Benedict Cumberbatch

by Justin Lewis

  Beryl Vertue and her producer daughter Sue were both eager to embrace Cardiff as the primary location for Sherlock. ‘There is a lot of enthusiasm there,’ said Beryl, ‘and some very interesting locations. A production leaves a lot of money in a town. Apart from the crew you have cars, hotels, food, restaurants, couriers… All those things are a big financial advantage.’ The location of Cardiff as a production base for the revival of Doctor Who from 2005, plus spin-off series such as Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures, meant it soon became a nerve centre for other established BBC dramas like Casualty and new shows like Merlin and Being Human. The city had become a major tourist attraction – visitor numbers had increased by more than 40 per cent. It was much less expensive to film in and around Cardiff than in London.

  It was while working on Doctor Who as staff writers that Moffat and Gatiss had hatched their plan to revive the idea of Sherlock Holmes. On their many train journeys back and forth between London and Cardiff, they discovered they were both huge fans of Holmes and Watson. They had enjoyed the idea of Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce in the 1940s playing the two characters as contemporary figures, rather than as hangovers from Conan Doyle’s Victorian era. ‘Modern-dress Holmes,’ they thought. ‘Someone should do that again!’ After discussing this at length, they decided that they should be the ones to do it – before someone else got the chance.

  Finally, the two of them, plus Sue Vertue, met up to strike a deal. Appropriately, the venue chosen was a restaurant in London’s Piccadilly called the Criterion – the very first place Holmes and Watson had dined in Conan Doyle’s original books. Work would begin on a pilot in January 2009.

  From the outset, the plan was to be faithful to the characters of Holmes and Watson, but transplant them to the world of twenty-first century London. The look of Sherlock would be bang up to date; fustiness would be out. It was the antithesis of a period piece. ‘Conan Doyle’s original stories were never about frock coats and gaslight,’ said Moffat. ‘They are about brilliant detection, dreadful villains and blood-curdling crimes. Frankly, to hell with the crinoline!’ Gatiss agreed. ‘What appealed to us about doing Sherlock in the present day is that the characters have become almost literally lost in the fog. While I am second to no one in my enjoyment of that sort of Victoriana, we wanted to get back to the characters, and to why they became the most wonderful partnership in literature.’ In addition, the two leads were relatively youthful – Cumberbatch was 32 at the time of the pilot, Freeman a slightly more senior 37 – which meant that the show would challenge the convention of Holmes and Watson being middle-aged. Add to that a sartorial elegance for Holmes. ‘A modern take on Sherlock requires a modern look,’ declared Gatiss. ‘Benedict brings that to the role. He’s in this sharp suit and a stylish overcoat, which gives him a great silhouette.’

  Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes would remain the eternally super-confident detective, with a determination to outwit both criminals and the police. Some were concerned that the modern setting might make solving the cases too easy. The nineteenth-century Holmes, they argued, had not had the luxury of Google or a mobile phone to help him escape a trap. But Cumberbatch insisted this was missing the point: ‘He uses technology as a resource. This man contains things that technology, no matter how efficient it is, cannot know. He’s one step beyond because he’s human.’ In other words, the human mind has a flexibility and spontaneity that no computer (no matter how sophisticated) could possess, and Sherlock was attracted by science, technology and the Internet. ‘He’s brilliant at collating information,’ said Cumberbatch. ‘And he’s as equally engaging on an intellectual level as he is on the understanding of human nature.’

  ‘I am sure [Holmes] would have loved to have had the technology we have now,’ said Paul McGuigan, who would direct most of the first two series. ‘In the books he would use any device possible and he was always in the lab doing experiments. It’s just a modern-day version of it. He will use the tools that are available to him today in order to find things out.’

  With no deerstalker, and nicotine patches replacing the crutch of his pipe, the new Sherlock would have access to mobiles, laptops and MP3 players. Watson would have a blog. Holmes would fire off text messages (innovatively, these would appear onscreen, as would characters’ inner thoughts) and run a website called The Science of Deduction. But their base would remain the famous central London address of 221b Baker Street (above a greasy spoon cafe), Holmes’s devious nemesis Moriarty would still be an enemy, and other supporting characters would be present, like Mrs Hudson the housekeeper and Inspector Lestrade (played by Una Stubbs and Rupert Graves respectively).

