Sunday Summary: Do It Anyway

Happy new year to you all. (Is it too late to be saying this now?) I hope you're all not too gloomy about Christmas being all over now and the return to normality - although Christmas isn't really over until the last of the snack food is gone. Fact. Or if you're a fellow retailer, perhaps you're relieved.

I quite like the beginning of a new year. The empty pages in the calendar with their infinite possibility; though I don't really do resolutions, I like to take the time to look over my life and see what has been a success in the last 12 months, and what changes I could make. This year has a massive change on the cards: I've handed in my notice at work, and will be leaving in four weeks' time. There is still a lot I love about my bookshop job, and I'm very proud of what I've achieved there in the last eight years, but I'm afraid of stagnating, and all the signs seem to be pointing towards it being time for me to say goodbye. But I'm leaving without anything certain to go to yet, which is almost as frightening. Financially I'll be OK for a while, as long as I only buy necessities, but of course the sooner I find a new job, the better. (In the spirit of "Do It Anyway," I've promised myself the reward of a trip to visit a friend in Canada if he's still there when I'm back in work.)

With the dark grey weather and long evenings, it's a good time to get back into my books, and Jessie Burton's The Muse is easing me out of my recent reading slump. I really loved her debut novel The Miniaturist, and The Muse is shaping up to be just as good, although I've reached a perspective-shift and need to adjust to the new characters and setting.

With my change in financial circumstances I'm going to be very strict with my spending and am enforcing a partial book-buying-ban (though I do intend to go to Bex's second London Bookshop Crawl next month, mostly for the social element and with a strict budget.) There are a few books out now or coming soon that I want to buy, such as Juno Dawson's new book Margot and Me, and the short "Spinster Club" book And A Happy New Year by Holly Bourne. But I shall also be making more use of the library and second-hand bookshops this year (as well as continuing the battle with my to-read pile and all the books I want to reread.)

I recently watched Netflix's surprise series The OA, which turned up with little fanfare. I'm not really sure what to make of it. It's the story of a young woman who reappears after going missing seven years previously. But she used to be blind and now she can see! As she struggles to adjust back to living an ordinary life, she meets with a few other people and tells them the story of her strange experiences in captivity. But how reliable is she? I'm not really sure if The OA was a bit good or really, really (but endearingly) bad. Certainly there were some elements that were utterly ridiculous; in particular the "movements" that were supposed to have mystical powers. But as much as I laughed at the weird interpretative dance scenes, I was left pondering over questions of reality and narrative, and thinking about the characters after the credits had finished.

Also there was the return of BBC's Sherlock on New Year's Eve, with another episode tonight and a third next Sunday. I wrote a rave review of the first series of Sherlock all the way back in 2010 when it first aired. I was a huge admirer of Stephen Moffat, one of the series' creators and also head writer of Doctor Who. But Moffat has come under fire a lot in the past few years, and his Doctor Who and Sherlock with it; although I don't agree with a lot of the things I read, I can't help but keep in mind some of the criticism when viewing his work, and I think my enjoyment of the stories has suffered as a result. And the series has never reached the heights of the first episode "A Study in Pink." I think that the rules of TV mean that each story has to be bigger than the last, the stakes higher, the conflict darker, and it has moved away from the source material a bit. Last week's episode was a thriller more than a mystery, and it employed an egregious use of a much-criticised narrative trope that I don't think is likely to be forgiven any time soon. I understand some of the reasons why the writers made the decision that they did, but it's disappointing. A good writer has awareness of the tools of their trade; not just their words, but the character archetypes, tropes, cliches to avoid, common narratives to subvert. And unfortunately in that regard, Moffat and Gatiss are perhaps not quite such great storytellers as I used to believe.

Edited later: Although I still haven't forgiven them for last week's "twist," this week's episode, "The Lying Detective" was pretty epic, with a genuinely creepy villain and some real shockers - some that I'd foreseen in part, others that I think were deliberately written to make you kick yourself for not seeing and exposing even the supposedly savvy viewers' internalised prejudices and assumptions. Okay, Moffat and Gattiss, you win round 2.

