TV Review: SHERLOCK and BIRDS OF A FEATHER

A version of this article was originally published in The Courier on 4th January 2013.

http://www.thecourier.co.uk/lifestyle

Sherlock: New Year's Day, BBC1

Birds of a Feather: Thursday, STV

Paul Whitelaw

Take a cursory glance at this year's festive schedules and you'd be forgiven for thinking that British television is ruled by just two writer/producers: Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss. Following the inescapable dominance of Doctor Who's 50^th anniversary celebrations and Gatiss' supernatural visitations on BBC2 on Christmas Day, the duo continued their monopoly with the eagerly awaited return of Sherlock.

Tasked with providing a satisfying explanation for the sociopathic sleuth's faked suicide at the end of series two, they cheekily confounded expectations by conjuring more than one outcome. Galloping out of the trap, the giddy pre-credits sequence declared that Sherlock survived his fall using a bungee rope, a latex mask, Moriarty's corpse and none other than obfuscating mind man Derren Brown.

Colour me complacent, but this struck me as a perfectly acceptable and amusing explanation. It was a silly, fun, audacious illusion. Job done.

Except it wasn't. Sherlock, after all, isn't so much a drama as a theatrical confidence trick, where things are rarely as they seem. A playful piece of misdirection, this absurd version of events was quickly revealed as a harmless gag at the audience's expense, later superseded by a more “plausible” flashback involving air bags, a doppelganger corpse from the hospital morgue, a colluding network of homeless assistants, and the fiendish trick of placing a squash ball under Sherlock's armpit to briefly stop his pulse.

But even that was undermined by one more hint of ambiguity. Gatiss, who wrote the episode, clearly had no intention of supplying a definitive explanation, which wouldn't matter so much had the entire episode not been devoted to teasing out the riddle.

Bloated with self-referential gags about the colourful fan theories surrounding the suicide stunt, this wasn't another exciting 21^st century adventure for Sherlock Holmes, but a heavily meta-textual commentary on the hit TV show Sherlock itself. It was as if Moffat and Gatiss were more interested in causing a stir on Twitter than writing a coherent piece of entertainment.

Resembling a self-indulgent, overextended Comic Relief sketch, it allowed scant room for any other business. The barely sketched sub-plot involving a terrorist cell operating from the London Underground was little more than flimsy groundwork for the remainder of the series.

But at least the odd couple double-act of Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman continue to shine as Holmes and Watson. Cumberbatch's comic flair tumbled forth during a farcical scene in which he reintroduced himself to Watson in the guise of a French waiter. Watson's understandable reaction – a stunned conflagration of confusion, relief, sadness and fury – was impressively realised in Freeman's typically grounded, believable style.

Almost entirely by virtue of his thoughtful performance, he's the sole point of emotional depth in Sherlock's otherwise glib and heightened universe.

The engaging chemistry of its stars aside, I've never been convinced by the often disproportionate praise this series receives. Clever and entertaining though it often is, it's far too throwaway to ever be considered a classic. Blighted by one-dimensional characters – does anybody really care about the bland Molly's unrequited love for Sherlock? – and an alienating swagger of undeserved self-satisfaction, its audacity, while fitfully admirable, often comes across as mere superficial flash: a talented show-off with a desperate need to impress.

I admire Sherlock in many ways, but I could never love it.

Possibly the least anticipated comeback in sitcom history, the inexplicable return of Birds of a Feather was even bleaker than I'd anticipated.

Groaning under the weight of laboured, tired, embarrassing dialogue – yes, the computer game console Wii does sound a bit like a colloquialism for urine, doesn't it? - it's like watching a pathetic gaggle of ghosts going through the motions of haunting a long-abandoned manor. Pauline Quirke deserves better. So do we.

The reason for its sorry revival is a mystery that would leave even Sherlock dumbfounded.

Interview with STEVEN MOFFAT

This article was originally published in The Scotsman on 20th December 2011.

http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/tv-and-radio/preview_doctor_who_the_doctor_the_widow_and_the_wardrobe_1_2015336

As tireless overseer of the multi-award-winning Doctor Who and Sherlock, two of Britain's biggest – and in the case of the former, most globally successful – TV dramas, Steven Moffat's pre-eminent position within the cultural firmament is at once impressive and unenviable. “I never find any time to relax,” he sighs. “At this very moment I'm supposed to be at a big lovely, boozy lunch that I had to call off because I haven't finished this Doctor Who script that I'm very late on.”

Not that he's necessarily complaining, you understand. Like his predecessor on Doctor Who, Russell T. Davies, the Paisley-born writer has been a devoted fan of the series since childhood, so it's little wonder that his slight edge of weariness pales in comparison to his evident enjoyment of the job.

Although he admits there are days when he wants to run screaming from the room, he claims it's not because of the programmes themselves as such. “All the stuff that surrounds it can be... not so much bad as relentless. I have one of those jobs that a lot of people have, where I check my emails in the morning with trepidation. You know, is there a bomb in here, what am I unwrapping today? But in the main I wouldn't be here if I didn't love it.”

