A few days ago, the Los Angeles Times ran a sad, in-depth piece on the efforts to save Undershaw, Arthur Conan Doyle’s home during the writing of The Hound of the Baskervilles and the stories within The Return of Sherlock Holmes. Undershaw is currently very close to being radically renovated, much to the glee of developers who boast that they have “outwitted Sherlock Holmes.” There are, however, continued efforts to save Undershaw, focusing on John Gibson:

The campaign to rescue the house has drawn the support of a raft of authors, actors and descendants of the Conan Doyle family. Gibson, a retired surveyor, is also aided by his own Watson-like figure, a devout spiritualist (as was Conan Doyle) who says she saw the author and his family in a vision last year.

But the forces arrayed against them are a formidable lot whose ranks include, according to Gibson, a profit-driven developer, unsympathetic local officials and an incorrigible gang of cultural snobs. Since the local authority has already decided that the developer’s proposed overhaul is perfectly reasonable — and it is his property, after all — time is running out to foil the dastardly plans: The hammers start raining blows on Undershaw as early as next month.

Well, I won’t comment on the spiritualist “vision” of Doyle here, but suffice it to say that we at Sherlocking are very sympathetic to Mr. Gibson’s efforts and find this story to be quite a sad tale. There have been efforts to put the house on the list of protected historical buildings, but those with the power to save Doyle’s home are frustratingly disinclined to do so:

“He cannot be said to be an author of the standing of, for example, Charles Dickens or Jane Austen,” the report said.

Yeah, sorry, but many of us would beg to differ. In a year in which Doyle’s creations have spurred on popular new adaptations such as the Guy Ritchie film, the West End play, and, oh yes, Sherlock, it seems extraordinarily poor timing at best, downright cruel at worst.

Please tweet this post up, reblog it, whatever you have to do — Doyle and his works matter, and this building is an important piece of history that looks to be very close to being lost. Visit the Help to Save Undershaw blog for current news on the fight to save Undershaw, or The Undershaw Preservation Trust for more information on this historic building.

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Recently, the Kaleidoscopic Fest announced its program for the adaptations festival, to be held on September 9-11 in Wrexham. Of special note for Sherlock fans is an event featuring producers Steven Moffat and Sue Vertue, entitled BAFTA Cymru Presents: Sherlock The Story of a Modern Day Adaptation. Their appearance will be September 9th at 8pm. Tickets are £4.50 and can be purchased by following this link, by telephone (01978-293293), and in person from Glyndwr University.

The Twitter account for the festival appears to be soliciting questions for the session:

… so, if you’re looking for a reason to join Twitter, here’s another! I’m assuming they’d like it if you tweeted @Kaleidoscopfest for your questions.

One more notable item about the festival for Sherlock Holmes fans — there will also be a session entitled Sherlock Holmes – the Graphic Novels, featuring Ian Edginton and I. N. J. Culbard, creators of such Doyle adaptations as A Study In Scarlet, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and The Sign of the Four.

Looks like a great festival, and we’ll hopefully be able to post a report sometime in early September!

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This is a cute piece in the Daily Mail on the boon that Sherlock has brought to Speedy’s Snack Bar, and it reveals who really lives in the flat above:

A BBC spokeswoman said they wanted to film on Baker Street but were thwarted by heavy traffic.
The flat above Speedy’s, in North Gower Street, is really home to two South Korean students, one of whom, Tae Kim, 33, said: ‘There have been lots of people taking photographs outside.’

It’s nice to see Speedy’s — here’s a Google Maps link to its location — getting extra business, and kudos to Gatiss, Moffat, and Vertue for not replacing the awning with something fictional. I do hope in the second series we get an explanation of Mrs Hudson’s relationship to the “snax and sarnies” shop some of us saw from the pilot footage, though.

One other thing we just noticed that we hadn’t seen mentioned is that the building just adjacent to Speedy’s (and the fictional 221B Baker St) on North Gower is the site of a blue plaque — in this case, Giuseppe Mazzini, Italian Patriot. Not significant for Sherlock, surely, but just another bit of interesting trivia for those of you planning on taking the time to scout out all the filming locations from series one before we get more episodes.