  Holmes would also still play the violin. Cumberbatch was a novice to the instrument, but needed to at least look like he could play it – even if it was just holding the bow correctly. Help on this matter came from Eos Chater, a member of the string quartet Bond. ‘I would never insult the musical profession by saying that I had learnt the violin,’ said Cumberbatch. ‘I am desperately trying to convince people that what I am playing looks realistic. I have had some lessons.’

  There was some discussion about whether Sherlock would take drugs in the new series. After all, in Conan Doyle’s works, Holmes had been addicted to morphine. Might the super-sleuth be reliant on street drugs nowadays? Steven Moffat brushed aside the idea. ‘In Victorian times everybody was taking some kind of drug, largely because there was no such thing as a painkiller. It is a very different thing to say that Sherlock Holmes would be a coke addict now.’

  It seemed only natural to make the new Holmes and Watson series as up-to-date as possible. ‘When you read the stories, you realise Holmes is an extraordinary modern man in a modern metropolitan London,’ insisted Mark Gatiss. ‘They weren’t period stories to the people that were reading them, so we worked off exactly the same principle. We are not only keeping the essential character of Holmes, we are restoring it.’

  Dr John Watson’s background for Sherlock bore strong similarities to how the character was introduced in Arthur Conan Doyle’s very first Holmes story. In A Study in Scarlet, written by Conan Doyle in 1886 and published a year later, Watson was a wounded army medic returning from the frontline in the Second Anglo-Afghan War of 1878–80. Gatiss realised that this resonated with present-day Afghanistan. ‘It is the same war now, I thought. The same unwinnable war.’

  Once back in London, and with post-traumatic stress disorder, the military doctor would have no home or circle of friends. ‘He’s come back home to nothing,’ said Martin Freeman. ‘The one thing we know about ex-service people is they can find civilian life really hard to adjust to.’ Before long, Watson would be introduced to Sherlock Holmes by a mutual friend who knew Watson at Barts Hospital, and the pair would start flat-sharing in – where else? – Baker Street.

  * * *

  Stepping into the shoes of Sherlock Holmes was a daunting prospect. How many Holmes had there been in 125 years? Some studies suggested at least 200. Benedict Cumberbatch may have been guessing when he said, ‘I am probably the 71st Sherlock.’ The first incarnation on screen occurred as early as 1900, though all trace of that has long gone. Still in the silent film era, there was a short in 1910 called Arsène Lupin contra Sherlock Holmes, and almost fifty 20-minuters in the early 1920s with the Englishman Eille Norwood in the starring role. But it was in 1939 that the first truly famous Sherlock Holmes made his debut. Starting with The Hound of the Baskervilles, and sporting the trademark cape and deerstalker, Basil Rathbone (with Nigel Bruce as Watson) would star in 14 films in seven years.

  Since Rathbone, the roll call of Sherlock Holmes actors has included Peter Cushing, Roger Moore, Stewart Granger, Ian Richardson, Tom Baker, Christopher Lee and Nicol Williamson. Peter Cook teamed up with Dudley Moore as Watson for a desultory The Hound of the Baskervilles remake in the late 1970s. Even John Cleese had been Sherlock – in the 1973 television one-off, Elementary My Dear Watson, written by the absurdist playwright N.F. Simpson. Most recently, there
had been two TV Sherlocks: the Australian Richard Roxburgh (in the BBC’s 2002 remake of The Hound of the Baskervilles) and in 2004, Rupert Everett in Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking.

  Perhaps the boldest break with the traditional Holmes image came in 1988. The film Without a Clue assigned Dr Watson (played by Ben Kingsley) to solving the crimes, for which he dreamt up a literary creation: an inebriated unemployed actor called Holmes, played by Michael Caine. It wasn’t an incarnation the young Benedict Cumberbatch had enjoyed. ‘There have been some pretty awful adaptations, some really, really painful ones. Michael Caine – let’s not go there.’