Although Moffat can often come across as rather prickly in interviews, the man I speak to makes for amusing and avuncular company. At the risk of sinking into armchair psychology mode, he exhibits that not uncommon combination – at least among creative types - of shyness, self-deprecation and bolshy confidence. The latter is hardly surprising, given that he's one of the most feted screenwriters of his generation, renowned for his sly wit, quicksilver dialogue, vibrant imagination and ingenious plotting.

But it was that very audacity which led several of your actual adult critics to complain that the most recent series of Doctor Who – Moffat's second in the showrunner chair – was far too complicated for children. Unsurprisingly, he's having none of it.

“When you say 'adult critics', there's about three,” he chuckles (he chuckles a lot). “The truth is we don't have any audience feedback about it being desperately hard to follow. All the kids got who River Song was, all the kids knew that the little girl regenerating would turn out to be River. It really isn't that hard to follow. Because it was momentarily more arc-based they decide to say it's too complicated. Because Russell was gay they had to say it was all far too gay. No it wasn't! If anything, I think Russell should be credited as the man who made the Doctor definitively heterosexual. But it's just finding something to say about it, they'll do it every year and you never know what it's going to be.”

There has been some confusion lately surrounding the scheduling of the next series, with conflicting reports suggesting that not all of the 14 episodes will be shown in 2012. Can he clarify? “I can clarify that we start shooting in mid-February, but literally I can't tell you what the schedule is. What headlines are you planning for that time of year? I've only just found out what the transmission schedule is for Sherlock, and I've finished making that. I've barely started writing Doctor Who. Loads of things about that are in flux, all for good reasons actually.”

He can confirm, however, that it's part of his grand-plan to remove Doctor Who from its usual Spring/Summer slot and back to the Wintry habitat it enjoyed when he was growing up. “It's done very well in the Summer, it's not like we've ever suffered from it, but it's almost like an aesthetic thing. If you're having to close the curtains so you can see the screen, that's not a good time to be watching a show that's largely about tunnels and torches. Somehow I think it's a show you watch in the dark.”

As for the 50^th anniversary in 2013, Moffat has already promised an appropriately special episode, although when pressed he teasingly replies, “Why talk in the singular? Again, genuinely, the plans are at an early stage, but we have some very clear ideas about some of the things we're doing, and I think Doctor Who fans and kids will think it's the best thing ever. We've got a load of very big plans – the mere fact that we're talking about this two years before the event should tell you how seriously we're taking it.”

Fans are obviously clamouring for an anniversary special featuring current incumbent Matt Smith alongside many of the previous Doctors.

“Apparently,” he shrugs, and chuckles again, with absolutely nothing more to say on the matter.

Extracting new information about the revived Doctor Who has never been easy. A magnet for rumour and misinformation, the series attracted confusion again recently when Harry Potter director David Yates claimed he was making a rebooted movie version with an entirely different cast and mythology.

“It's completely inaccurate!” hoots Moffat, “there's nothing there! I mean it would be lovely, yes. If anything, the only good bit about this is that it might actually focus our minds on thinking that we actually should do [a film]. But to state the bleeding obvious, it's not going to be a different version of Doctor Who with two different Doctors at the same time. Of course not, we're not that silly. That would be no way to run a franchise, would it? I'd love it to happen, but that version you heard was just a guy getting cornered on the red carpet and not really being on-message.”

When asked what it is that attracts him to such flamboyant characters as the Doctor and Sherlock Holmes, he unequivocally cites their mutual brainpower and thirst for knowledge. That's perhaps hardly surprising coming from a former schoolteacher.

“The thing that unites both those shows is that they absolutely fetishise intelligence. It's about being clever, and that being clever is a good thing. In the Clarkson-isation of television I think it's rather good that we have two very popular drama series that expect the audience to be intelligent, and are right in that expectation. The only superpower those two heroes have is the fact that they're smarter than anybody else in the room. It says you don't have to be the fastest, the best-looking, the sexiest, you can just be smart. You don't often get the message, especially in American movies, that smart is good, that smart doesn't have to be geeky and silly, it can actually be amazing and powerful. And particularly in the case of the Doctor, he's such a moral man, he's a good, clever man, that's all he is. I think that's about as positive a message as you could possibly give.”

The Doctor and Holmes aside, Moffat also previously reinvented the tale of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde for the BBC, and recently wrote the Tintin movie for Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson. Are there any other iconic fictional characters he'd like to get his hands on?

“When Mark [Gatiss, co-creator of Sherlock] and I get together we discuss Doctor Who, Sherlock Holmes and James Bond, and I keep saying, 'Oh we can't do James Bond, because there has to be something left that's still fiction for us!' I love those films, but I think I shouldn't write that because then I'll ruin James Bond for myself.”

It's probably just as well, as he wouldn't have the time. Nevertheless, it looks as though he'll be steering the adventures of the Time Lord for at least a while yet.

“I genuinely haven't got a plan,” he claims, “except I'll probably have to stop at some point or I'll die. And dying would be bad. But my main concern is not so much how long I do it, but that I absolutely, definitely am going to be handing it on to somebody else. I want it to be in great shape, and some day I want somebody else to come in and knock my socks off with what they do with it. You don't want to be the last person in the relay race, do you?”