Dazed In The Life

Sure Look, It’s Sherlock January 13, 2012

I’ve been a bit of a Johnny-Come-Lately to many things in my time (but not to THAT thing, Ladies, oh no). In fact, as an Irishman, I’ve always been a Paddy-Come-Lately and it’s only recently that I’ve begun to apply the term Johnny-Come-Lately in such situations. Proof if ever it were needed. Our family insisted on fish-on-a-Friday in the good old Catholic way for many years, although I’m not sure whether God had envisaged fish-fingers when he dictated this particular diktat. I wore voluminous boxer-shorts far beyond the stage where social ideas of sexiness impelled me to boxer-briefs. I was among the last of my friends to invest in a digital camera and the accompanying practice of genital photography without the intrusion of surprised (and, dare I say, damn lucky) chemists in the development process. I didn’t speak until the age of 8.

Not all of the above are accurate. Which aren’t are for you to decide and/or imagine to your heart’s content.

I have had a wildly fluctuating relationship with the cutting edge. Let it be said that on rare occasions I’ve been right there at the incision, whilst more often I’ve arrived so late in the day that the cutting edge has dulled, blunted, rusted and dissolved into nothing, leaving nothing but a forlorn scissors-handle. I know I listened to The Fratellis long before most of my friends. Sadly I think I’m still listening to them long after they’ve all stopped.

The area of my life where this is best illustrated is in the field of television. I watched The Wire (praise be upon it) after I got tired of all my friends making references I didn’t get, mainly based on elongating the word “shit” to breaking point. If you haven’t watched The Wire, you won’t get this reference. SEE!? THAT’S ANNOYING! Similarly, I launched into Shameless a full three years after it first aired. I never saw Desperate Housewives first series and, as a result, the whole narrator-is-dead thing  remained unrevealed to me for years. I am still yet to complete The West Wing and The Sopranos or even to see a single episode of Mad Men.

So it was that I was socially pressurised by an avalanche of Facebook statuses and tweets into biting the BBC bullet and I watched ‘Sherlock’. I missed it when it first aired and never got around to catching up, so I decided that I would do it properly: Watch the first series before allowing myself to see the new episode which had everyone in such a lather of cyber-sweat. Which was difficult to do because usually I can’t resist immediately supporting anything that sends the Daily Mail into state-of-the-nation, think-of-the-children, filth-pedlar-witch-hunting overdrive. This episode apparently contained “shocking” pre-watershed nudiness. I had to be patient.

I watched Episode 1 last Saturday. I inconveniently had to spend the following day with friends but got home and watched two more episodes that night. By Monday evening I had seen all five extant episodes. I had caught up with the rest of the British public. I was completely and utterly hooked and hungry for more. I had had the luxury of watching five episodes back-to-back as a complete newcomer without having to wait a week for the next instalment. And now, nothing. I need my fix. I need my Cumberbatch. In fact, I’m now so addicted they may need to invent a medicinal patch to satisfy the cravings – a Cumberpatch?

The joys of ‘Sherlock’ are many. Each 90 minute episode is a film in itself and give the audience the thrill of ‘trying to figure it out’ as all good detective dramas do. The performances are excellent – Cumberbatch is maddeningly magnetic and Freeman is endearingly enduring with a warm chemistry between them. It is interesting how some of the conventions which exist in the new Guy Ritchie cinema adaptations of the Holmes stories also form the basis of the TV series: The sometimes claustrophobic and combative depiction of the relationship between Holmes and Watson; the use of slow-motion and zoom to demonstrate Holmes’ deductive methods; even the honky-tonk soundtrack is familiar and impossibly fitting.

The stories are ripping yarns, the villains devious (Andrew Scott is a truly terrifyingly psychotic Moriarty) and most importantly of all, our central character is beguiling. Sherlock is flawed like all the best of them – they’re always mavericks like Bond, reckless like Magnum PI, have failed personal lives like Morse and are drug addicts like Jessica Fletcher. Cumberbatch’s Sherlock is so engaging precisely because he’s a misfit, a freak, socially incapable while totally unperturbed by it, rude, pompous, self-centred and possessed of extraordinary cheekbones. My, there’s cutting edge. Sigh.

A true measure of a good song is if you find yourself humming it the next day. A measure of ‘Sherlock’s’ brilliance is the fact that on the Tuesday evening I found myself sitting on the tube, considering the peach-coloured paint stains on the suede boots of the straggly-haired, broad-shouldered twenty-something with a posh accent and designer frames and building up a picture of ‘what’s really going on here’. “Wealthy parents, middle-child, former pupil at a rugby-playing public school but he preferred rowing, now wants to be an artist and has just come from a studio – not his own, a girl’s, hence the nice clothes”. Yep. I had him pegged. Now I just need him to commit a crime and I can look like a bloody genius.

In the meantime, I sit here staring at BBC iPlayer impatiently and wishing for Series 2, Episode 3. Soon. Soon.