  Cumberbatch’s personal favourite was Jeremy Brett, the star of ITV’s Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, whose decade-long stint in the lead role might have lasted still longer, had it not been for his untimely death in 1995. Even so, Brett – and for that matter, Rathbone – had inhabited period pieces. ‘Jeremy Brett was wonderful,’ said Cumberbatch, who had watched him avidly as a youngster, ‘but that doesn’t put me off at all. We’re moving away from a Victorian period so it’s a great scope for freedom and interpretation.’ Indeed, it wasn’t as if the intention of Sherlock was to eliminate all previous incarnations, but to add to them. ‘We’re setting out to do something new,’ said Cumberbatch. ‘Why should we serve up what people have already had so sublimely?’

  Martin Freeman agreed that it was like starting afresh. ‘I think you can get into trouble if you try to hang your hat too much on what other people have done,’ he said. ‘Those people haven’t done this script. We’re not playing the novels, we’re not playing the films. We’re doing this script.’ Besides, it wasn’t as if reboots didn’t happen elsewhere in popular culture. ‘Steven [Moffat]’s rationale was that we update Ian Fleming with Bond all the time,’ said Freeman. ‘We’re not seeing Daniel Craig in the Fifties. Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories are certainly rich enough to do that with.’

  Ultimately, Moffat promised that despite the setting, Sherlock would reflect the core values of the two central characters. ‘Everything that matters about Holmes and Watson is the same. Other detectives have cases, Sherlock Holmes has adventures – that’s what matters.’

  Because Holmes was not a policeman but a private detective, he was not bound by police procedures and doing everything by the book. He could be much more unconventional and shadowy in his working methods. The police had come to nickname him ‘The Freak’. He was also a man not just of thought but of action. ‘Holmes was a good shot and a martial arts expert,’ said Cumberbatch, ‘and although he’s very much of the thinking school rather than an action school, he is also supposed to be an athlete – which I enjoyed quite a bit.’

  Cumberbatch regarded Sherlock as a mystery series set apart from most of the many detective and cop series on television. He put it down to the central character having a mind like a computer: ‘…this almost supernatural but achievable ability to tie in the amazing amount of detail from a crime into some kind of narrative and then he uses his sensory qualities with his database of knowledge in his hard drive to make sense of it. He can scan a situation through touch, taste, sight, smell and an incredible amount of acquired knowledge.’

  The character of Sherlock Holmes is so enduring and vivid that some have assumed him to have been a real person. The fictional chat show host Alan Partridge (aka Steve Coogan) once insisted that he had lived, but he wasn’t alone in his delusion. In fact, some believe Holmes to be not just real but still alive, evidenced by the volume of correspondence which still reaches The Sherlock Holmes Museum in London’s Baker Street.

  How much of Sherlock was in Cumberbatch? And how much of Cumberbatch was in Sherlock? Frequently entertaining and animated in conversation, he was careful to emphasise that Sherlock was a scripted series, and he was still just acting when on screen. ‘Because I talk a lot – probably because I’m nervous and can’t quite edit the thoughts into something a bit more pithy – I get pinned into the same mania bracket, or having the same level of energy.’ Far from it, he insisted. ‘I’m very lazy in comparison to Holmes and I operate at a far lower speed.’

  Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes is a talkative, pedantic sort. ‘He is one step ahead of the audience, and of anyone around him with normal intellect,’ he said. ‘There’s a great charge you get from playing him, because of the volume of words in your head and the speed of thought – you really have to make your connections incredibly fast.’ But this did not make him a superhero, more a highly observant human being capable of deducing something from the tiniest fragment of evidence.

  Steven Moffat had always been fascinated by the character of Sherlock, precisely because his was a skill, not a superpower from the gods. There would always be an explanation. ‘Sherlock Holmes explained,’ said the Doctor Who writer. ‘Superman never told you how he flew, he just did. The Doctor never says a word about how the Tardis can be bigger on the inside, it just was. But Sherlock can’t wait to tell you how the trick is done – and I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough to find out.’

