Sherlock Holmes

BBC drama on Sherlock Holmes proves fiction can be bigger than fact

Theories behind quite how Sherlock Holmes defied death in the final episode of the BBC’s fabulous re-telling of the timeless detective have nabbed a rather generous amount of media attention this week.

His dramatic tumble off a roof-top, his apparent bloodied, dead body lying on the pavement, and his dramatic reappearance at the episode finale has sent people into a world of theory and counter-theory.

Internet forums, for whom this sort of thing were possibly created for, have been thoroughly abuzz as followers take to their keyboards with their own ideas.

All of which allows me to step in and rather burst the bubble.

Firstly, it should be made abundantly clear to everyone that Sherlock Holmes is not, despite this error being made back in his hey-day, a real person.

He is one of fiction’s most glorious, engaging characters. But flesh and bones in any context other than the imagination he is not.

Secondly, for anyone with a mere Trivial Pursuit-level passing interest in Holmes knows that the Reichenbach Falls is one of author Arthur Conan Doyle’s best known books. And it is familiar because our hero plunges to what appears to be his death, only to re-emerge and probably (although we can only guess) tell chums ‘reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated’.

Thus, it was a fair bet that at the end of the Reichenbach Fall episode of Sherlock, our hero would return, whatever it appeared.

But perhaps the biggest one to stop the debate is surely that this is a television programme. A fictional drama, thus the hows and whys are redundant or too serious a debate.

Many decades ago there used to a series called Rocket Man which saw the hero end every single episode apparently plunging to his death.

The next instalment would simply reveal that what actually happened was he escaped moments before he went over the ravine/the building he was in blew up etc etc.

While I can’t be sure headlines didn’t debate the unfeasible escape method, I suspect they didn’t.

And yes, I am aware when JR got shot in Dallas it made an awful fuss, but that was a simple case of ‘whodunnit’ as opposed to ‘how did he do it’.

Granted, this is now sounding suspiciously like a miserable rant from someone who doesn’t care less about Sherlock.

But, like the next person, I have wasted valuable brain cells pondering what happened. Just that by the time you’ve seen the broadsheets bleat on about it and Radio 4 devote airtime to it during its main news programme upon an evening, you cannot help but think the lines between fact and fiction have blurred dramatically.

Do we really need to take to internet forums to discuss how an event carefully choreographed for a TV drama about mysteries managed to deliberately pull the wool over our eyes?

Probably not.

Surely the biggest mystery in recent weeks is how that cruise ship captain managed to slip over and fall into a lifeboat. Now that is real life. And probably fiction too.