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Ezard’s obsessive sense of detail, in some ways a dry run for the character of Sherlock Holmes a few years later, was exploited with some extremely long and complicated speeches for Cumberbatch to learn. ‘It’s a bit of a stretch. The other day, I had a vast tract of dialogue and Peter had written quite complex lists into it.’ Line-learning did not come naturally to him in the first place. ‘I struggle to learn by rote. When I was younger I had to spend double the amount of time learning French vocabulary.’

Another very different challenge came when Ezard embarked on an affair with Michael’s wife Yasim (played by Anamaria Marinca) and Cumberbatch faced another sex scene. ‘Sex scenes are never easy and shouldn’t be easy,’ he shrugged. ‘Even if you were single and fancied the pants off them, it would be hard because it’s such an unnatural thing to do in front of a film crew.’

The role of Stephen Ezard proved a rich one for Cumberbatch, a mix of the dynamic and the intellectual.

‘Stephen is an awkward, accidental hero, but there’s a vitality to him. He is running around handling guns, coming
across bodies, escaping bullets and policemen, living underground, being tortured, being driven around in the boot of a car …’ It was quite a role.

The Last Enemy
reached the screen in early 2008, as part of a BBC1 drama schedule that also included
The No. 1
Ladies’ Detective Agency
, the
Life on Mars
spin-off
Ashes to Ashes
and
Lark Rise to Candleford
. In the next couple of years, Benedict Cumberbatch appeared in a variety of guises in TV drama. His first work for ITV in nearly five years was as ex-policeman Luke Fitzwilliam in
Agatha Christie’s Marple
, starring Julia McKenzie, in which he shared the screen with Jemma Redgrave, Sylvia Syms, Shirley Henderson, David Haig, Hugo Speer, Tim Brooke-Taylor and others. Fitzwilliam would team up with Miss Marple to solve the mystery of a spate of deaths shortly after a glamorous young American woman arrives in the village of Wychwood-under-Ashe.

* * *

Having played a politician (William Pitt the Younger), a botanist (Joseph Hooker) and a biographer (Alexander Masters), the next of Cumberbatch’s real-life roles was as a legendary painter. In 2010, he was the tortured
nineteenth-century
Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh, in a TV
drama-documentary
to coincide with an exhibition at London’s Royal Academy celebrating his life and works. Presented and co-written by Alan Yentob, the host of the arts series
Imagine, Vincent Van Gogh: Painted with Words
was based
around excerpts from a series of letters exchanged between Vincent and his younger brother Theo (Jamie Parker). The correspondence documented every stage of Van Gogh’s adult life, right up to his early demise in 1890, aged only thirty-seven. But the film was careful to also include many of his canvasses, featuring works less commonly seen than ‘Starry Night’ or ‘Sunflowers’. As would be expected by now, Cumberbatch brought a dimension of humanity and sensitivity to Vincent, rather than the popular image of a man out of control.

Painted with Words
came a few months after a two-part television film called
Small Island
, in which he was cast as a ‘little Englander’. Bernard is a dull banker-turned-landlord in the London of the 1940s, who is suddenly called up for World War II. After his departure, his wife Queenie (Ruth Wilson) takes in lodgers who have sailed on the SS
Empire Windrush
from Jamaica to Britain. Gilbert (David Oyelowo) and Michael (Ashley Walters) have faced an uneasy and hostile reception in London, while struggling with low-paid jobs and casual bigotry. When Bernard returns home several years later, having been missing presumed dead, he discovers the strong feelings Queenie has for Michael. For his contribution as Bernard, Cumberbatch received a
nomination
in the Best Supporting Actor category at the 2010 British Academy Television Awards, while Oyelowo’s starring role was shortlisted for Best Actor.

The BBC drama department had announced earlier in 2009 that it intended to try to make more period productions based in the more recent past, and not simply keep remaking
Dickens or Austen favourites.
Small Island
was a compelling example of the success of this strategy, moving and well-acted from all sides, and ultimately led to other post-war period drama productions such as
Call the Midwife
and
The Hour
. For Benedict Cumberbatch, though, sudden fame would arrive in 2010 via an evergreen favourite brought bang up to date.

