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Filming of the third series of the BBC’s Sherlock begins on Monday, and it’s been confirmed that there will be a fourth. This news will either delight or horrify Sherlock Holmes obsessives, one of whom, it was reported on Thursday, has been caught cyber-stalking the actor playing the detective, Benedict Cumberbatch.
I say delight or horrify because Sherlockians, as they’re known, never agree on anything. I’ve been immersed in the Conan Doyle stories since I was 10 years old, and my bookshelves groan with volumes in which experts pore over “the canon” like biblical scholars dissecting Holy Writ.
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“I think Dr Zeisler has made a cast-iron case for Friday 23 February 1886,” says Dakin. “The client left the coronet with Holder the banker for four days and said he would reclaim it on Monday: therefore he called on Holder on a Thursday and Holder visited Holmes on Friday.”
Further evidence includes “a combination of meteorological records from Whitaker, including snow in London, sunshine in the morning and moonlight at 2am”. A rival date of 1883 put forward by another scholar is dismissed on the grounds that there was no snow in London in February 1883 “and snow plays too essential a part in the story to be discarded”.
Dakins’s nitpicking is witty and he has a sharp eye. Holmes “had remarkably bad luck with colonels”, he observes: Col Sebastian Moran, a deadly assassin; Col Moriarty, who tried to protect his evil brother; Col Walter, who stole the Bruce-Partington Plans; Col Upcott “of atrocious conduct”; Col Ross, “who was unpardonably rude to Holmes”, etc.
The origins of this odd game are intriguing. The Catholic scholar Mgr Ronald Knox invented Sherlockian “higher criticism” in order to tease liberal biblical scholars who used inconsistencies in the Gospels to dismiss Christian teaching. Knox wrote a mock-scholarly article exposing the hundreds of baffling inconsistencies in Conan Doyle’s stories. The game was then taken up by Dorothy L Sayers, who clashed with Knox over the identity of the unnamed university attended by Holmes.
“Oxford!” said Knox, pointing to clues in The Musgrave Ritual indicating Christ Church. “Cambridge!” said Sayers. In The “Gloria Scott” we learn that as a second-year undergraduate, Holmes was bitten by a bull terrier as he went down to chapel, and only in Cambridge was a second-year student likely to be living in college. A century on, the debate continues.
The Sherlockian movement, also big in America, verges on a cult – one to which I once felt myself drawn. Years ago I joined The Sherlock Holmes Society, but never attended their meetings because I was afraid I might get sucked in.
Also, Sherlockians hold events at which they dress up as characters from the canon – the fat blackmailer Charles Augustus Milverton, or the fusspot housekeeper Mrs Hudson. There I draw the line (at least in public). But what a glorious example of Anglo-Saxon eccentricity – as puzzling, in its way, as any of the mysteries solved by the Great Detective.
It’s tough at the top of the BBC
Are BBC executives receiving enough professional help to enable them to cope with the dangerous levels of stress at Broadcasting House? The answer, thank the Lord, is yes. The Beeb (that is, you and me) has just forked out £130,000 on “counselling” services. Quite what counts as stress in the upper echelons of the BBC isn’t clear. Not being able to secure a table at the Wolseley for that all-important breakfast with “Baroness Helena Kennedy” (as she incorrectly styles herself), perhaps. Or needing a Conservative voice for a discussion about Europe, finding that Michael Heseltine and Ken Clarke are booked up, and – gasp! – having to invite on a proper Tory instead.
A papal bull for our times
No sooner had Pope Francis appeared on the balcony of St Peter’s than Twitter wags were saying: “So that’s what happened to Jim Bowen.” I wasn’t sure that the former Bullseye host was still with us, as they say, but I’m glad to learn that he is, aged 75, having recovered from two serious strokes last year.
He has a nice line in self-deprecating humour, does Jim, who in an earlier incarnation was deputy head of a primary school in Lancashire. Of his famous darts quiz, he says: “People watched it because they couldn’t believe it was so bad. I reckon they went to the pub on Sunday nights and said, 'It’s got to get better, surely?’ And it didn’t!”
His best line? “I still can’t believe we had speedboats as prizes. The only contestants who ever won them lived in top-floor flats in Coventry.”
Waffle that just doesn’t add up
Talking of the new Pope, the Guardian didn’t wait long before sticking the knife in.
No sooner was his identity known than editor Alan Rusbridger immediately tweeted a link to a 2011 article by Hugh O’Shaughnessy, hard-Left megabore, that accused Cardinal Bergoglio of conniving with the Argentine navy to hide political prisoners during a visit by human rights inspectors.
O’Shaughnessy’s source? An Argentine journalist, Horacio Verbitsky. One snag: as the Guardian later admitted, Verbitsky “does not make this claim”. So the story was false and a gross libel.
Meanwhile, the Independent was in full here’s-one-I-prepared-earlier waffle mode: “If Rome’s new head rules for as long as John Paul II, the chances are he will either be remembered for halting the decline of Catholicism in the secular world – or failing to stop it altogether.”
Indeedy-doody. Plus, of course, he’d still be Pope at the age of 102.
Very sweet, but could it be a syrup?
Is Michael Fabricant MP a secret brony? That’s the name for a male fan of the My Little Pony franchise; unmarried gentlemen, on the whole, who indignantly reject the claim that there is anything effeminate about their hobby. Quite right. I know of at least one senior Anglican bishop who is an influential brony. I only ask because Mr Fabricant this week briefly adopted a My Little Pony toy as his Twitter avatar. Very sweet it was, too, speckled blue with a golden mane resembling the politician’s own tresses. I haven’t identified which model it was, but in the interests of accuracy I hope the 62-year-old Conservative member for Lichfield chose a pony whose tonsorial arrangement is, like his own, fully detachable.
