Sunday night sees the latest in a long line of adaptations of the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. According to Mark Gatiss, one of the writers of the new BBC1 series, Holmes is already the most filmed character in literary history. Bad luck on Arthur Conan Doyle who, as we know, hoped in vain to kill off his hero.
Setting the new series in contemporary London, Gatiss and co-writer Steven Moffat have given the city equal billing with Holmes and Watson, played by Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman. Today's London, Gatiss believes, is just as exciting as a London full of fog and hackney carriages. "We have tried to fetishise the modern era," he told me. "There are ways of shooting even the most familiar place that refreshes everything about it."
Avoiding cliches of Victorian London proved hard, however. "They are everywhere. And particularly when Benedict is in silhouette in front of Big Ben, it was impossible."
Gatiss, 43, said he first experienced London in 1972 on a family trip.
"I remember so much about that visit. Everything was dirty. I went back to school and drew Big Ben with a big black line down it."
He later realised that this early visit to London, before all the maintenance works and innovations of the 1980s and 90s, was in the same year the cult horror film Theatre of Blood was filmed in the city. "So this was the London I remember. The same colours and the same dirt."
It is not the same London you will see in Sunday's episode of Sherlock Holmes, but there is still a sense of mystery and excitement, even if the smoke has long gone from the Big Smoke.