O
n 19 December 2008, the BBC announced that it would be producing a new contemporary take on the Sherlock Holmes character and stories, originally created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the late nineteenth century, but remade in countless stage plays, films and television series over the decades.

The two men responsible for the reinterpretation had been creative giants in British television for some time. The Scottish writer Steven Moffat, formerly an English teacher, had taken over from Russell T. Davies as the showrunner of
Doctor Who
in 2009, but his writing career went all the way back to the imaginative and amusing children’s series
Press Gang
at the end of the 1980s, which made stars of Julia Sawalha and Dexter Fletcher. The sitcoms
Joking Apart, Chalk
and
Coupling
had established him with grown-ups,
before he had modernised Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
for James Nesbitt in 2007’s
Jekyll
. He was first exposed to the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at the age of ten, when his parents considered a film version of
The Hound of the Baskervilles
on TV to be ‘too frightening’, and sent him to bed. Soon after, though, they gave him a copy of
A Study in Scarlet
, the first Holmes story. He was immediately hooked.

‘It’s not too much of a stretch to say that Arthur Conan Doyle invented the TV series,’ Moffat would reflect. ‘He looked to all the fiction magazines and they were all serialised novels or short stories. He thought to himself, the short stories are great but they don’t bring you back next week or next month. What about a continual series of short stories featuring the same character? You’ll always have a reason to come back next month. Now,
that
is the TV series.’

Moffat’s co-creator on
Sherlock
, Mark Gatiss, also had a background in comedy. He was one-quarter of the League of Gentlemen, whose macabre humour had gravitated from fringe productions, to radio and then television, but he also had a serious interest in film history, particularly horror cinema. He was a devotee of Conan Doyle’s work. ‘I retreated into Sherlock Holmes,’ Gatiss said of his boyhood in County Durham. ‘I wanted to live like an 1895 detective, not in a grim post-industrial town.’ He immersed himself in the purple-covered Penguin editions of the stories, and marvelled at them. ‘The Holmes stories are all dialogue and you can read them in 20 minutes. Whenever I meet someone
who hasn’t read them, I always think they have got so much fun to come.’

The two men knew exactly who they wanted for Sherlock Holmes. There was only one man for the job – and Mark Gatiss had worked with him three years earlier, on the film
Starter for 10
. ‘It was vital to nail the casting,’ said Gatiss. ‘Benedict was the only person we saw for Sherlock. It’s very difficult to get someone with that amount of command, which he really has.’

Their Sherlock of choice had thoroughly enjoyed several past interpretations of Conan Doyle’s enduring icon, most notably Jeremy Brett’s reading for ITV’s
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
in the 1980s and early 90s. But as someone who liked to be surprised by his career and do all sorts of acting jobs, Cumberbatch was not one to speculate about long-term ambitions or dream roles, and the prospect of
Sherlock
was no different. ‘I didn’t really have a dream to play this character,’ he said. ‘That’s the one question that I never have an answer for: what jobs do you really want to play? I came to this role very flattered that they were very seriously considering me for it.’

Finding the right person to play Holmes’s companion took longer. An early possibility was a young actor called Matt Smith, who came to audition for Dr John Watson. ‘Matt gave a very good audition,’ Steven Moffat later revealed, ‘but he was clearly more of a Sherlock Holmes than a Dr Watson. There was also something a bit barmy about him – and you don’t actually want that for Dr Watson.’ Only a few days later, Smith auditioned for the part of
Doctor Who
, a show
Moffat had recently taken over. Enormous acclaim would follow, and as the set of
Sherlock
was next door to that of
Doctor Who
in Cardiff, it wasn’t long before Matt and Benedict were constantly bumping into each other. ‘We have lovely mornings,’ said Smith, just appointed the new Doctor, ‘where we go, “Hi Sherlock!” “Hi Doctor!” I think they should do an episode [with Sherlock Holmes]; these two great minds going, “Ding-ding-ding! Whatcha got?”’

