London is the opposite of pathetic fallacy.

[alexsarll]

Unsurprisingly, I liked Steven Moffat's take on Sherlock Holmes quite a lot. Not least because this was essentially Holmes as the Doctor, except ruder. But then that makes perfect sense given Holmes was inspired by Doyle teaming up with the Doctor, and/or teamed up with the Doctor himself, depending which book you believe. The Holmes-vision in particular was very reminiscent of the Doctor-vision we saw in The Eleventh Hour (and which was then quietly dropped even though Confidential suggested it would be a Thing). The modernisation was a smart move, so much better than another take on the character reduced to yet another costume drama, yet another pale shadow of Jeremy Brett - although of course you can't have a modern Holmes in a modern London without it also being an alternate world story, because Baker Street 2010 wouldn't be anything like the same without a Victorian Holmes having been. The only failure of modernisation I spotted was the first appearance of Holmes; yes, the corpse-beating scene was great, but a century on, with results from the Knoxville body farm &c to consider, it wouldn't be necessary. There were other problems: Moriarty was a much less significant figure in the original stories than the race-memory account suggests, so bringing him in this early feels mistaken. But I loved the reversal of Alan Moore's Mycroft/Moriarty bait-and-switch from League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Also, after criticism from some of the easily-offended about Moffat's comparatively heteronormative Who, the 'Harry' bit was a nice touch - though the Holmes/Watson-being-taken-for-couple thing was slightly overdone. And I suppose the offended people will now just fixate on the abandoned walking stick instead. Not perfect, then - but still very good. Though whether the other writers will keep up the same standard remains to be seen, especially when one of them made his last screenwriting appearance with 'Victory of the Daleks'.

A reasonably quiet weekend, spent largely watching films (of which more later in the week) except for Saturday when there were two parties. A situation which can often end in tears, or at least unconsciousness, but fortunately I fell asleep in the kitchen at the one where I knew almost everyone, so they're used to me. Yes, I really am that classy.

Read Si'mon' Spurrier's Contract last week, with high expectations; alongside al_ewing, Spurrier is the best of the recent crop of 2000AD writers, which is no slight praise. And it's by no means a bad read - well, it's a 'bad' read in the moral sense, because it left me stood in Poundland thinking 'you know, you could get everything you needed to torture someone in here, and still have change from a tenner' - but it does suffer from one of the characteristic problems of novels by comics writers. Not the having seen it all before - yes, Spurrier has had a protagonist with the surname Point before, yes, the amoral lead is his thing, but those are all fine to revisit, and I wasn't left with the feeling of repetition for the prose audience which I got from, say, the first half of Neil Gaiman's American Gods. The problem is more...what to call it? 'Over-concentration', perhaps. Because comics writers are so used to conveying everything in a couple of lines per panel, and leaving the rest to the artist, once *everything* is filtered through a first person narrator, the characterisation can be almost too strong. It's a similar situation when a pop lyricist - or a good one, anyway - writes a book. Nick Cave's debut was excellent, but he was so used to fitting epics into four or five minutes of song that, given hundreds of pages, he produced something where the same density, over a greater length, was almost too much. It makes you realise how easy people who only ever write extended prose have it.

There's a trick which I think Art Brut began to popularise, and which several bands have taken up recently, of giving songs the same names as songs which already exist, without them being remotely the same songs. Not necessarily as diss or homage, just...liking the title. And normally I rather enjoy it, but on the new Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan album, they come a cropper. Because when I saw 'Come Undone' and 'Time of the Season' on the tracklisting, I thought, I really want to hear Isobel and Mark cover those songs. Maybe that's the problem, because I never for a moment thought the Art Brut album was going to include a M/A/R/R/S cover, or that the Indelicates album would have them doing the Stones.

Comments

[azureskies.livejournal.com]

although of course you can't have a modern Holmes in a modern London without it also being an alternate world story, because Baker Street 2010 wouldn't be anything like the same without a Victorian Holmes having been.

Yeah, as it started one of my first thoughts was "Right, so, in THIS London, Baker Street's just an ordinary station without any silhouettes on the tiling. And nobody's ever used the phrase 'No shit, Sherlock'."