One more episode of the season, and although I do enjoy Sherlock over all, I kind of hope this'll be the last series, to leave us wanting more instead of carrying on past its welcome, as too often happens with popular series. Best to go out on top, I think.

Old Stories, New Settings: on modern-day adaptations of classic literature

I always used to consider myself a purist when it came to adaptations of beloved books. I have a button badge that says "The Book Was Better," and yes, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it is. And yet we book-lovers do like to watch film adaptations of familiar stories, to see the stories and characters we know and love brought to life. Woe betide anyone who gets it wrong! But can anyone really reproduce the films that play out in a person's mind when they read a book? No one ever reads the same book as anyone else, or so they say; everyone brings something new to the reading. But a good story is timeless, and so often people demonstrate this by bringing old stories to a new setting, to show how themes and characters can transcend a single place and time. It's an idea I used to frown upon, but have come to appreciate. Viewing a familiar tale in a new way can give you a new understanding and better appreciation of the original text.

The point at which I first acknowledged this was in the summer of 2010, when the BBC showed the first series of Sherlock. I recognised the brilliance of casting Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman (even without a moustache) as the Great Detective and his sidekick, before I even identified that they were dressed in modern clothes. They were Holmes and Watson, there was no doubt about it. From before Holmes appeared on-screen, from the first time he spoke, his character was clearly defined, given new life free from the trappings of the smoggy setting of Victorian London and its formal language.

 

I didn't need to read the back blurb of Jacqueline Wilson's recent novel Katy to know what it was. A Katy on a swing? Well, that would be a modern-day telling of Susan Coolidge's What Katy Did, a classic that was inevitably a big part of my childhood - and indeed now Nick Sharratt has illustrated a paperback of the original to match, a visual confirmation that times may change but children do not.

I knew that Wilson had liked that book as a child, although to the modern or older reader, the Victorian moralising is rather unpalatable now. Jacqueline Wilson specialises in stories about dysfunctional families and flawed but believable child heroes and heroines, so adapting What Katy Did plays to her strengths. I really liked how closely she stuck to the original, especially in the first half of the book, mirroring even the minor details: the ice-house, on which the children love to sit, has become a garage roof. Aunt Izzie is now Katy and Clover's stepmother, and middle-child misfit Elsie their stepsister, while the younger ones are at least half-siblings. It was the details of the children's make-believe storytelling and games that made that story come alive for me as a child, so it's really interesting to see what their modern-day counterparts get up to (and it is really not that much different at all. Katy and her friend Cecy have mobile phones now, instead of "post-offices" in the garden, but they use them to taunt and exclude poor Elsie in just the same way.) Halfway through, at the time of the accident, the story moves away from the original What Katy Did and becomes a new Jacqueline Wilson book with 21st century values. Katy does not need to become reformed (and utterly dull) and be rewarded with miraculous healing. The world doesn't work that way, and by giving her heroine the challenges of accepting her limitations and setting herself new goals as a person with a disability, Jacqueline Wilson has written a more relatable young heroine for modern-day Katys to relate to.

Possibly the most adapted and updated story of them all is Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, the tale of hate turning to love that has formed the starting point of most romantic comedies. Bride and Prejudice brings a Bollywood twist to the classic tale. The world has grown smaller, but human nature remains, and the formalities and misunderstandings of Regency England translates well into the cultural divide between a rich, haughty American businessman and a bright young Indian woman whose mother wants to arrange good marriages for all her daughters. Oh, you know the story! Bride and Prejudice is a smart, funny, sometimes corny but feel-good adaptation of the old story.

Then, of course, there's Bridget Jones's Diary, based on the novel by Helen Fielding (which I think was originally published as a weekly newspaper column.) I read and watched this before I ever read Pride and Prejudice (yes, there was such a time!) and haven't seen it for ages, but although it's more loosely based on Austen's novel, there are clear parallels in this tale of a thirty-something singleton surrounded by smug marrieds, with the charming cad on one side, and on the other hand the snob called Darcy who looks like Colin Firth (the ultimate bit of meta-casting.)

