On 1st January 2014 over 9 million viewers in Britain tuned in to watch the BBC’s hit show ‘Sherlock’ with a further 3.5 million who watched later on catch-up. It also holds the record for the largest number of people tweeting about a drama during a broadcast on UK television (averaging at 2046 tweets per minute during the broadcast).
But what is it about this show that makes it so appealing to the British public? A good deal of the credit for this lays at the door of the programme's creators Stephen Moffat and Mark Gatiss. They are both writers for another extremely successful BBC drama, ‘Doctor Who’, and are clearly very good at what they do. The story goes that they developed the idea for the series during numerous train journeys to the Doctor Who production base in Cardiff.
However, I think that the person who deserves the most credit is the man who inspired both Moffat and Gatiss in the first place; the character of Sherlock Holmes himself, as created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
It is not without reason that Sherlock Holmes has become the archetypal detective.
Conan Doyle was a delightfully eccentric man and, in my opinion, something of a genius. In Sherlock Holmes, supported by his dedicated chronicler and best friend Dr. Watson, he managed to create a character who is both fascinating and almost superhuman in his wide ranging abilities and yet is somehow very believable and endearing as a person.
When they first meet, Dr Watson says of Holmes "I had no idea that such individuals exist outside of stories”, which indeed they probably do not. However, when reading Conan Doyle’s stories it is impossible, if not to believe, then to at least hope that they do.
Interestingly the phrase “elementary my dear Watson” that most people associate with the character of Sherlock Holmes was never used by Sherlock in any of the Conan Doyle stories.
Neither, in the books, does he have a great love or attachment to deer stalker hats.
These apocryphal elements of the Sherlock Holmes story have been toyed with in the BBC’s Sherlock (along with Watson’s moustache) in what I believe is a playful nod and a wink to fans of the original works of Conan Doyle.
To find out more, tune in to the final episode in the latest series this Sunday at 8.30pm on BBC 1 or catch up on the series so far here.
Alternatively, if reading is more your thing, then why not read the first ever Sherlock Holmes story ‘A Study in Scarlet’ here.
