Sherlock-'A Study in Pink' & 'The Blind Banker'

After being bombarded with tweets, facebook status', magazine articles and radio programmes praises this modern-day Sherlock Holmes, I have finally sat down and watched the first two episodes 'A Study in Pink' and 'The Blind Banker'.

Created by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss (the men behind Doctor Who), this is the famous story of Sherlock Holmes re-located to modern day London.

Doctor Watson (Martin Freeman) is a veteran of Afghanistan, struggling to adjust to life in London. Sherlock Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a 'Consulting Detective' who drives DI LeStrad (Rupert Graves) and his team around the bend with his constant interfering in their cases. They are bought together by a mutual friend, as both declare themselves to be bad flatmates.

Within moments of moving in together, a spate of four apparently unreleated suicides fill the papers. All four people take the same poison, and yet the victims (a wealthy businessman, a teenage boy, an MP and a Welsh media lady) have no apparent link. Holmes manages to solve the message scrawled on the floor next to the Welsh lady in pink, get hold of her suitcase (which he deduces she must have due to the splatter of mud on her tights) and track down her mobile phone.

'A Study in Pink' is solved with quite a chilling ending. Although the killer is motiviated by pretty typical motives, when one looks at CSI and Law & Order-estranged family relationships, terminal illness-it is the idea that he could 'pass by unnoticed' as a taxi driver, which is most disarming.

The second episode 'The Blind Banker' has more of a far-out plot. A bank chairman (Bertie Carvel), an old university friend of Holmes, calls him to his bank to examine some graffiti. This graffiti is then linked to the murder of their Hong Kong chief trader and a freelance journalist. It then evolves that an ancient Chinese crime ring are hunting down people who have a link to an expensive item that has been lost from the black market of smuggling antiques in which they trade.

Perhaps it plays off the success of the Guy Ritchie film, but this adaption of Sherlock Holmes is quite brilliant. Cumberbatch is wonderfully eccentric, slightly arrogant and, as is the case with many very intelligent people, appears slightly out of touch with normal behaviour-especially regarding relationships. As Watson, Freeman brings a quality of exasperation with the world to the part, and it is through his association with Holmes that his world begins to come back to life.

Really it is Cumberbatch and Freeman's show, yet good support is offered by Graves in the form of the reluctant police chief, Jonathan Aris as the forensic officer Anderson who loathes Holmes, Louise Brealey as the coroner who is quite taken with Holmes, Una Stubbs as Holmes & Watson's landlady and Zoe Telford as Sarah.

I found the nods to the original text quite brilliant; the idea of having Baker Street as a proper apartment in London, Holmes being on a 3 nicotine patches a day in order to stave off his smoking addiction. There is also the interesting fact that today a close relationship between two men instantly arouses the belief that the men must be gay, as opposed to friends or colleagues.

Now I'm in the same position as a great many other people in the country, totally gripped and eagerly awaiting the conclusion in Part 3.