The latest adaptation Pride and Prejudice heralded a new kind of storytelling in the form of the Literary-Inspired Webseries. Filmed in short episodes in video-journal format, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries give us Lizzie Bennet, a twenty-something graduate student who has moved back home with her family in a difficult financial climate, wondering what future there is in store for someone with an English degree - a painfully relatable variation on the theme. Most of the drama happens with Lizzie relating events to her video journal (with some interruptions from friends and family, and some excellent re-enactments.) Ashley Clements is sassy and expressive as Lizzie, Laura Spencer (wasn't she in The Big Bang Theory as Emily?) is sweet and lovable, while Mary Kate Wiles is lovably obnoxious as Lydia, as you'd expect, but shows more character growth than Austen allowed her, and a rare vulnerability later on. The other two sisters are relegated to being Mary the Emo Cousin who Lizzie (perfect!) and Kitty is literally Lydia's adoring cat.

Since The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, Youtube has been rather overrun with modern-day video-diary versions of every classic imaginable: all the Austen, I think, Shakespeare, Sherlock Holmes, Little Women, and my beloved Anne of Green Gables has got not one but two webseries inspired by it. Green Gables Fables came first, starring Mandy Harmon as Anne, and in September returned for its second season. I think it took a little while to get really good, as the actors grew into their characters. It is very faithful to the book, although I wasn't quite sure that some of the substitutions quite reflected the original - having a manicure at the salon, for example, doesn't quite have the same importance as finally getting to wear nice clothes, and the hair disaster and the cake disaster less dramatic. But by the time Gilbert Blythe turns up in the middle of the first season, it got into its stride, and it is notable for its amount of "transmedia" with Youtube channels for supporting characters, who all have regularly-updated Twitter accounts interacting with each other for things that can't be shown in a five-minute video diary once a week. Tanner Gilman is a magnificently lovable, nerdy Gilbert Blythe, who is more important to get right than a Mr Darcy (and I'm sorry, women everywhere, but I still don't get the appeal. Not when I've grown up with Gilbert Blythe.)

Between the first and second seasons, Green Gables Fables filled in with some of the events of Anne of Avonlea updated and the stories told through their social media. Season two focuses on Anne of the Island, which follows Anne at Redmond College. It diverged a little from the book at the beginning with a subplot about Diana, who never went to university in the book, and yet it seems mostly to remain true to their characters - the growing distance between two friends, Diana being more of a homebody while Anne is academic and ambitious. The format doesn't always quite work; how do you show intensely private moments in a "Hello world, this is what happened to me today" video diary? And fitting four years' worth of events into one academic year also has its occasional uncomfortable juxtaposition of events happening too close together (notably Anne's romantic woes.) But I'm so glad to see Anne of Green Gables being talked about more - and discussions use the books as a starting point, instead of the (albeit excellent) 1985 TV miniseries. Green Gables Fables is an immersive storytelling experience, putting the viewer into the story and living through it as it unfolds. There's been some extraordinary writing and acting, and Ruby Gillis's last video made a fine adaptation of a particular scene in Anne of the Island. 

And I'm completely spoilt in having Project Green Gables as well. This Finnish-made adaptation re-imagines Anne Shirley as a black foster kid in a mostly-white community, a decision that gives added weight to the story in a contemporary setting. Like her ginger counterpart, Anne has her own hair woes, though with its natural texture rather than colour, and this change gives a deeper, more serious interpretation than mere vanity. Gilbert is going to have to work very hard at repentance for his hair taunts, and you can't blame Anne or laugh about her unforgiveness under these circumstances. This isn't a petty matter any more. As I write this, the story is up to the point of the Great Hair Disaster, and in Project Green Gables, Anne's rash mistake is buying a cheap chemical hair relaxer from the internet, with devastating results.

