Sherlock

I always remember Vic...

and Bob on Saturday Superstore, someone rang in and said...

"Where do you get your ideas from?" And Vic Reeves said:

"Out of our minds."

"Is it Sherlock Holmes you want? 'Cause I haven't seen him in ages."

What I like most about Sherlock, I suppose, is the initial thing...

Of receiving scripts, where you get to say and play and react to things that are...

that you don't get to do all the time.

We get that thrill when we read a script...

that the audience does when they first watch...

it's that coalface realization of...

And literally, sometimes, literally, if not figuratively...

between me and Martin, of reading it, looking up and going:

"Oh, my God."

You are never going to make anything next to great or next to brilliant...

without a very, very good script.

- "It's a tiny bit sexy." - "T know."

Amanda is in the show and Amanda is...

for those who don't know, my real-life partner.

I just always turn to her and go, "This is amazing. It's brilliant."

It's such a good script, isn't it? I mean, it's just...

You're misled as an audience and I think that's lovely.

We were looking, really, for an obvious arc to a third series.

What presents itself straightaway...

IS the incredible drama of him coming back from the dead.

We work together in a variety of ways.

And work out what the series is going to be.

- That's, in a way, the most fun, isn't it? - Oh, yeah.

Throwing it all into a pot and saying, "Well, here's a general shape..."

And here's a story I'd love to do.

"What if Sherlock was a best man? What if... What if we put him in here?"

It's like picking him up and putting him into an unusual situation.

It's the sort of thing that can lead to all kinds of exciting possibilities.

It's an object lesson in why you must only work on things you love...

because these conversations are never a chore.

We used to have these conversations anyway.

Yes.

We did them anyway, without them resulting in a TV show.

You never quite know what's going to happen with Sherlock.

When I read the scripts... 'Cause Steven and Mark...

. will tell me certain things and then not tell me...

You know, Steven won't tell me a lot when he's writing it.

And he also sometimes delivers in chunks, which is quite interesting...

'cause he just keeps doing cliffhanger after cliffhanger.

You keep going...

I kind of think the pressure of having a huge, enthusiastic fan base.

IS not pressure, it's rather nice.

But it's also not a thing where you can respond...

o the fact that it has a massive international audience.

Shows go off the rails if you start trying to direct it towards...

what you think people will like or what you think they might fear.

We just have to make it for ourselves.

It's a hundred-year-old spoiler, but Dr Watson does marry Mary Morstan.

And you get that sort of slightly miffed:

"You're not allowed to do this, you'll spoil it."

But it's our show.

And I dare say, what happens is when the episodes are revealed...

you will see that we don't spoil it, because we don't want to.

I got told about the idea of bringing in Mary Watson...

and I thought, "Well, okay, what's that going to do..."

To the dynamic of them and how is she going to figure?

Is she going to be a third cog in the wheel...

Or is she going to be something separate?”

She kind of gets in between the two of them...

but she wants them to be together as well.

So you see them, in Episode 2...

they're sort of not fighting crimes or solving things at the moment.

So she sort of says, "Well, look, why don't you sort out a case for him?"

And then, "Why don't you sort out a case for him?"

And then she kind of pushes them together...

because she can see that they kind of miss each other.

I think for John and us, you know, in real life...

it could never just be, "There's now three of them."

Amanda didn't want there to be three of them "cause she didn't want to be hated, for a start."

Do you know what I mean?

Like the person who comes in and kind of ruins the dynamic...

of the two most famous people in detective literature.

John?

The reunion of John and Sherlock, it makes my hair stand on end.

It's just the... It's so beautifully played.

Martin, the complex emotions you see of astonishment and grief and rage...

all flickering through his eyes.

And then Sherlock, like an exposed little kid, going:

"I think I might have misjudged this one."

It's a joy.

Well, the short version...

hot dead.

What you don't expect from the books, where it's just...

"Oh, good God. You're alive! Wonderful. Let's get on and have another adventure."

Is the fact that in reality, if you've grieved someone for two years...

that's going to put you in a hell of a hole.

We were wondering when we got the script, how are they going to deal with that?

And I think it's... I hope we do it well but I think it's potentially very good.

One of the themes of this series, which wasn't stated at the beginning...

but I think has emerged in what we've done...

is Sherlock Holmes versus the real world.

He does sort of get involved in real-life things...

like going to a wedding, having possibly a girlfriend, all those things.

Updating Sherlock Holmes means putting him in our world...

and seeing what he makes of it, that's what it really means.

Pray silence for the best man.

We play a sort of parlour game of "What would Sherlock be like in..."

And the great thrill and revelation of that was, well...

he'd be the best man, wouldn't he?

And what would Sherlock Holmes's best man speech be like?

A train wreck?

Or what if he was brilliant at it?

Reading the stories and Dr Watson gets married between stories.

And I remember as a kid just thinking:

"Well, Sherlock Holmes must have been the best man."

There was no other option. Because Dr Watson had exactly one friend.

And thinking, "I wish we'd seen it." Well, now we get to see it.

And we had a long discussion about not caricaturing and not being silly.

What would Sherlock Holmes do as a best man?

Well, he's a genius. He's an accomplished genius.

He's a suave, accomplished genius and knows how to dress well.

He'd be very, very good at it. But he'd still be Sherlock Holmes.

- He'd treat it as a problem. - Yes.

"How can I do the world's best best man's speech?"

So, it's actually both a train wreck and a masterpiece.

Right, um...

In Episode 3, which is based on Charles Augustus Milverton...

and in the original story he does become engaged to Milverton's maid.

Heartlessly, which Steven has extrapolated into this thing and it's amazing.

John Watson's reaction is like... It's our reaction, it's the audience's, it's like...

"But you're behaving like a human being here."

- And it is... - And it's so funny.

We should have you two over for dinner.

- Really soon. - Yeah.

My place though, not the scuzz dump.

Great, yeah.

Dinner! Yeah.

You think, "Oh, it's nice he's become humanised."

He understands how to do all that now." And you realise he exploits it to terrible ends.

Yes.

It's devastatingly cruel what he does.

He inveigles his way back into her life...

and impresses her and turns his ability onto a single focus.

He's suddenly capable of doing a whole lot of things...

that he couldn't dare do in the past.

But it doesn't necessarily make him nicer.

Did you just get engaged to break into an office?

Yeah. Stroke of luck...

meeting her at your wedding. You can take some of the credit.

- Je... Jesus, Sherlock, she loves you. - Yes. Like I said, human error.

Charles Augustus Milverton, and in our one Magnussen...

is a true, sort of a repugnant human being.

He's not evil, necessarily.

He doesn't have plans for sort of Hitlerian world domination...

but he is just sort of completely amoral.

I mean, absolutely amoral.

He's created sort of another line of moral ethics.

This man, who as he says, preys on people who are different...

and bullies them, basically.

Lars Mikkelsen is incredible in the part.

But it's brilliant that he's not just another Moriarty.

I've dealt with murderers, psychopaths, terrorists, serial killers.

None of them can turn my stomach like Charles Augustus Magnussen.