Mick Hartley

Sherlock Series 2 was off and running last night with the first episode, A Scandal in Belgravia. It has, as far as I can see, been universally adored by the critics, after having received an extraordinary amount of advance publicity.

Well, I've been here before, but I didn't share the general enthusiasm. Very well produced, slick, clever…but still nonsense.

Both the pre-publicity and the reviews concentrate on the sexual undercurrents: between Holmes and Dr Watson – are they really gay? – and between sultry lesbian dominatrix and femme fatal Irene Adler and the virtually sexless and borderline autistic Sherlock. Sadly if this fails to excite you – and it certainly failed to excite me – well, there wasn't much else to enjoy. The plot, for instance (and yes, warning: spoilers ahead)…

Start with the amuse-bouche, as it were: the case of the broken-down car and the dead man in the field. It connected to nothing, but supposedly showed how damned clever Holmes was, and clearly served to impress Ms Adler. A driver sits by the side of the road trying to start his car. He sees a man in a field nearby. His continued efforts to start the car result in a loud back-fire. Next time he looks, the man in the field is dead. The police are called, and are, of course, baffled. The man wasn't shot. How did he die? Sherlock doesn't even need to go there in person to solve this ridiculously easy case. What happened? Well, isn't it obvious? The man – a keen sportsman – had just thrown a boomerang. He was distracted by the backfire, looked round, and was hit by the returning lump of wood – which then headed for a nearby river to float conveniently away and leave behind a mystery to be solved.

Well…that pretty much sets the tone. An absurd and arbitrary solution presented to us as the result of remarkable detective work. Personally I think the man was hit by a lump of frozen urine from a passing plane – it's a slightly more plausible scenario – but ours not to reason. We just sit back and marvel at Sherlock's powers of deduction. 

Of course you might say this is just entertainment, and we shouldn't expect gritty realism. But some kind of believability is surely required. Jonathan Creek, another series about an eccentric detective solving far-fetched murders, at least had its tongue firmly in its cheek, and respected the intelligence of the viewers. At the end everything, however strange, clicked into place. Here there's no such deal with plot integrity. Audiences with enquiring minds are not welcome. Just sit back and soak it up.

Again: Irene Adler is killed. Holmes goes to the morgue. Her face is badly damaged, we're led to believe, but nevertheless Holmes is able to identify the body. But then…she turns up again, alive and well. How did she manage that? How did she fool everyone, including the great all-observant detective, into believing that the corpse in the morgue was her? If there was an explanation I didn't hear it. Don't worry, just keep watching. 

Again: perhaps the episode's central scene. Sherlock has been trying to guess the right password for Irene's smartphone, which contains all the nasty secrets. In vain. She's won. She's outfoxed the great detective and made him look foolish. But, at the heigtht of her triumph, as she readies herself to collect all the prizes, Sherlock turns round. "No", he says, firmly. We realise this is the key moment. He takes the phone. He's worked out that she is in fact in love with him. She's allowed emotion to enter into her calculations. Oh fatal error! Sherlock knows what the password is. It's…he types the letters…S..H..E..R. SHERlock. Geddit? To unlock the phone. 

Well, again, of course, it's completely arbitrary. That it's a possible guess is the very best you could say for it. Even 221B, which he'd tried earlier, was more likely. And yet the whole resolution of this episode's plot, with the triumph of Sherlock and the fall of our femme fatale, depended on it. Once again Holmes' genius is not demonstrated to us, as it was in the original stories, as an essential resolution to the plotline. We are merely told it – to take or leave. It's a reasonable rule of thumb, I think, that when you have a detective successfully guessing the vital password, then you have a writer who's failing his audience.

As for the final denouement…poor Irene ends up in Kashmir or some such place, about to be beheaded by terrorists. (Why? Well, there's a theme of terrorism running through which never really connects to anything else, but lends a spurious depth to the plot and allows for some unpleasant CIA heavies to be bested by Holmes – and how we love American heavies to be bested by our boys! But really she might just as well be in a Colombian rainforest about to be shot by cocaine smugglers.) At the last moment her sword-wielding executioner turns out to be…Holmes! Who'd caught a cab over from Baker Street, perhaps. She's saved!

Basically this is not good serious television. It looks down on the viewer rather than respecting their intelligence. It's kids' TV; which is appropriate given writer Steven Moffat's background in Doctor Who. We're meant, as a distraction from the absurd plot, to be enthralled by the acting – Benedict Cumberbatch as a spoiled petulant boy, Martin Freeman running the full gamut of his acting repertoire from good-natured bemusement to….good-natured bemusement; like Tim from The Office. If that doesn't get you, well…tough.

As a contrast…Great Expectations. Cut to the bone to reveal the gothic novel buried inside. Wonderfully filmed – I loved the opening sequence in Romney Marsh – and with characters who develop with the plot. The twist when Pip's real benefactor is revealed is just wonderful story-telling. Genuine TV for adults.