SHERLOCK AND THE WEIGHT OF EXPECTATION

I went to see a sequel a few days ago. They can be tricky things to get right and I always approach them with a certain amount of trepidation, but we decided to bite the bullet and risk it anyway.

It was the follow up to Guy Ritchie’s rather fabulous “Sherlock Holmes” film of a few years ago and which starred Robert Downey Junior and Jude Law. When I said “rather fabulous” it was not without a slight sense of irony because we had completely failed to go and see that film in an actual cinema and had rented it in the full expectation that we were going to loathe and detest the thing. Guy Ritchie’s previous outings had not been all that well received in this house and with him choosing to tackle a subject that was thought of with much fondness around here, namely the various adventures of the person we like to think of as “Great Uncle Sherlock”, there was much trepidation as the shiny disc slipped into the brass and oak of the steam-powered shiny disc player.

Of course, it all turned out to be rather wonderful and our own copy was swiftly purchased (so much for the “money saving” process of joining a rental scheme…) and has been played several times since as a counterpoint to the performances of Mr Brett and Mr Rathbone, who both still give the more definitive portrayals of the old reprobate. So, when the sequel was announced and duly surfaced, it was much anticipated and, despite our relative indolence, we determined to get ourselves over to a picture house at some point during the festive season and jolly well sit ourselves down and watch it, and pretty marvellous we found it to be to.

Not, of course, that you should take my word for it. People, I find, should really be left to judge these things for themselves. My opinions mean nothing and, it has to be said, it is becoming increasingly obvious that I know absolutely nothing about anything very much, either. For example, whilst I was sitting in the picture house, desperately afraid that the hacking cough I have recently had and which refuses to finally go away would resurface and leave me having to scuttle from the picture house so as not to ruin the experience for everyone else, suddenly, after at least thirty years of following Uncle Sherlock’s adventures, it finally dawned upon me that my (s)ister and (m)yself share the same initials as Sherlock and Mycroft. This is probably just an insignificant coincidence as neither of my parents showed any signs of having any admiration for the works of Conan-Doyle, but it pleased me nevertheless.

All that coughing must have finally got the blood pumping into my brain, assuming, of course, that it could find it.

Mind you, even though they had no need to be, somewhere deep inside my head alarm bells were ringing anyway from the amount of publicity material that claimed that this movie was “funnier” (as well as “bigger” and “better”) than the original. Dark memories of old favourites now being “played for laughs” rather than making any attempt to be in the least bit thrilling gnawed at me, but I needn’t have worried and for this old and rather irregular moviegoer, the whole thing really did turn out to be a rather marvellous experience, which I’m not going to say any more about because I have been, and I suspect always will be, wary of “spoilers”.

For example, I still haven’t forgiven the person who told me the ultimate fate of one of the main characters in the Harry Potter films a full three years before they even made the film because, as he put it, “Oh, everyone knows that…” Nor have I ever been forgiven by the person to whom I once mentioned the ending of “Thelma and Louise” to a full decade after its release, and it having seeped into almost every other area of pop culture, I (wrongly) thought... So we have to tread carefully in such matters.

But sequels are still a tricky thing to get right. In cinema terms, there really is nothing worse than having a massive level of expectation placed upon you and then completely failing to live up to it. This is something that I like to call the “Phantom Menace” factor...

A whole generation grow up enjoying a particular trilogy of movies that came out when they were young and so, years later, the great creative wizard who first made them decided to make a few more of them. The anticipation for these films then grows almost exponentially to an almost unrealistic level and when the films are released, the fans, who have now grown far older than they once were, are still prepared to camp out overnight to see them and, when they do, the actual films themselves really haven’t a hope of living up to all that hope and anticipation or to be the equal of the many films that have already been playing in the heads of all those different people for so much of their lives and, somehow, despite making shed loads of cash, they manage to disappoint, and fall down under the weight of all that expectation.

Or, perhaps, the wait of expectation…

Ultimately sequels are bound to disappoint us because if they just give us exactly the same thing they will seem unoriginal, and if they are too different we will feel that they have lost whatever it was that made the original so special for us.

It is a very tricky path to navigate...

But then very few things can ever live up to the hype anyway. If someone with an almost limitless marketing budget spends weeks telling you that the next big thing is the greatest thing ever, your levels of expectation are so high that the actual reality of sitting and watching the show, or game, or book, or whatever, cannot possibly ever really hope to live up to the anticipated version that was running in your head, no matter how good it claims to be. Sometimes the “best” experiences are those which take you by surprise when your expectations are not so great, but somehow, the dark arts of marketing could never allow that.

This is why “fans” can end up being the most vocal pressure group when it comes to voicing their distain for something that they still claim to love without measure in these days of the internet. If something turns out to fail them personally by not being as great as the marketing departments who now “own” what they once held so dear tell them it is, it can lead to a great deal of resentment when that thing is changed and warped beyond their own idea of what it “should” be.

Although, to be fair, in most spheres it would seem that it has always been the passionate fan who can be the most critical, whether it is the football fan who thinks that they could run the team better than any of the coaching staff and who, perhaps, still harbours the belief that simply by turning up regularly, one day they will be plucked from the stands and asked to play as a centre forward, or the fan who has loved a TV show for many years and somehow believes that the abstract version that exists inside their head will be more appealing than any of what they think of as the “rubbish” versions that are currently being broadcast into many homes across the nation instead of accepting that this version is far more popular and appealing and successful than any of the more intimate versions that they themselves might prefer to make if they ever got the chance, because what they really want is more of the same comforting shows that made their own childhoods slightly better places to be all those years ago. But the world of film and television production cannot ever be like that. It is a savage and cut-throat industry where only the toughest can survive being put before the harshest of critics, the public.

Us.

This is why, in the end, we should always fear the passionate fan, despite them being the very lifeblood of whatever it is that they are supporting, because they are the ones closest to something, the ones that love it the most and are therefore sometimes the least qualified to be objective.

Which brings us, rather naturally, back to Uncle Sherlock, or rather “Sherlock” starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, the rather fabulous television updating of the legendary detective into modern times that so wowed TV audiences over three Sunday evenings nearly eighteen months ago. After all that time of winning all those awards and being the latest “best thing ever” the much-anticipated new shows start their run tonight and, if I’m being truly honest, it scares me to death that, after all that anticipation, I might find them a bit ordinary. Oh, I know that the team making them are some of the safest and surest of hands working in British television today, but it still bothers me that people across this great nation of ours will sit in their armchairs and start saying things like “What was so special about that?” and “I can’t see what all the fuss is about, can you?” when all I want them to do is love it to bits.

I’ve said it before, and I’m sure I’ll say it again, sometimes it really is just all of the hope that you have in life that deals you the most brutal of blows. Tonight, I really do hope that the programme remains as wonderful as I believe it to be, but there’s still that nagging fear that it might not be.

Hope and fear… Sugar and spice… Black and white… Sweet and sour….

Holmes and Watson.

Somehow opposite extremes just simply work so very well together, and I guess I must just keep my faith in that…