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In anticipation of “The Great Game,” Den of Geek have interviewed Mr Gatiss again about Sherlock and what we might be seeing in second series, should one be commissioned. In particular, Gatiss discusses some of the influence of Doyle’s original Holmes stories and how they might shape the next series:

Going forward, Sherlock is very much on your plate with Steven [Moffat] doing Doctor Who. What are you looking for next? Because I understand Sherlock started out as six one hour episodes as opposed to the three 90 minute adventures we got. Are you looking – for want of a template – that you do a kind of Frost kind of thing, where every year you get another few?

Oh, yeah. Three 90s is a nice thing, it’s a mini-series.

That’s still three months of filming, though?

It is. It is a lot, yeah. If you keep thinking of them as movies too, that’s a lot.

We hadn’t plotted six episodes. We had some vague ideas of where we’d go. So, it’s not like we had to [change] the entire thing. It’s about upping the scale of the threat. But without giving too much away, what we’d like to do if we get some more is tackle some of the favourite stuff. And what that would mean, if we could, would be to start then making it feel like our version. So, if anybody was to say you’re doing Moriarty too quickly, it’s really about not deferring your pleasures, you know? Why wait for season five?

But what that would mean if it happened, if we did some more, is that right, this series of three could be John gets married as he does in the original stories. What does that do to the dynamic? There’s so much to play around with.

The genius of Doyle is it’s all there, and sometimes it’s not quite in the right order. He admitted it himself: he married John off, and went, “Oh, god, now I’ve got to do the stories retrospectively!”

So, a few things to glean from this — it seems likely, if a second series is in the works, that we’ll be seeing another series of three 90-minute episodes, that Moriarty seems likely to appear in the 2nd series (so as to not ‘defer pleasures’), and we might see Watson married off relatively quickly. If they actually show the episodes out of chronological order a la Doyle, that could be amazingly interesting.

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Many have wondered about the coat the Benedict Cumberbatch wears in Sherlock, and we made a post on the fashion in Sherlock a few days ago, partially because of the interest in this coat. We had tweeted at GQ, asking for more information on the elusive coat, and just received this response:

Hooray, they’ve updated their post with more information on the coat!

UPDATE: We have just heard from Belstaff about Holmes’ jacket. “The jacket was the Milford Coat from the 2007 Autumn/Winter collection. It cost £1,000 and was a seasonal model, therefore no plans for it to come back in stock for now.”

So, Sherlock’s coat, it’s £1000, it’s a Belstaff Milford Coat, it cost £1000, it’s from the 2007 collection, and it’s £1000. Oh, not sure if I mentioned, but… one thousand quid. But, hey, at least now we know, and if any of you happen to strike it rich and know where to find it, well, please get in touch.

In one other tidbit, during the promotion of Sherlock in Los Angeles the last few days, Masterpiece PBS tweeted an hilarious (somewhat uncomfortable?) picture of Benedict Cumberbatch with a Sherlock Hemlock shirt:

It’s an American Apparel shirt from with an image of Sherlock Hemlock, one of the characters from the wonderful PBS children’s TV institution, Sesame Street. Again, this shirt also appears to be out of stock — or at least I can’t seem to purchase it from the AA site — which may be because Sesame Street didn’t actually “collaborate” with AA on these shirts like AA had initially stated in a press release.

I’ll say this: When we started this blog, we never, ever expected that anything regarding the creepy Dov Charney would be discussed here. Let’s hope it’s the last time, and lets all pray for the safe return of more AA employees, like those fourteen models that were rescued in a daring midnight raid back in 2007.

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As noted in our last post, Cumberbatch, Moffat and Gatiss are in LA doing press for Sherlock‘s US airing this fall. Some of the early press has been trickling out – a photo here, a Tweet there – but USA Today‘s “Live From…” blog has a bit more info than most.

Calling the show “already a big hit in Britain,” Robert Bianco goes on to quote Moffat as saying:

“We were absolutely convinced this was the right thing to do, to update Sherlock. We’re fanboys; we’re true zealots. We absolutely believed this was going to work. The only thing greater than our belief that we were right was our surprise that we were right.”

Right, indeed!