Project Green Gables may be less polished than Green Gables Fables, but it is more adventurous when it comes to adapting scenes and chapters of Anne's life to a modern setting, and by doing so it better retains and underlines the nuances of the original. It is not a brooch that Marilla accuses Anne of stealing, but her prescription medicine, an accusation that cuts much deeper and has potentially far-reaching consequences. She's not an orphan any more, but a foster child of unreliable parents. And just her gossip about Avonlea school goings-on makes me think about the original, so-familiar text in a different light. Laura Eklund Nhaga plays a very different Anne Shirley to Mandy Harmon - and yet they both are Anne, bringing out complementary sides to her personality. Both Annes are aged up to about sixteen or seventeen, whereas in the book she first appears as a precocious eleven-year-old. Laura Eklund Nhaga brings out her innocence, her passion and enthusiasm, her non-stop joyful chatter, instantly convincing me that she was Anne. The supporting cast are also wonderful, and like Anne, they are the book characters come to life but in a very different way from Green Gables Fables. A special mention for including the hilariously obnoxious Charlie Sloane, not a character who tends to be very prominent in film adaptations. The series shows a deep knowledge of the source material, easily making reference to the little things as well as the defining events.

With two webseries adaptations as well as a film and a new television adaptation in the works, I'm over the moon. Anyone who knows me will tell you that Anne of Green Gables is the book that defines me, and although I can hardly fault the best-known television adaptation, as far as I'm concerned, the more Anne, the better.

Sunday Summary: Resolutions, Sherlock and Bout of Books 9

Well hello to you all, and a happy new year. Again.

2014 seems to have got off to a positive, if sleepy start. I'm blaming the weather for getting inside my brain. Apparently there has been a little sunshine, but if this rumour is true it is unverified by me, as I've been working when it has shown its face. So far, however, I haven't let the bad weather get to me this winter; I've been enjoying being wrapped up in a duvet reading, watching DVDs and internetting the evening away. (Oops to the last.)

I seem to have gone a bit overboard on resolutions this year, in an attempt to reclaim my life and really make this year worthwhile. Last year had some wonderful moments, but it also had some long stretches of dreariness, and I'd like to look back over each month this year and say, "Ah, yes, this is when I did such-and-such." Let's see how well that goes...

My resolutions for 2014

• To do something new each month. Create new memories, go on adventures, do things I've never done before. I've got one thing lined up already: my friend Hannah, who is a photographer, put out a call for models to feature in some fantasy-themed projects, and I've volunteered to take part. Exciting!
• To write every day. After far too long battling writer's block, I came up with a great idea for a novel, and if I can write 500 words each day, (weekends off) that's 10 000 words per month. Hardly NaNoWriMo, but it's the length of a university dissertation in a month. 750words.com, Write or Die, and Written? Kitten are all great websites to help boost the word count. I use 750words.com as a place to brain-dump and warm up my brain before getting to work on the novel itself.
• To be more active. I'd like to get into a habit of swimming regularly (NOT in the sea at this time of year; I'm not that brave) and to go to the outdoor gym in Ventnor which is both free and less intimidating than joining an indoor gym. Also, my sister bought me Miranda Hart's Maracattack DVD. Maracas make fitness fun! 
• To give more. I don't have much money, but I'm better off than many people, and it doesn't take much to help out: a click of a button, an extra few groceries for the foodbank, buying a Big Issue. 
• Not to let my outgoings exceed my income.
• Except when it comes to books. I want to read more books than I acquire and get my to-read pile down. A tracker on the sidebar of my blog is an attempt to keep me accountable for the books I buy versus those I read and/or give away.
• To be more positive. Not to grumble about work (outside of working hours, and also to keep it off the shop floor.) Not to worry what other people think of me, and in turn to be kinder to others, less judgmental, less snarky.
• To challenge myself to leave my comfort zone, but also to know when I need to stay inside it. To be kind to myself as well as to others.

