MG: Well, we’re not teasing, we just keep saying this: we don’t know.
SM: None of us have decided to stop – at some point we might reassemble, but we’ll see.
MG: Like the Avengers.
SM: Unless we get stuck inside this Escape Room—
MG: Which is entirely possible! [laughter]
SM: —and never get out, the entire cast and production crew, unable to get out of the Sherlock Escape Room—
MG: Wait, wait, that is Series Five! [more laughter] It’s very meta. The entire cast and crew are trapped inside their own escape room, for three 90-minute episodes—
SM: ‘But Benedict, you’re supposed to be the clever one, come on!’
MG: [more laughter] The public have to help us get out. That’s quite good…
July 2010. It is three weeks before the first series of Sherlock broadcasts on BBC One, and show creators Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss are panicking. The BBC has suddenly brought forward the slot for their show “by a substantial amount”. As summer is already a difficult time to launch a series, Gatiss and Moffat are bewildered as to how they will promote it.
“We were sitting around with our heads in our hands,” Steven Moffat remembers, “going, ‘There isn’t enough time to do this. It will broadcast to no one.’ ”
This was when they joined Twitter.
“It was really only one step up from individually knocking on people’s doors and shouting, ‘Sherlock is coming!’ through their letter boxes,” Mark Gatiss explains. “We were almost… desperate.”
“What did we think we’d get?” Moffat muses.
“Four million viewers,” Gatiss replies.
“Four million viewers, tops, and a couple of nice broadsheet write-ups. That was our best-case scenario.”
On the night the debut episode – A Study in Pink – went out, the core cast and crew assembled at Moffat’s house in Kew to watch it, in a state of nervous tension.
Gathering around the wine – “a lot of wine” – were Martin Freeman (Dr Watson), Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock Holmes), Mark Gatiss, Steven Moffat and Sue Vertue, the show’s producer, who is, handily, also married to Moffat, “which has, over the years, saved us a fortune on cabs”.
In the event, when Sherlock began, the Moffat party had to immediately pause it, as Benedict Cumberbatch still hadn’t arrived.
“He called us – he was stuck in a traffic jam on Baker Street,” Moffat recalls. “Sherlock Holmes, stuck on Baker Street! We couldn’t work out if that was a good sign or not.”
“I think he might have made that up, to be honest,” Gatiss says. “But it’s a really good lie.”
When Cumberbatch finally arrived, the party who made Sherlock watched the show ten minutes behind the rest of Britain.
“But we knew when the climax happened,” Gatiss beams, “because suddenly all our phones were going off, everyone texting, everyone phoning. I mean, exploding.”
“An hour later, I went and sat in the garden,” Moffat says, “and looked at Twitter. I saw that Benedict was trending worldwide on Twitter, Martin was trending worldwide, Sherlock itself was trending worldwide. And people were talking about it with this… passion. As if they were lifelong fans – when, of course, they’d not seen it 90 minutes ago. Everything had changed in 90 minutes.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about Mark Gatiss, whose gay identity was forged in the 80s-early 90s. I’m a lawyer now but my first career was in the men’s fashion industry. And for many years I have lived in a well-known LGBT resort community (the annual White Party is our biggest event). During the late 80s and early 90s I worked for a gay men’s fashion catalog and store. I was one of only three women working there. The other 100 plus employees were gay men, young to older. I have personally experienced the unfortunate fact that gay men can and very often do have misogynistic attitudes toward women that are in some ways different from het men’s attitudes– but not entirely. In fashion, for example, the majority of celebrated designers of women’s fashion are gay men. They are clearly designing from a viewpoint of the clothes being suitable only for a young man’s body, not a woman’s body.: tall, long, lean, no hips or breasts. This is seen over and over. To the extent that some gay men model their version of “feminine” behavior, it is a very distinctive version that bears little to no resemblance to actual women’s behavior (drag, camp, femme), and is arguably misogynistic. Working in the business with so many gay men, I heard them mock “fag hags” too many times to count, it was a staple of daily humor. “Fag hags” were seen as tiresome females who obsessively fetishized gay men. I do think that is part of the dynamic happening between Mofftiss and the primarily female fandom. Far be it from me to take away means of expression for gay men that break free of heteronormative toxic masculinity, but what we see in Sherlock is part of the divide in the LGBT community that has been brewing and debated for decades and really has never resolved: Gay men, especially those of of a certain generation really are only standing up for gay men. It’s just another kind of male privilege. There is a lot of denial, dismissal, and even contempt for bisexuality, especially bixsexual men, and for lesbians and transgender persons. In the LGBT community, gay men have the privilege that het men have in larger society. And while that may be changing in the younger generation, for the gay men that came up as young men in the 80s and early 90s, the ideas of embracing and allowing full representation for bisexuals, lesbians, and transgender persons was simply not a thing. To attempt to be fair, they saw themselves as having their own fight to fight, and during those years the big fights were coming out, and HIV/AIDS. Taking all of this into account, it is rather easy to see why there has not been any desire to fulfill the wishes of a primarily queer female fanbase for a romantic johnlock narrative (i.e. Using shorthand, The Princess Bride narrative). But I can see the appeal for Gatiss in making the story of Sherlock and Eurus about finding family, making one’s own family, and healing family. Gatiss has spoken about his own difficulties in coming out to his family and the lack of acceptance that he experienced for a long time (I believe that is substantially healed now according to Gatiss). Like many queer people he has undoubtedly had to make his own family outside his blood family and this is a very important narrative for many queer people. Sherlock completes that journey throughout the show. One could also see Eurus as standing in for a closeted queer family member, who can only be free from the closet (prison) by adopting specific disguises/false selves that appeal to each of their friends/family members. Seen in that light, Eurus’s ultimate acceptance by the Holmes family is touching. (Since in the world of Sherlock she is still the ultimate evil, though, she has to stay in the closet/prison forever). So I come from a place of frustrated understanding and sympathy for a man of Gatiss’ generation wanting to tell a sort of coming out story, both for Sherlock and for Eurus. But I so want the creators to stop holding female fandom and “female” narratives (i.e., fulfilled gay love stories) in contempt. But that’s not the story they wanted to tell. We have to tell our own.
Stepping back here like you do with such a judicious assessment of the generational context and such a perceptive reading of the narrative goes a long way to unknotting a very fraught, messy situation from the gatiss side of the equation.
And yes to this:
But I so want the creators to stop holding female fandom and “female” narratives (i.e., fulfilled gay love stories) in contempt. But that’s not the story they wanted to tell. We have to tell our own.
Well said, and something I hadn’t considered before.
Mark Gatiss in an interview to the Indian newspaper, The Hindustan Times, dated 11 August, 2018.
He had something to say about the possibility of the next season of Sherlock.
“Give people a chance to miss it”? Mark, I adore you, and I stand by my analysis that it’s the long hiatuses that made it possible for me to write at all, so you know, thanks, but… miss it is all we do. We wait and we miss it.
Sherlock Fandom Archive 