He looks up, as if he can see them, hovering over the grand piano.
“You’ve just got to put your hand out, and catch them.”
During our whole chat, the only time he seems roused to genuine annoyance is when I ask him what I think might be the most amazing question of my entire journalistic career. Thanks to a meeting at a party last year, I am able to say to Keith Richards—one our greatest living rock stars—“Keith. I met Noddy Holder last year, and he’s convinced you wear a wig.” (For American readers: Noddy Holder is the permanently beaming, costermonger-lunged lead singer of British glam-rock legend Slade. Imagine Robert Plant, but dressed like a glittery clown.)
“Not yet!” he says, looking genuinely indignant. “Hey man, what’s his problem with wigs?”
“He thinks both you and Mick wear them,” I say, with mock disapproval.
“Get out of here!” Richards roars. He pulls down his bandana and shows me his hair—gray, a little wispy, but looking undeniably real. “Hey Noddy, you know, there more important things in life than hair. Mick definitely doesn’t wear a wig. I KNOW! I’ve PULLED IT! What’s Noddy’s problem?”
“I think Noddy’s just very proud he’s still got a gigantic afro,” I offer.
“Well, that’s about all he’s got,” Keith says, sniffily. “Well done, Nod.”
Our hour is up. Keith is off to get ready for another day of shooting on Pirates—possibly the most high-profile busman’s holiday in show business.
“Any plans for the future?” I ask, as he picks up his cigarettes—still eschewing the British ones on the table.
“Well, you know, we’ll be on the road again in the future,” Keith says, pocketing his lighter. “Yeah. On the road. I think it’s going to happen. I’ve had a chat with . . . Her Majesty. Brenda.”
And Richards leaves the room, laughing. He’s at it again. Winding up Mick; doing what he wants; being Keith Richards, for the sixty-seventh year in a row.
“I had to invent the job, you know,” he said, earlier. “There wasn’t a sign in the shop window, saying, ‘Wanted: Keith Richards.’ ”
And he’s done a bloody job of it.
I don’t think I can hold out any longer: I think it might be Sherlock time. Sherlock blew my mind like I wanted it blown—hard, fast, properly, and while I was too busy laughing to notice that it was also, quietly, and at the same time, breaking my heart.
I loved the way it entered—kicking the door open shouting “BANG! And I’m in!” in such a confident manner that, twenty minutes into the first episode, people on Twitter were saying, “This really might be one of the greatest TV shows of all time.” After twenty minutes! That is one hell of a mesmeric aura for a show to be throwing off.
When people said, smugly, “Oh, it’s just because you fancy Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock,” it was as if they were saying to a plant, “Oh, you only photosynthesize because of the sun.” Well, YES. DUH. That’s what the sun/Cumberbatch does to me/a plant. Why are you arguing against the miracle of Nature? You might as well punch a tree. Just buy the box set.
Anyway. Here’s my review of the first episode, written with a spinning head and a bursting heart, and a bid going on eBay for a deerstalker hat.
SHERLOCK REVIEW 1: LIKE A JAGUAR IN A CELLO
Oh dear. That was bad timing.
In the week where Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt questioned if the BBC license fee gives “value for money,” the advent of Sherlock donked his theory quite badly. It’s a bit embarrassing to be standing on a soap-box, slagging a corporation off as essentially wasteful and moribund, right at the point where they’re landing a bright, brilliant dragon of a show on the rooftops, for 39p per household. And with the rest of the BBC’s output that day—theoretically—thrown in for free.
The casting was perfect. Benedict Cumberbatch—the first actor in history to play Sherlock Holmes who has a name more ridiculous than “Sherlock Holmes”—was both perfect and astonishing: an actor pulling on an iconic character and finding he had infinite energy to drive the thing. He is so good that—ten minutes in—I just started laughing out loud with what a delight it was to watch him.
He looks amazing—as odd as you’d expect The Cleverest Man in the World to look. Eyes white, skin like china clay, and a voice like someone smoking a cigar inside a grand piano, this Holmes has, as Cumberbatch described it in interviews, “an achievable super-power.” He might not have actual X-ray vision, but his superlative illative chops mean that London is like a Duplo train-set to him: an easily-analyzable system, populated by small, simple plastic people.