Sherlock: contains spoilery talk

New Year also saw, at long last, the return of the BBC's Sherlock. Who else saw it? After the end of series 2 in January 2012, all the talk was: how did Sherlock fake his own death? Series 3's opener, "The Empty Hearse" was more about this question, and the big reunion with Dr Watson, than it was about the usual genius deductions and big mysteries. The main plot reminded me a lot of V for Vendetta. But what of the answer to the big question? Three solutions were provided, some more preposterous than others in a clear nod to all the fan theories that have been all over the internet for two years. But do we believe Sherlock's answer? Anderson, to whom he revealed his secret, picked holes in the revelation, and declared it "disappointing." I'm inclined to believe that Sherlock did not tell the whole truth, but is this all the answer we're going to get? Much of the internet says yes, citing the episode's use of the language of prestige, that "a magician never reveals his tricks." True. But I'm inclined to hope that the truth will be revealed eventually, probably at the end of episode 3. Sherlock is not about the unexplained; his method is to wow us with his incredible, complex but often quite mundane methods of deducing the truth. Writer Steven Moffat (also head writer of Doctor Who) has attracted a lot of criticism over the last year or so, and yet I retain my faith in him as a master storyteller, in command of every plot thread. And he did not write "The Empty Hearse," Mark Gatiss (also the actor who plays Mycroft Holmes) did. Yes, Sherlock is a joint project between these two writers (and some others) but I have a feeling that Moffat would want to write the big reveal himself. Did he write episode 3? Not sure, but as he's only co-written episode 2, I suspect he probably did.

Bout of Books 9.0 starts tomorrow; probably the most popular bloggers' readathon, and a chance to get through some of those books I really ought to have read by now. I've been reading N0S4R2 for about a week now, which really does live up to the hype! Written by Joe Hill (son of a very famous horror writer) it is a real page-turner: a serial killer, a take on the vampire genre (and not the sparkly sort) and a girl who can find lost things. I've also got Mindstar Rising, a science fiction/mystery book borrowed from my friend Jamie, Something Borrowed, sequel to Never the Bride, which is a library book I keep on renewing, and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. This book is my least favourite and I've suspended my Potter reread in favour of my Christmas books. Umbridge is so unpleasant I can't even love to hate her; she just makes the book feel oppressive and hard work. But I'd like to finish the series before reading The Cuckoo's Calling, and I want to have read that before it's published in paperback.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

My best friend, Judith, is only two months older than me, but when we were at school, she was in the year above me. This proved very useful when it came to discovering literature. Many a book I read and loved came second-hand through her talking about what she was studying in English. This was certainly the case for my first Sherlock Holmes stories. I must have been either ten or eleven, and after her raving about Holmes, I just had to find out what all the fuss was about. Even at eleven, I didn't like missing out on a good story. I vividly remember that I read four stories, one of which was "The Speckled Band," which captivated me, appealing to my slightly ghoulish imagination. This must have been one of my first really grown-up stories, and it was like nothing I'd ever read before.

I've read The Hound of the Baskervilles a few times, but aside from that, Sherlock Holmes lay at the back of my mind for many years. I watched a few stories on TV, acquired much of the knowledge through the osmosis of popular culture, but didn't read much until about eighteen months ago, when BBC started airing Sherlock for the first time. The series sent me right back to the original stories: A Study in Scarlet, and The Sign of Four. After an unusually long wait for a second series of a TV show, Sherlock returned to the screens once more on New Year's Day this year, and I returned to the next volume of the series: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.


After two novels, the third installment is a collection of short stories. This makes the book easy to dip in and out of, and you need little knowledge of what has come before, but can read the stories in any order - there may be a throwaway reference to "the case of..." but nothing that has any bearing on the tale. In fact, the stories aren't even compiled in chronological order - some are set after Watson's marriage, others before. They are narrated by Dr Watson, as written up long after the event. Though far from simple stories, they are told simply, often to the same formula: The problem is presented, Dr Watson, the client and the reader are all baffled, but not Sherlock Holmes, oh no! He ponders a lot, asks strange questions, goes out, solves the mystery then comes back and then tells us how he did it. My favourite stories in the collection are those which have a little less talking and a little more action, those stories in which Watson gets to go "on location" with Holmes.

Some of the tales are rather silly, such as "The Blue Carbuncle" - a valuable jewel which nearly ends up in the Christmas dinner. Two stories require suspension of disbelief as dodgy characters fool those closest to them with disguised identities, and then there is "The Red-Headed League." A fun, entertaining and cunning tale, but how gullible was Holmes's client, duped into joining this fictitious club, just for gingers?