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

And there aren't a bunch of 'heritage' shops and museums clustered around 221B.

I wonder if Gatiss will repeat his 'what the Shakespeare?' gag with a 'No shit, Poirot' or something.

[darkmarcpi.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Baker Street just looked like any random central London street.

I was there the other day, actually. The old M&S head office used to be there (the second most famous thing about Baker Street really), though it's been replaced by a fancy crystal glass and steel building.

Baker Street also houses the Sherlock Holmes hotel, so perhaps it's wise they didn't use the actual site as location.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

It did look plausibly like a random central London street, though - which is what it would be, without the Holmes legacy. Much better than the attempts at London in Who, certainly, where it was usually really obvious that we were in Cardiff with a Tube sign hastily stuck on an office entrance.

[stu-n.livejournal.com]

It was North Gower St standing in for Baker St. They did lots of filming in London — the restaurant where they were watching the taxi is Tapas Brindisa on Broadwick St, opposite the John Snow. And I stumbled upon the crew filming in Gerrard St earlier in the year.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Ah, I should have recognised the John Snow junction! Thank you for those. Though this does remind me of another quibble - even before it had become clear he was a serial killer, I was somewhat sceptical about the idea that a London cabbie would necessarily obey all the prohibited turns &c from that chase scene...

[stu-n.livejournal.com]

I did notice that while the restaurant wasn't where they said it was, the map in Sherlock's head was of the filming location. Odd, but only jarring for a Londoner who recognises the location, I suppose.

Being related to a few cabbies, I reckon they absolutely would obey all the road instructions. Not doing that would be like trying to write with the wrong hand, or suddenly deciding to walk backwards.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

While I'm sure none of them are your relatives, it's impossible to wait more than a few minutes for the 4 or 19 at Finsbury Park bus station without seeing a cabbie ignore the No Left Turn sign in order to get up Stroud Green Road quicker, even though that means going through a pedestrian crossing on the green man.

[stu-n.livejournal.com]

Ah, that's Outer London. It doesn't count.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Thinking about it, the bodies were mostly found outside the centre too, weren't they?

[perfectlyvague.livejournal.com]

What kind of mentalist cabbie knows Brixton that well?

[perfectlyvague.livejournal.com]

Now I've seen it all, they filmed timelapse outside the front of my office looking down towards Tower 42. I also remember seeing some of the rooftop stuff being shot round there.

Also I am used to people exiting from the wrong tube to the wrong street in London, that's just filming restrictions. However, why would a Barts doctor just be sitting on a bench in Russell Square? Totally wrong hospital lunchtime hangout.

Also what's with the obsession with casting Drop The Dead Donkey women? Hayden Gwynne and the one that played Sally? Coincidence? Joy Merryweather's going to turn up this Sunday, I bet you.

[perfectlyvague.livejournal.com]

Although now I think about it, they way they approach Tower 42 is only possible if they'd been to Wagamama's first. Er.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Wow, comments on an old entry that aren't Japanese or advertising Rolex replicas!

This is exactly the problem I have with London filming. Fuck it, they're happy to close bits of the city down for sport, or inbreds getting married - getting the locations right on the small number of films and shows I wish to watch should clearly be a higher priority still.

[vertigoranger.livejournal.com]

My first thought was Mycroft, and I vacillated between the two throughout, so that worked. I liked it also.

[vertigoranger.livejournal.com]

Oh and I wonder if that Rache detail was a nod to Gaiman's Holmes/Cthulhu story A Study in Emerald? I asked them, via the magic of twitter, but we all know twitter is a waste of time.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Surely they're both just referencing the original Study in Scarlet?

[vertigoranger.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah. I must have read it, because I have, but don't remember it. Should maybe have looked that up, really.

[vertigoranger.livejournal.com]

No in fact, after consulting my records: I started reading with The Sign of Four and had skipped A Study in Scarlet entirely. I shall go away now.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

It is a bit of an odd one; I was glad last night's homage didn't emulate it to the extent of spending about half its run-time on a Holmes-less tale of Love Among The Mormons.