Soon after seeing Matt Smith, the Sherlock producers tested Martin Freeman, who had featured in Richard Curtis’s 2003 romantic comedy
Love Actually
and revived Arthur Dent for the movie of Douglas Adams’
Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
(2005), but was perhaps still most famous for his role as the lovelorn Tim Canterbury in the original BBC2 TV series of
The Office
. At his audition, it was obvious that he was the perfect Watson to Cumberbatch’s Holmes. ‘When Martin left the room after reading with Benedict,’ recalled Gatiss, ‘Steve said, “Well, there’s the series before our eyes!”’

‘Once Benedict was there,’ said Steven Moffat’s wife, the producer Sue Vertue, ‘it was really just making sure we got the chemistry for John – and I think you get it as soon as they come into the room. You can see that they work together.’

Vertue had met Moffat a decade earlier when they worked together on his sitcom
Coupling
. Her mother was Beryl Vertue, a pioneering independent force in entertainment for nearly five decades. In the 1960s, as agent to comedy giants like Spike Milligan, Tony Hancock, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, Vertue recognised the potential in international television sales. She sold the formats of hit British sitcoms
like
Steptoe and Son
and
Till Death Us Do Part
to American TV networks. After a spell as a film producer, she returned to television in the early 1990s and started up the production company Hartswood Films, which enjoyed a string of hit shows:
Men Behaving Badly
,
Is It Legal?
, and the
aforementioned
Coupling
and
Jekyll
.

Beryl Vertue and her producer daughter Sue were both eager to embrace Cardiff as the primary location for
Sherlock
. ‘There is a lot of enthusiasm there,’ said Beryl, ‘and some very interesting locations. A production leaves a lot of money in a town. Apart from the crew you have cars, hotels, food, restaurants, couriers… All those things are a big financial advantage.’ The location of Cardiff as a production base for the revival of
Doctor Who
from 2005, plus spin-off series such as
Torchwood
and
The Sarah Jane Adventures
, meant it soon became a nerve centre for other established BBC dramas like
Casualty
and new shows like
Merlin
and
Being Human
. The city had become a major tourist attraction – visitor numbers had increased by more than 40 per cent. It was much less expensive to film in and around Cardiff than in London.

It was while working on
Doctor Who
as staff writers that Moffat and Gatiss had hatched their plan to revive the idea of Sherlock Holmes. On their many train journeys back and forth between London and Cardiff, they discovered they were both huge fans of Holmes and Watson. They had enjoyed the idea of Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce in the 1940s playing the two characters as contemporary figures, rather than as hangovers from Conan Doyle’s Victorian era.
‘Modern-dress Holmes,’ they thought. ‘Someone should do that again!’ After discussing this at length, they decided that they should be the ones to do it – before someone else got the chance.

Finally, the two of them, plus Sue Vertue, met up to strike a deal. Appropriately, the venue chosen was a restaurant in London’s Piccadilly called the Criterion – the very first place Holmes and Watson had dined in Conan Doyle’s original books. Work would begin on a pilot in January 2009.

From the outset, the plan was to be faithful to the characters of Holmes and Watson, but transplant them to the world of twenty-first century London. The look of
Sherlock
would be bang up to date; fustiness would be out. It was the antithesis of a period piece. ‘Conan Doyle’s original stories were never about frock coats and gaslight,’ said Moffat. ‘They are about brilliant detection, dreadful villains and blood-curdling crimes. Frankly, to hell with the crinoline!’ Gatiss agreed. ‘What appealed to us about doing Sherlock in the present day is that the characters have become almost literally lost in the fog. While I am second to no one in my enjoyment of that sort of Victoriana, we wanted to get back to the characters, and to why they became the most wonderful partnership in literature.’ In addition, the two leads were relatively youthful – Cumberbatch was 32 at the time of the pilot, Freeman a slightly more senior 37 – which meant that the show would challenge the convention of Holmes and Watson being middle-aged. Add to that a sartorial elegance for Holmes. ‘A modern take on Sherlock requires a modern look,’ declared Gatiss. ‘Benedict brings that to the role. He’s
in this sharp suit and a stylish overcoat, which gives him a great silhouette.’

Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes would remain the eternally super-confident detective, with a determination to outwit both criminals and the police. Some were concerned that the modern setting might make solving the cases too easy. The nineteenth-century Holmes, they argued, had not had the luxury of Google or a mobile phone to help him escape a trap. But Cumberbatch insisted this was missing the point: ‘He uses technology as a resource. This man contains things that technology, no matter how efficient it is, cannot know. He’s one step beyond because he’s human.’ In other words, the human mind has a flexibility and spontaneity that no computer (no matter how sophisticated) could possess, and Sherlock was attracted by science, technology and the Internet. ‘He’s brilliant at collating information,’ said Cumberbatch. ‘And he’s as equally engaging on an intellectual level as he is on the understanding of human nature.’

‘I am sure [Holmes] would have loved to have had the technology we have now,’ said Paul McGuigan, who would direct most of the first two series. ‘In the books he would use any device possible and he was always in the lab doing experiments. It’s just a modern-day version of it. He will use the tools that are available to him today in order to find things out.’

With no deerstalker, and nicotine patches replacing the crutch of his pipe, the new Sherlock would have access to mobiles, laptops and MP3 players. Watson would have a
blog. Holmes would fire off text messages (innovatively, these would appear onscreen, as would characters’ inner thoughts) and run a website called The Science of Deduction. But their base would remain the famous central London address of 221b Baker Street (above a greasy spoon cafe), Holmes’s devious nemesis Moriarty would still be an enemy, and other supporting characters would be present, like Mrs Hudson the housekeeper and Inspector Lestrade (played by Una Stubbs and Rupert Graves respectively).

Holmes would also still play the violin. Cumberbatch was a novice to the instrument, but needed to at least look like he could play it – even if it was just holding the bow correctly. Help on this matter came from Eos Chater, a member of the string quartet Bond. ‘I would never insult the musical profession by saying that I had learnt the violin,’ said Cumberbatch. ‘I am desperately trying to convince people that what I am playing looks realistic. I have had some lessons.’

There was some discussion about whether Sherlock would take drugs in the new series. After all, in Conan Doyle’s works, Holmes had been addicted to morphine. Might the super-sleuth be reliant on street drugs nowadays? Steven Moffat brushed aside the idea. ‘In Victorian times everybody was taking some kind of drug, largely because there was no such thing as a painkiller. It is a very different thing to say that Sherlock Holmes would be a coke addict now.’

It seemed only natural to make the new Holmes and Watson series as up-to-date as possible. ‘When you read the stories, you realise Holmes is an extraordinary modern man
in a modern metropolitan London,’ insisted Mark Gatiss. ‘They weren’t period stories to the people that were reading them, so we worked off exactly the same principle. We are not only keeping the essential character of Holmes, we are restoring it.’

Dr John Watson’s background for
Sherlock
bore strong similarities to how the character was introduced in Arthur Conan Doyle’s very first Holmes story. In
A Study in Scarlet
, written by Conan Doyle in 1886 and published a year later, Watson was a wounded army medic returning from the frontline in the Second Anglo-Afghan War of 1878–80. Gatiss realised that this resonated with present-day Afghanistan. ‘It is the same war now, I thought. The same unwinnable war.’

Once back in London, and with post-traumatic stress disorder, the military doctor would have no home or circle of friends. ‘He’s come back home to nothing,’ said Martin Freeman. ‘The one thing we know about ex-service people is they can find civilian life really hard to adjust to.’ Before long, Watson would be introduced to Sherlock Holmes by a mutual friend who knew Watson at Barts Hospital, and the pair would start flat-sharing in – where else? – Baker Street.

* * *

Stepping into the shoes of Sherlock Holmes was a daunting prospect. How many Holmes had there been in 125 years? Some studies suggested at least 200. Benedict Cumberbatch may have been guessing when he said, ‘I am probably the
71st Sherlock.’ The first incarnation on screen occurred as early as 1900, though all trace of that has long gone. Still in the silent film era, there was a short in 1910 called
Arsène Lupin contra Sherlock Holmes
, and almost fifty 20-minuters in the early 1920s with the Englishman Eille Norwood in the starring role. But it was in 1939 that the first truly famous Sherlock Holmes made his debut. Starting with
The Hound of the Baskervilles
, and sporting the trademark cape and deerstalker, Basil Rathbone (with Nigel Bruce as Watson) would star in 14 films in seven years.

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