Spanking Sherlock: BBC gets the wrong end of the stick

SO, LARA PULVER enjoyed spanking Benedict Cumberbatch. Well zipadeedoodah; I wouldn't have minded a go myself. Teach him to pretend to be Sherlock Holmes, when everyone knows that Holmes was actually Victorian. Fellow should comb his hair and try to be a bit more aquiline.

A foul instinct. Not Cumberbatch's fault, of course. Just doing his job. No more was Lara Pulver to blame. The idea of making Irene Adler a dominatrix was mildly dodgy, but whoever thought that that's what a dominatrix was actually like needs a damn good thrashing.

No. That's unfair. It's not their fault, either. It's just an awful sort of clichéd ignorance, not that far removed from the prep school boy who thinks babies happen when the gentleman gets on top of the lady and is excused into her.

All too terribly English, and one of the crucial things about Holmes - the Holmes as conceived by Arthur Conan Doyle, which Sherlock is still dependent upon, otherwise it would be called something else, with different stories and different characters - is that he's not English at all. Unlike the BBC, which actually boasted, on its own website yesterday, that it realised Sherlock was a "bit naughty".

Anyone who uses the word "naughty" in any sort of sexual context should be removed from that context at once. They're not ready. "Naughty" is a word for low-rent escorts ("Are you feeling naughty, then, dear?") or for men who have a special name for their virile member ("Be nice to Matey, darling").

And Sherlock was, alas, naughty. Naughtiness ran through the whole enterprise.
 
So, okay, fine, I am the one person in the entire world who didn't like it. Spit on me. I can live with it.
 
But it's not because Cumberbatch was bad, or the photography was dud, or Lara Pulver wasn't achingly gorgeous, because he wasn't, it wasn't, and she was. It wasn't even because poor old Watson seemed to be in one of those rotten dreams actors are prone to, where they've been rehearsing for a different part in a different show and then suddenly they're ON, dears! and helplessly bewildered and doing their best but it all goes tits up. Or, in this case, tits out.

It was because it missed the point. It took the plot of the original Scandal in Belgravia but missed the actual story. That the two are different things is something that often gets overlooked. (I've done it myself, so we're in a glasshouse/stones situation here.)

The plot, like all Sir Arthur's plots, is faintly risible. That they felt obliged to beef it up by making the basis of blackmail not just sex but kinky sex meant they fatally weakened the story, which is about the unexpected vulnerability of Holmes: a man of pure intellect whose only brush with the world of feeling is provoked by a woman of equal intellectual power.

In other words, the written story proposes that clever can be sexier than sexy - an idea women still have drummed out of them even today.

But there's more. Though much of the imagined texture of the Conan Doyle stories is overpainted by its readers - it's not always foggy and Mrs Hudson bustles in far less often than we imagine - to update and delete that texture removes a layer of complexity in the original tales.

Nor do we get so much as a sniff of the crucial, three-cornered battle at the heart of the Sherlock Holmes stories. At the apex stands Holmes himself: the embodiment of the world of scrutiny and bright light. Ranged against him are the twin darknesses of Victorian complacency (embodied in dear old Watson and in Scotland Yard), and of the signifier of all that would lie hidden and undetected, Professor Moriarty.

And there's yet another level Sherlock entirely fails to decode. The crucial battle fought out in story after story is modernity versus tradition. Holmes, with his monographs and methods, his cultural rootlessness and his improbable experiments, all directed towards a logical and efficient exposure, is modernity for good or ill. Watson, defined by his (old) service revolver and his (old) war-wound (got in an old war), and by his affably Anglican readiness to do his duty and, when necessary, to be astonished, is tradition.

It can be summed up in the two sounds which come to our ears when we think of Sherlock Holmes: cab-horses' hooves, and the hiss of a steam-locomotive.

If you like the production values and the heartbreaking curve of Ms Pulver's back, fine. But, far from naughty, it's all a bit airbrushed. For the real full-frontal, read the originals.

• The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle, Wordsworth Editions. ISBN 1 978-1840220766

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