Adventures also contains some of the most wonderful and memorable cases. We meet The Woman, Irene Adler, the one woman Sherlock acknowledges. There is the gruesome tale of the "Engineer's Thumb," and the "Copper Beeches" mystery, first dismissed by Holmes as his "zero point" for interest, but which turns out to be one of the most intriguing and exciting of all. And of course, "The Speckled Band," my old friend, the original locked-door mystery.

Yes, reading these stories, sometimes I found myself rolling my eyes at some of these cliched tropes - but let's not forget that they were not cliched. These are the original twisty page-turning detective stories, those that helped to invent the genre. I won't say Conan Doyle was the inventor - check out Poe's Auguste Dupin stories that came before - but for twists and thrills and cleverness, I think nothing has topped the Sherlock Holmes series in over a century. Maybe Agatha Christie put up a fair fight.

Film: Sherlock Holmes (2009)

After finally getting reintroduced to Sherlock Holmes thanks to Steven Moffat's recent series, and having my prejudices surrounding the character and the stories challenged, I decided to rent the DVD of the film that I was so quick to pooh-pooh on my first impression, from a two-minute trailer in the cinema.

After such a good version on the TV over the last three weeks, perhaps the recent film didn't really stand much of a chance in my opinion, but I will be fair: it was a lot better than I had expected, and a pretty good period-action-adventure film. Unfortunately, I still wasn't quite convinced by Robert Downey Jr. as the title character. To me he came across as inconsistantly Holmes-ish, and as the film went along the Holmes-ish moments became longer and more frequent, but he wasn't actually Holmes to me. My impression was that he was trying too hard. His accent, his mannerisms, came across as a little too forced and unnatural, instead of the carelessly deadpan snarker, he came across as a smartass, as well as a bit clumsy and clownish. He did very well when Holmes was being more serious or showing off his "Holmes Clevers" but in other scenes I wasn't convinced. It's not that I objected to the action scenes when I came to watch the film itself (having been re-educated on the nature of the Holmes stories) but the way they were executed left me cold.

Jude Law as Dr Watson, on the other hand, was perfect. I find Law one of the more distinctive actors around at the moment and yet in this film I was able to forget he was Jude Law and just see Doctor Watson. Unlike the TV Series, which focuses on Holmes and Watson's first meeting and cases, these two have been working together for a long time and have an easy, bantering relationship.

The setting and atmosphere of the drama were well done, tension built by various uses of sound and lighting, and there were moments, while less "arty" than the TV series, that were effective in showing slow flashbacks to see Holmes's workings-out. The film begins in the middle of the action, as Holmes and Watson go after the villain, and yet it took me longer to be engaged than in the more thoughtful beginning of Sherlock. The plot itself was satisfactory, but a little weak and quite improbable. That in itself itself wouldn't have caused me to dock points - I am currently reading A Study in Scarlet which has moments which are probably almost as silly, but which can be excused by the time of writing. The climax in the Houses of Parliament, however, was too large-scale to be credible.

Although the film-makers did a wonderful job of scene-setting, almost certainly using plenty of CGI to get some pretty marvellous landscapes of Victorian London, the film felt more like a period drama by a modern author than the TV series, which although set in the present day, captures the spirit of the original.

TV: Sherlock

I'm the first to admit it: sometimes I can be a real literary snob. When I find out about a new TV or film adaptation of a favourite book, I find myself excited and apprehensive in equal measure. Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to leap on every use of artistic license in the FilmOfTheBook, but I do notice if someone acts in a way that is inconsistant with their character, (for example, Faramir in The Lord of the Rings) or if new events are inserted into the story that are noticeably out of place (such as the Death Eaters at the Burrow in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince) if a really significant, character-defining line is omitted, ("DON'T - CALL - ME - COWARD!" in the aforementioned Harry Potter) or if it just "feels wrong." (ITV's recent Wuthering Heights, though accurate, just didn't live up to the pictures in my head.)