At one point, a suspect speeds away from him in a taxi. Holmes can call up the A-Z, and the taxi’s only possible route, in his mind: “Right turn, traffic lights, pedestrian crossing, road works, traffic lights.”
By climbing over the right rooftop, ducking down the right alleyway, and running very, very fast while looking hot, Holmes can beat the taxi to its destination: as easily as if he were the size of the Telecom Tower, or Big Ben, stepping over the city laid out on the rug at 221b Baker Street.
Of course, this view of humanity’s masses makes him a high-functioning Asperger’s/borderline sociopath. Questioning why someone would still be upset about their baby dying fourteen years ago—“That was ages ago!” he shouts with the frustration of a child. “Why would she still be upset?”—Holmes notes that the room has gone quiet.
“Not good?” he hisses to Watson.
“Bit not good, yeah,” Watson replies.
So this is why Holmes needs Watson—their advent into each other’s lives managed with three perfect flicks of the script. Yes, Watson is impressed by Holmes: “That’s amazing!” he gasps, as Holmes deduces he has an alcoholic sibling, merely from scratch marks on his mobile.
“People don’t usually say that,” Holmes blinks, pleased. “They usually say, ‘Piss off.’ ”
But this Watson isn’t the usual, buff, conservative sidekick. In a role rivalling his turn as Tim in The Office, Martin Freeman’s Watson is altogether more complex and satisfying. Yes, he’s here as dragon-trainer—to whack Holmes with a stick when he starts monstering around, and climbing up on the furniture. But he’s also as quietly addicted to “the game” as Holmes—it’s Watson with the nervous tremors because he misses active service, in Afghanistan, Watson with the gun.
Sherlock is so packed with joy and treats, to list them means bordering on gabbling: Una Stubbs as secret dope-fiend landlady Mrs Hudson (“It was just a herbal remedy—for my hip!”), Mycroft Holmes’s mysterious, posh, texting, superlatively composed assistant, “Anthea.” The little nods to the possibility that Holmes might be gay. The insanely generous casting of Rupert Graves as DI Lestrade. The line “I love a serial killer—there’s always something to look forward to!” And the perfect placing of what is, presumably, the series arc: “Holmes is a great man. And I hope, one day, a good one, too.”
“Value for money” isn’t even the start of it. Every detail of this Sherlock thrills. Given that it was written by Steven Moffat in the same year he knocked off the astonishing, elegant and high-powered re-booting of Doctor Who, at £142.50, Moffat’s scripts alone are value for money.
If the funding is ever called into question, I’ll pay it myself. In cash. Delivered to his front door step. With a beaming, hopefully non-stalkerish, “Thank you.”
Then, two weeks later, it was all over: there were only three episodes in the first season. And I’d lost the bid on the deerstalker to someone in Leicester. I was gutted.
SHERLOCK REVIEW 2: THE FRUMIOUS CUMBERBATCH
“But why are there only three episodes?” Britain asked, scrabbling around in the listings, in case there was a Sherlock left they’d overlooked, at the bottom. “Only three? Why would you make only three Sherlocks? Telly comes in SIX. SIX is the number of telly. Or TWELVE. Or, in America, TWENTY-SIX—
because it is a bigger country. But you never have three of telly. Three of telly is NOT HOLY. WHY have they done this? IS THIS A GIGANTIC PUZZLE WE MUST DEDUCE—LIKE SHERLOCK HIMSELF?”
But yes. On Sunday, Sherlock came to an end after a fleet, flashing run. Like some kind of Usain Bolt of TV, perhaps it finished so early, simply because it was faster than everyone else. Either way, it had left scorch marks on the track: in three weeks, it flipped everything around. Sunday nights became the best night of the week. Martin Freeman went from being “Martin Freeman—you know. Tim from The Office” to “Martin Freeman—you know. Watson from Sherlock.” Stephen Moffat had—extraordinarily—constructed a serious rival to his own Doctor Who as the most-loved and geekily-revered show in Britain. And Benedict Cumberbatch had, of course, gone from well-respected, BAFTA-nominated actor to pin-up, by-word, totty, avatar and fame: the frumious Cumberbatch.
“The Great Game” opened with Holmes—slumped in a chair, legs as long as the TV was wide—bored, shooting at the wall without even looking. Popping holes in that lovely 1970’s wallpaper at 221b Baker Street; lead-like with torpor.