[returntosender.livejournal.com]

I think Lucifer Box cancels out 'Victory of the Daleks' - which I actually quite liked, cough cough.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Novels and TV work are very different beasties, though. You can take them both into account in answering the wider question 'Is Mark Gatiss a Good Thing?' (undoubtedly he is), but when it comes to anticipating his contribution to a Moffat show...well.
That said, before that his last TV work AFAIK was Crooked House, and that was utterly excellent.
Essentially, I'm still just in a bad mood about the Alessi Daleks.

[returntosender.livejournal.com]

Fair point. Whenever Daleks pop up I find myself thinking again of that Daleks in Manhattan rubbish which I thought was easily the worst thing in New Who. I don't think I'll ever stop fuming about that.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

It was truly dire, but almost instantly superseded for me by the interminably dull '42'. And even that wasn't quite as bad as The Runaway Bride.

[zagreb2.livejournal.com]

I think "Victory of..." was hamstrung both by being built-around introducing the new dalek design and by the 42 minutes running time when Gatiss clearly wanted to tell the kind of detailed story that needs a two-parter. The general thrust of the story and characters were fine, it was just terribly rushed making some scenes (such as the reveal about the scientist happening around ten minutes after we met him) feel jarring.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I've seen this defence a lot, but not being able to write a story paced for the running time you've got is still a pretty bloody fundamental screenwriting fail.

[puzzled-anwen.livejournal.com]

I liked Victory of the Daleks, but then I am a bit obsessed with WWII. I want a copy of the Ironside poster to go with my Keep Mum, She's Not So Dumb one...

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

The poster - and indeed the Ironsides bit generally - were fine. It was just the rest of the episode which let it down.

[puzzled-anwen.livejournal.com]

Well, yes, obviously I want the poster more because it is awesome than from any particular loyalty to the episode.

[puzzled-anwen.livejournal.com]

It sounds as though that body farm thing is an ongoing project, though, so presumably there are still things to be learned.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Certainly, but something as obvious as post-mortem bruising must surely have been fully covered by now. But then, would forensics, detection &c even have followed the same path without Holmes as their presiding immortal? The alternate universe thing has more ramifications than I first noticed.

[puzzled-anwen.livejournal.com]

Yes, I nearly added something like that (ok, probably without the immortal bit) but then didn't bother. Best story ever.

[amuchmoreexotic.livejournal.com]

The ramifications go way beyond the state of forensic science.

Notice how Holmes asks "Iran or Afghanistan?". When Sherlock Holmes is a real person, you can't invade a country without a WMD programme and get away with it.

[amuchmoreexotic.livejournal.com]

Although that might be down to Mycroft, rather than Holmes.

[amuchmoreexotic.livejournal.com]

Actually, on further investigation, this Iran thing might have more to do with my ropy laptop speakers than Moffat's genius. But it should be true.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I definitely heard Iraq, but the theory was great while it lasted.

[ohdearyme.livejournal.com]

I read Contract recently too - there's a bit at the end that really got me though. I can't quite remember what it was, something to do with his piece of paper. Something he said about it that it seems to be assumed the reader would understand but I didn't. Though that could just be me being a bit slow...

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that was a bit puzzling. He'd earlier described the number as involving a pound sign and a lot of zeroes, and the implication I got at the end was that it was just £0000000 (or similar). But what that actually *means*, I don't know. Was he lying to us all along about his exit conditions?

[ohdearyme.livejournal.com]

That's the same conclusion I came to, but I didn't quite get it either. Still, it's reassuring that I'm not the only one, I feel a lot less like I totally missed the fucking point now.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Having established that it's not just you, can you not get the gentleman friend to ask the author? And if so, can you let me know the response? Because now you've reminded me (at the time it was overshadowed by the whole being-dead bit, not that I hadn't seen it coming but still) it is really bugging me.