  What he sometimes lacks is a sense of empathy, and he has a tendency to speak without thinking, like Gregory House or Basil Fawlty. Death and murder can be an emotive subject for many, but it can excite Sherlock Holmes.

  The lack of empathy and unflinching eye for detail means that Sherlock can have a macabre attitude when finding a corpse. Watson has more of a conscience. ‘Sherlock likes the game of it,’ commented Martin Freeman, ‘whereas John is, at first, horrified by how Sherlock treats a dead body as a game.’ ‘Holmes needs grounding,’ said Cumberbatch. ‘He is too maverick for what he is trying to achieve. Watson is a reality check but, like a moth to the flame, needs the adventure. London is the battlefield.’

  Freeman was in no doubt, even as the pilot was being made, that Cumberbatch was a dream of a co-star. ‘I’m fast learning Benedict is perfectly cast. He has a really strong and assured way with language, and he’s quick and able to play quick thinkers as a result, people who are mercurial.’ And to play Holmes, to be able to think quickly, is a must.

  * * *

  Even before Sherlock was given a chance to take flight, yet another Holmes would appear. This time, it was Robert Downey Jr. in Guy Ritchie’s film, with Jude Law as Watson. Having a big feature film reach the screen while a TV series based on the same characters was being made could have knocked everyone’s confidence on Sherlock. ‘I did feel threatened,’ Cumberbatch later admitted. ‘Robert Downey Jr. is amazing. They’ve crammed it into a Warner Brothers type action role, which is terrific in its way, but I must admit I was horribly, schoolboyishly relieved when the press gave it a bit of a kicking.’ Still, Holmes is a tough character to gain full control over. ‘I don’t think we’re in competition with it. He’s the most-played fictional character, so who am I to be precious about it?’

  The premiere of the Sherlock Holmes movie on Boxing Day 2009 might have meant that the Sherlock hour-long pilot would have been delayed until the following year, but in the event, that pilot would never be broadcast. Instead it would be remade and transmitted as the first of three feature-length stories.

  When newspapers revealed that the Sherlock pilot (an embryonic version of ‘A Study in Pink’) had been ‘shelved’, in May 2010, some titles protested that £800,000 had been wasted on something the viewers would never see. The Sun even assumed that the pilot must have been sub-standard. However, the purpose of making a television pilot is to try something out. ‘As with the rest of the industry,’ explained a BBC statement, ‘we occasionally use pilots to experiment with the best ways of telling stories. As a result of this pilot we commissioned a series of three 90-minute episodes.’ So the series would go ahead, and for those who wanted to see the ‘lost’ pilot, it would be on the DVD release as a bonus. Making that pilot had not only convinced the BBC to go ahead with a series, but also persuaded international broadcasters to buy it. So much for it being a waste of money.

  Knowing the story wouldn’t go away, Mark Ga
tiss went on to elaborate on what had really happened.

  ‘We were originally going to make six 60-minute episodes. Then the BBC said, “We want to make this more like event television, so we want three 90-minute episodes.”’ So the team set about remaking and expanding the pilot but having been happy with the efforts of director Coky Giedroyc, they decided to make the first version public. ‘We thought, “Well fuck it, we’re just going to show people the pilot.” It’s different, but we would have been very proud to put it out.’

  Besides, the temporary burial of the pilot was necessary. The first version of ‘A Study in Pink’ had a similar plot, and mostly the same cast. But for the 90-minute version, it had been rewritten and extended substantially. It looked and sounded very different. The more devoted fans would welcome its presence as a bonus feature on the DVD, as an interesting comparison with the subsequent series, but for casual viewers, the major changes in style and content for the series were too dramatic and risked looking confusing. It was important when establishing a new series to be as clear and distinctive as possible.

  As director for the series, Paul McGuigan was shown the scripts, and the unbroadcast pilot episode. He had a specific vision for how the series should look. ‘One of the first things he said,’ Steven Moffat told American radio station NPR, ‘was you want to think Sherlock Holmes is behind the camera too. You want to see the world as Sherlock Holmes sees it. And that informs an awful lot of his work on the show… to give you the Sherlock’s eye-view of the world all the time.’