“What you need is a nice murder,” Una Stubbs’s Mrs Hudson clucked, sympathetically, in the hallway. “Cheer you up.”
So when Moriarty came out to play, Holmes’s glee at the oncoming chaos was inglorious, but heartfelt. He received phonecalls from weeping innocents, parceled up with TNT. Moriarty told them what to say: they give Holmes a single, cryptic clue about an unsolved crime, and tell him he has twelve, ten, eight hours to solve it, or they will die.
With increasing dazzle, Holmes busts each case. On the foreshore by Southwark Bridge, with London frosty and grey behind him, Holmes looks at the washed-up corpse in front of him, and in less than a minute concludes that because this man is dead, a newly-discovered Vermeer—going on exhibition tomorrow—must be a fake. His torrent of illation is extraordinary—his mind has anti-gravity boots; he bounces from realization to realization until he’s as high as the sun.
Ten minutes later, and he’s in the gallery, staring at the Vermeer. He knows it’s fake but doesn’t know how to prove it. Then Moriarty’s latest, TNT-garlanded victim calls him. The voice is tiny.
“It’s a child!” Lestrade, Watson and the audience horror. “A child!” The child starts counting backwards from ten—Holmes has ten seconds to prove the Vermeer is a fake. The tension is insane—I was biting my wrists with distress—but when the answer bursts on Holmes, he almost doesn’t shout out the answer in time: the pleasure he’s had from smashing the case has him high as a kite. He is wired.
But the whole season has been building up to Holmes meeting Moriarty and, finally, in a deserted swimming pool, here he is: Jim Moriarty. Young, fast, Irish.
Sherlock seems oddly—relieved at finally meeting Moriarty. Yeah, he’s completely evil—but he’s also the only person in the world who doesn’t, ultimately, bore Holmes. He’s made the last week thrilling. Moriarty makes Holmes come alive—even when he’s trying to kill him. And Moriarty knows this.
“Is that a Browning in your pocket—or are you just pleased to see me?” he asks.
“Both,” Holmes says, during a scene that had an undeniable undercurrent of hotness.
But things suddenly turn. Moriarty knows that Holmes is bad for business. And—oh yeah—Dr. Watson’s still standing in the corner, covered in TNT. Moriarty’s threatening to explode him. I’d forgotten about that, during the hotness.
“The flirting’s over, my dear,” Moriarty says, warning Holmes off.
Holmes is in accord. “People have died.”
And suddenly, the awfulness of Moriarty comes roaring out. “THAT’S. What people DO,” he screams—eyes dilating so huge and black, I wondered if it might have been done with CGI. “I will BURN the HEART out of you,” he continues, warning Holmes off his patch, boilingly insane. It was like when Christopher Lloyd shows his evil Toon eyes in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?—truly startling. Andrew Scott has some serious chops.
And there, five minutes later, we left them, on a cliff-hanger. Moriarty’s snipers shining their laser sights on Holmes’s and Watson’s hearts; Holmes pointing his gun at a pile of TNT, telling Moriarty he’s happy to blow them all sky high; The Great Game ended in checkmate. Not quite as amazing as the first episode—which was the televisual equivalent of someone kicking a door off its hinges, screaming, “I’ve COME to BLOW your MINDS!”—but a different league from Episode Two; and still the best thing on all week by several, palpable, indexable leagues.
Sherlock ends its run as a reekingly charismatic show, flashing its cerise silk suit lining in a thousand underplayed touches: Holmes watching The Jeremy Kyle Show—“Of course he’s not the father! Look at the turn-up on his jeans!” The neat one-two of, “Meretricious!” “And a happy New Year!” A myriad of amazing moments from Cumberbatch, who will surely—surely—with his voice like a jaguar in a cello, and his face like sloth made of pearl—get a BAFTA for such a passionate, whole-hearted, star-bright re-booting of an icon.
No one can be in any doubt that the BBC will re-commission Sherlock, and that—so long as Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss are in charge of the scripts, as they were for the first and last episode—it will continue to totally delight anyone who watches it.
But next time, in sixes, or twelves, or twenty-fours, please. Not threes. Threes are over far, far too quickly. Now Sunday is just . . . normal again.
I still haven’t got round to doing what I propose in this next piece. I really must. I am still haunted by the boy in the playground. I wonder what he did next? I hope he continued to escalate his look commensurately with each passing year, and now walks around Solihull dressed like fucking Batman.
