neither Scott nor Gatiss appeared in the publicity material cast lists, nor in the Radio Times billings. When so much television kept telling you what was going to happen next, he was a great believer in holding certain things back: ‘If every now and then you pull a fast one so that the moment of transmission still means something, it can be just wonderful.’
Many were surprised and disappointed that Sherlock’s first series was comprised of only three episodes, in an age where most American television series make 13 or even 24 episodes every year, and even high-profile high-concept British series like Doctor Who manage up to a dozen. But the prospect of making more Sherlock had the problem that Steven Moffat – as the showrunner and head writer on Doctor Who too – would have to accommodate those commitments. The BBC, delighted with the first series ratings for Sherlock, acknowledged that it wasn’t a question of ‘if’ more would be made, more ‘when’ and ‘how’.
There were two possible options for the second run of Sherlock. Either there would be another trio of 90-minute films, or a slightly longer series of hour-long episodes. BBC drama head Ben Stephenson believed that the 90-minute option would feel like ‘less of a detective show and more of an adventure show’.
Over the first th
ree Sherlock episodes, viewing figures had peaked at 9 million in the UK. It would be a huge international sales success for the BBC, which licensed the episodes to 180 territories worldwide. Viewers in the United States were treated to them from October 2010 on the non-commercial US network PBS. From August, teasers from the show had been included in a promotional campaign onscreen, which partially borrowed a slogan from Holmes himself: ‘The Game Is On This Fall’. Indeed it was. It would be pitted against another critical favourite: HBO’s gangster series Boardwalk Empire. But for American audiences, and to the great regret of the production team back in the UK, each 90-minute episode of Sherlock would be cut by eight minutes to accommodate sponsorship announcements. ‘We try to cut the bits which aren’t essential to the story,’ admitted Sue Vertue at Hartswood, ‘but they are often the lovely character scenes.’
Populist but smart and critically feted, Sherlock would be an obvious contender for prizes in awards ceremonies. Its first plaudits came in October 2010, when it picked up two gongs at the Crime Thriller Awards sponsored by the opticians chain Specsavers. The show itself won the coveted TV Dagger prize, seeing off the competition of Wallander, Luther and Ashes to Ashes. But Cumberbatch himself was recognised individually, accepting the award for the Best Actor category from the star of Silent Witness, Emilia Fox. The following January, he battled it out with Matt Smith and Ashes to Ashes’ Philip Glenister for the National Television Awards’ Best Drama Performance, but all three were trumped by the more senior David Jason, retiring from his role as Jack Frost in ITV’s A Touch of Frost.
Victory would be Cumberbatch’s again, however, at the Broadcasting Press Guild Awards that March, when he beat Hugh Bonneville of Downton Abbey to the Best Actor award. In September, he was Best Actor of the year at the GQ magazine awards – where recipients in other categories included Matt Smith, Hugh Laurie, Bill Nighy, Professor Brian Cox and George Osborne.