[juggzy.livejournal.com]

Holmes: Brilliant. Sorry I can't be more erudite. I do see the similarities between Holmes and Smith's Who, even down to the horselike cadaverous facial constructions. It makes me wonder a bit if a. Smith's brilliance isn't in fact entirely down to Moffat's writing and perhaps direction and b. If Moffat isn't Working Something Out. Loved the bromance subtext; Martin Freeman, as always, takes things to another level.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I was going to say that if Moffat does have any writerly obsessions, they're fairly recent ones, because neither show has anything much in common with Coupling unless you count the more intricately-structured episodes. But thinking back even further, to Press Gang...Dexter Fletcher had one of those faces too, didn't he?

[splendorsine.livejournal.com]

Victory of the Daleks is a good episode, and we're all going to torment you by saying so until you're not sure whether it is you or the whole world which has gone insane.

Si Spurrier by contrast was one of the chief reasons I cancelled my 20+ year subscription to 2000AD. I'm willing to believe he's had enough practice to be a good writer by now, but at the time his stuff seemed to me a complete disgrace... I still feel like British comics-writing genius skipped a generation somewhere.

Holmes was SO much better than Jekyll that it came as a relief, but after the initial Twitter-hype of "OMG OMG HOW GOOD WAS THAT" I felt marginally disappointed by the second half and the denouement. The Sicilian scene from The Princess Bride, but not done half as well? Holmes' powers of deduction should have been the linchpin of the first episode, but instead he's put in a situation where these powers are pretty much useless, and only Watson's trusty service revolver can save the day. I guess the point is to spotlight Holmes' massive ego and his compulsion to put his life on the line for kicks, but is this really that true to Doyle? The original Holmes was hugely eccentric, but not really a borderline psychopath hated by normal people everywhere, surely? As with Doctor Who, I think the post-1980s obsession with making our fictional heroes darker and therefore "sexier" is a bit tedious. At least Holmes isn't snogging all of the ladies he meets yet, that's something.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I think the best summary was reached in discussion with atommickbrane, who had come to the episode after hearing the bad press. Conclusion: it was largely bad because we all thought it was going to be ace. If you've heard that it's bad, on the other hand, it seems surprisingly good.
(I am booked for a marathon season rewatch in August, so we'll see how it fares. TBH, though, I am more expecting to be reassessing 'The Beast Below')

Which Spurrier did you not like?

The TV adaptations have always had to fiddle the originals a little to make Watson seem less like a useless prick; even in the Jeremy Brett ones, where he was played fairly bumbling, he would often save the day in ways Conan Doyle did not set down.

[amuchmoreexotic.livejournal.com]

I think the difference is not so much that Holmes has got "darker" - I mean, he's gone from a cocaine addict to a nicotine patch abuser - but that people's reaction to him is portrayed more realistically.

This is spelled out in the bit where Holmes is surprised that Watson praises his deductive skill. Holmes: "That's not what people usually say."

Now going by the original stories, at this point we expect Holmes to complain that people say something like "Oh I see, I thought you'd done something clever."

But in the new version, what people actually say is "Piss off", which I think is closer to how people would react to someone that perceptive (as opposed to someone who pretends to be perceptive but doesn't actually know any uncomfortable truths, e.g. Derren Brown).

Mind you, I can't see the original Holmes casually explaining to two work colleagues how he knows they have been shagging, so I guess the modern version is much ruder. But that's partly because adultery would have been far more scandalous in the old days.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

But even that was largely retaliatory; I can certainly picture Jeremy Brett doing it if he was faced with the endemic disrespect which, as you say, is (nowadays at least) a far more plausible reaction to Holmes' skills, except from those who have directly benefited.

[splendorsine.livejournal.com]

In a more realistic universe people would have said "piss off" to David Tennant in HIS smug genius mode about ten times an episode, or just skipped to punching him straight in the face. (Which is why Waters of Mars and Midnight are two of his best episodes.)

I don't see what's so realistic about the police saying "here's the only guy who can help us capture London's worst serial killer since Jack the Ripper, but his personality is kind of abrasive, so PISS OFF LOSER", mind you.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Nilsen managed at least thrice Jack's total, so that whole line falls apart. Besides which, when you look at some of the stupid shit which results from interdepartmental police politics in the States (often leaving serious crims at liberty), similar issues arising from interaction between the police and someone who doesn't even have an official position seem entirely plausible.