HELLO. YOU LOOK WONDERFUL.
When I was fourteen, and bored, I used to walk the five miles into town, sit on the patch of grass outside St. Peter’s church, and look at people. Obviously, at that age, it was mainly boys I was looking at. And obviously, given that I was sitting in the drizzle, staring at them, and wearing—it’s a long story—a red, tartan bathrobe instead of a coat, they would cross the street, and go into Argos, to avoid me. But still, I would look. I would look and look and look. They literally could not stop me.
Anyone who’d seen Desmond Morris’s The Human Zoo would suggest I was studying humans like animals, but I know that I was not. It was far more formless, and thoughtless, than that. I was definitely just staring—like a mono-browed lollygagger, creating a patch of unease by the village well.
I think that, at the time, I thought that if I looked at people—particularly boys—long enough, I would somehow work “it” out. That I had no idea what “it” was, of course, is one of the hallmarks of adolescence. If I’d been forced to put money on what “it” might be, it sadly would not have been, “Whether my life would be immeasurably improved if I stopped wearing a bathrobe, tried to be normal, and bought a coat, instead.” I was, as you can see, quite hopeless.
We all look at people, of course. We cannot help it. Mankind has hot air balloons, and crampons, and mine shafts, and submersibles. Mankind has been on the Moon. Anywhere we look, people get in the way—hanging off ladders, falling from windows, putting their face a little too close to yours to ask you if you’re alright. Everywhere we look, we are looking at people. They are like Nature’s little screensavers.
But one of the things I most love about this country is that we do not, will not, stare at each other. The British will not spend all day gawping at each other in the drizzle, however odd we may look. The entire cast of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert could roll into Starbucks, with candy-colored cockatiels flying out of their hair, and—after a brief glance upwards—everyone would studiously go back to reading their papers, as if the door had merely been blown open by the wind. In a cramped, crowded nation, we know the essence of politeness is ignoring pretty much everyone around us.
And yet—and ye
t, this saddens me, also. For while it means we do not cause anguish in the hearts of the sweaty, the harried or the deformed, it means that, with the Olympic Committee of our gaze, we also fail to hand out gold medals to those who actually should be looked at.
Yes. I’m talking about people who look hot. People who look really, really hot. Not necessarily classically staggering, like a Moss, or a Best. But those who’ve put together a smoking outfit, done something foxy with their hair, artfully clashed their shoes with their bangles, or just gone whole hog, and back-combed their fringe until it looks like a hat. Straight boys in pink nu-rave hoodies. OAPs in scarlet ballet pumps. Waitresses with 1940s up-dos. Ghanaian girls in pig-tails and jodhpurs, trotting round Topshop like it’s a gymkhana. These are the people who want to be looked at. They are abiding by Quentin Crisp’s maxim—to live their lives as if they were in a movie. But their tragedy is that, by living in Britain, it’s a movie that will be furtively glanced at, for a mere second, and then pointedly ignored.
For those who believe, as I do, that the next stage in human evolution will be neither a giant leap in intelligence, nor partial DNA-merge with robots, but all of us looking consistently better-dressed, it is a crime against Nature itself.
Instance: I was in Solihull last week, in a park. It was starting to look—as all parks must, in the middle of a wet September—a bit like a plate of boiled cabbage, with some swings stuck in it. Sitting on the edge of the skate-park was a boy of about fifteen, who had clearly recently seen The Dark Knight in the last few months, and was now desirous to be the Joker. On this day, he was doing so by dressing all in black—skater trousers, knee-length pea coat, beanie hat. When he took the coat off, it revealed a cropped black waistcoat over a white shirt—a shirt that bordered, thrillingly, on blouse.
While the other kids skated—in nondescript trousers, and greige tops—he leaned against the monkey-bars, smoking a fag, and photographed them with an impressively old-fashioned Nikon. Now, I’m not entirely deluded. I know that the photos were probably awful, the cigarettes had a one-in-three chance of giving him cancer, and he was in all probability, a bit of a dick. But I loved him. I loved him for treating his outfit like an atmosphere-controlled space suit, which shielded him from the world he was actually in. I loved that his clothes were a signal to vaguely like-minded people—the opening line of a conversation, which you could hear from the other side of the park.