Gatiss: Sherlock “back to basics” for the Victorian Christmas Special

Jonathan Appleton is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

Mark Gatiss says it was ‘oddly difficult’ to send Sherlock Holmes back in time to the nineteenth century for the forthcoming special.

“We’ve spent so long successfully modernising it. We had to sort of go back to basics. What we initially did was to come up with modern equivalents for all the Victorian things, so in this we go back to the original. The texting is sending telegrams. We just reverse engineered it to how Conan Doyle did it. It’s essentially our Sherlock as if we’d always done it set in 1895,” he says of the one-off episode, likely to air at Christmas.

Gatiss and series co-creator Steven Moffat had been kicking the idea of a Victorian-set story for some time but it was the availability of the show’s key personnel that made the project come to fruition:

“It’s very, very difficult to get everyone together – and what we realised was that we had an opportunity to do a special when everyone was free. It just became the time to do it. We’re at a particular point in the show which perfectly fits this idea.”

Sherlock fans will be glad to hear that it won’t be too much longer before production gears up on the fourth series, with Gatiss set to start writing and filming to take place in 2016.

Elsewhere in the interview with Radio Times Gatiss talks about why he’s an ever-present on the Sherlock set, promises the special won’t be such a great departure from the series, and explains that some journalists can’t understand why modern tech won’t feature…

New episodes of Sherlock are always a long time coming, but the recently released clip from the special will help keep you going until Christmas.

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