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A fun piece in GQ on the fashion in Sherlock, with some insight provided by costume designer Sarah Arthur:

“Holmes would not have any interest in fashion so I went for classic suits with a modern twist: narrow-leg trousers and a two-button, slim-cut jacket,” she told us. “I also went for slim-cut shirts and a sweeping coat for all the action scenes – it looks great against the London skyline.” We concurred. But how could we steal the sleuth’s style? “The suits were Spencer Hart (from £495. At Liberty. liberty.co.uk): contemporary with a slight period feel. He uses fine cloth which looks wonderful and sits perfectly. The shirts were Dolce & Gabbana (£155. dolcegabbana.com) and the coat Belstaff (belstaff.com).” And yes, we did ask, but apparently the deerstalker “wasn’t appropriate for this production”.

Since a deerstalker should clearly be deemed inappropriate for any production of, well, anything not starring Basil Rathbone, it seems that Arthur made some good alternate choices. Albeit expensive ones — £155 Dolce & Gabbana suits? It appears there’s good money in being a consulting detective in 2010.

Update: And, as Cumberbatch, Gatiss, and Moffat are all in Los Angeles right now promoting Sherlock‘s premiere (October 24th) in American Public Television, it seems Benedict decided to wow everyone with his own style:

From a Twitpic posted on the masterpiecepbs Twitter account.

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A few brief notes today, before we dive headlong into tonight’s episode…

First, a great interview with Steven Moffat was posted by Den of Geek a few days ago. In it, Moffat discusses the format of Sherlock, Martin Freeman’s performance as Watson, and his thoughts on working with Paul McGuigan:

He’s very savvy about working the screen in thirds, which you don’t see a lot of on television. Is that how you envisaged the look of Sherlock yourself?

I wouldn’t claim that I would envisage it as well as Paul McGuigan does, because he’s got an extraordinary eye. Best director I’ve ever worked with. It was that kind of thing – I suppose I’d be using examples like The Ipcress File, a sense of playfulness with the visuals. Thinking we can actually do fun stuff.

This show, we should always be clever, and it should be clever in the way it looks as well.

One thing that was very key was he was saying you should feel that there’s a Sherlock Holmes behind the camera as well. I thought that was a very astute thing to say.

Nice to see McGuigan’s inventive direction getting more note — it made the premiere episode quite striking, and we’re looking forward to seeing if Euros Lyn carries that style forward in tonight’s episode.

…

Next, only a couple of previews of “The Blind Banker” have made it online so far — some positive reviews, some less so. Here’s a rundown of the ones we could find:

(A warning, even though many say “spoiler free,” some of these include likely minor spoilers; please don’t click through if you’d rather not know a thing about the episode!)

I’ll be honest, I’m not one for detective stories so it’s great credit to writer Stephen Thompson who rather neatly made me forget that I was in fact watching a crime show. The excellent production values continue with predictably pleasing direction from Euros Lyn, convincing location shooting and a cracking score. Sherlock proves, as it did last week, that Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss have produced a vision that is utterly compelling for all of its ninety minutes – a rare feat for television, or film for that matter.

Looking at this episode as a pure standalone, it still disappoints. The script commits some cardinal sins for a murder mystery: for one thing, there’s a good handful of coincidences scattered about to make the plot work; for another, there’s moments where the penny suddenly drops for our favourite Consulting Detective when, in fact, there’s not really been a huge shift in the information at his disposal.

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A great, hilarious interview with Sherlock‘s Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman has been posted to Shortlist.com. It presents a little bit more of an off-the-cuff and funny sense of these two actors than we’ve seen in other press for the series. Here’s an excerpt, talking about Martin’s appeal to the ladies, as well as their spate of filming injuries/illnesses:

Watson’s a bit of a ladies man isn’t he?
MF: It’s why they cast me. They’re not stupid.

Any injuries during filming?
MF: I was injured day three. I slipped on the ice outside my trailer while holding a bowl of porridge and went down like a ton of bricks and did my wrist in. Benedict opened his door and went, “Are you alright?” And I said, “No not really.” Then we ended up going to hospital. We lost a real mission of a scene, a massive massive scene we lost that day where Ben had to go and pretend he was acting with me.
BC: It’s what I do all the time…
MF: So yeah, that was the first big injury.
BC: I had pneumonia along the way which was interesting and I clipped my knee while sliding around doing a stunt scene at the planetarium.

Hopefully they’ll find a way to keep the two Sherlock stars in good spirits and good health, should a second series be commissioned!

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One last piece of preview before “A Study In Pink” airs today — see Cumberbatch and Freeman’s interview with Andrew Marr.

Enjoy! Only a few hours to go!

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