When I saw the trailer for last year's film entitled Sherlock Holmes, I recoiled in horror. I am loath to repeat my exact snooty remarks about it, but I did not like the look of it in the slightest. It looked to my mind like a mock-James Bond action film which was trying to be funny. However, I never actually saw the film, and my friends who did, unanimously declared it a lot better, a lot truer, than the trailer implied. Also, except for The Hound of the Baskervilles I haven't actually read any of Conan Doyle's novels since I was about twelve, and am undoubtably influenced by my impressions of the time: very clever, but a bit old-fashioned and stuffy.

And then another version of the famous detective popped up, months after the last. I was alerted to this through micro-blogging site Twitter, when a rather successful TV writer named Steven Moffat opened an account to talk about his latest project. Mr Moffat's writing skills burst into the public consciousness in 2005 when he sent Great Britain diving for cover behind the nearest sofa with four words: "Are you my mummy?" Over the next four years Moffat wrote one Doctor Who story per series, awakening the nation's terrors of Things Under The Bed, Things That Move When You're Not Looking and Things In The Shadows, before making fans shudder and cheer when he took on the job full-time. It is this blogger's opinion that Moffat's first series was the most consistently good since Doctor Who was revived.

So when I heard he was working on a series about Sherlock Holmes, I determined to watch it, without knowing a thing about it other than its writer. When the Radio Times came in, I turned straight to the Sherlock feature and looked at the picture: Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Watson (Martin Freeman) outside 221B Baker Street. And they looked good. Cumberbatch looked younger than the usual Holmes but even from the picture, I could tell he had the right air. Watson, well, I never could quite picture him. TV and film Watsons never quite looked right to me, though I wasn't sure what he should look like. But Freeman has the right sort of everyman manner about him. It helped that he was Arthur Dent in a recent Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Then I read the first paragraph of the article, which pointed out the thing I'd somehow managed to miss. His Sherlock was set in the 21st century. Oh, the heresy. And I didn't mind. More, I was embarrassed not to have noticed the characters were in modern dress. I read on, and, possibly hypnotised by the Moff's supernatural power of the pen, found myself agreeing with every word he wrote: Conan Doyle didn't write stuffy period drama, but fast-paced detective thrillers. TV and film adaptations formerly were in danger of forgetting this, and viewers certainly were, building up an idea of Holmes that wasn't actually there. At this point I became aware of an uncomfortable recognition of this in myself and resolved to go down to blockbuster and check out the recent film and examine it on its own merits.

Watching the TV series, it became clear that Holmes and Watson translated well into the twenty-first century, if in fact Conan Doyle didn't have a time machine and wrote it for this very purpose. Holmes' first line to Watson: "How are you? You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive."

I was hooked on Sherlock from the first minutes. The police are giving a press conference about their investigations into a string of "serial suicides," and every so often everyone in the room's mobile phones ring in unison. All have the same text message, a single word. "Wrong." This Sherlock is well at home with technology and the modern world, a fact that is shown through his deductions throughout the episode, which are truly astounding: being able to track down the killer from one scratched word: "Rache." The original story: A Study in Scarlet reveals this to be the German for Revenge, but knowledge of the book won't help with that detail in A Study in Pink.

To help us mere mortals, snatches of Holmes' thought-processes flash up on the screen, such as a map of London complete with traffic directions and short cuts during a chase.

Holmes is brilliant, arrogant, deeply unsettling, (seemingly) clueless when it comes to personal interaction, wonderfully, perfectly Sherlock Holmes. Only one person could call himself a "high-functioning sociopath" as a put-down to someone else. Also, his voice is perfect: a bit posh, deep and rather disdainful but somehow reassuring. I'm in control, his voice says.

Watson is a well-rounded character, brave and intelligent (as an army doctor should be) and ordinary, but holds his own against the rather other-worldly, impossible Holmes. The interaction between them is wonderful (more than one character in the first episode is convinced they are a couple, much to Watson's bemusement.)

There's so much more I could say about this series, but I don't want to give away plot spoilers, so all I will say for the time being is, if you haven't seen the first two episodes, go to BBC iplayer and watch them now. If you have: go anyway. Watch them again.

Alas, it is a British series, and only three episodes long. The last one is on Sunday night, 9PM. Watch it.