'Sherlock' goes vintage with holiday special
Time to put away the Santa hat and dust off the vintage deerstalker cap of Sherlock Holmes.
The holiday special Sherlock: The Abominable Bride (9 p.m. ET/PT Friday on PBS Masterpiece) takes Benedict Cumberbatch’s ace detective and Martin Freeman’s John Watson from their contemporary setting back to 1895 London for a mystery set in the Victorian era, the time when Arthur Conan Doyle first introduced the famous resident of 221B Baker Street.
And that means period garb for everyone, including Sherlock’s big brother Mycroft, played by series writer and co-creator Mark Gatiss. “Dressing up and showing off is all acting is,” he says, “and this particularly fine period is full of wonderful clothes.”
Gatiss checks in with USA TODAY from his London pad, where a Christmas tree is unfortunately missing a Sherlock ornament. “Maybe next year. Now that there’s an adult coloring book, I’m not surprised by anything anymore.”
Q: Other than revealing whodunit, what can fans expect with this special?
A: It’s got all our favorite Gothic things — foggy London, hunting caps, spooky houses, everything. Horror is a very big part of Sherlock Holmes. It’s not something we’ve been able to do much other than Hound of the Baskervilles, really, so it’s nice to indulge all that.
Q: Was it tricky to switch the mindset from modern to old school?
A: It's not like it suddenly becomes very slow-moving and stage-like just because it’s set in the past. Yes, there are tweaks but it’s as if we had done our version of Sherlock as it was always intended in 1895: The sensibility of the show, the tone, the pace and the humor is the same, it’s just set in the past. The Victorian setting is what we fell in love with so it’s joyous to go for a brief visit. I kind of undo all of the things we modernize, really. I suppose it’s a measure of how well our version has worked. To my astonishment, several journalists have said, “How can Sherlock Holmes exist in a world without iPhones?” And I said, “Well, there is some precedent …”
Q: Were those fun days with Benedict running around in that familiar Sherlock hat?
A: We’ve had the deerstalker in our version but more as an ironic thing. It’s very different to show him in the full rig: The Inverness cape and the tweed and the pipe.
Q: Sherlock works in 1895 or 2015. What about him do we just inherently love?
A: We’re not drawn to ordinary people, and Sherlock is different. He’s rude, he has very few social skills, he says the first thing that comes into his head, but he’s a genius and therefore we sort of have to live with him and tolerate that. He’s got amazingly attractive qualities but he’s odd and those are the characters the public’s always been drawn to in fiction. He’s the original — he’s the great detective and every other detective is in his shadow.
Q: Do you have other ideas for one-off specials?
A: It’s been like a palette cleanser. We’re writing the fourth series now, and it’s very nice to go back to the show as we know it. (But) it’s very, very difficult to get everyone back together. We may be doing more specials than series. The next we’ll do is a black-and-white one — go back to the roots. (Chuckles) I’m laughing because if this one started as a joke, and now we’ve done it, you never know.
Q: Now you just have to do the romantic comedy — the Love Actually Sherlock.
A: Oh, don’t say that.