What is Killing Sherlock?
Killing Sherlock: Lucy Worsley on the Case of Conan Doyle is historian and TV presenter Lucy Worsley’s new three-part documentary series on the “love-hate relationship” between author Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) and his most famous creation – the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes.
When is Killing Sherlock on TV?
The first episode of Killing Sherlock will be broadcast on BBC Two at 9pm on Sunday 10 December, with two more episodes broadcast on 17 December and 24 December.
What is Killing Sherlock about?
Arthur Conan Doyle published his first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, in 1887. The fictional detective soon became immensely popular, but by 1893, as Lucy Worsley explains, Conan Doyle had “come to hate” Holmes.
Fortunately, the author had come up with a way to get rid of his creation once and for all – or so he thought. In the short story ‘The Final Problem’, the detective falls to his death at the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. This, a now rich and successful Conan Doyle hoped, would free him up for more serious literary endeavours. But his gambit didn’t work, and he eventually resurrected Holmes in great part because of the negative public reaction.
So what are we to make of Conan Doyle’s love–hate attitude to Holmes? And what are we to make of Conan Doyle himself? As Lucy Worsley says: “While exploring [Holmes’] life and times, I also got a real and sometimes troubling insight into manliness, empire and Victorian values. I find his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, to be a complex, contradictory and endlessly fascinating character.”
In programmes that see Worsley picking through archives and meeting with experts, she not only charts an author’s disillusionment with his own success, but looks at how he played in goal for Portsmouth (really) and became a detective himself via his involvement in a famous legal case. She also explores how the darkness of the writer’s later stories and an interest in spiritualism related to tragedy in his own life.
Who is Lucy Worsley?
Lucy Worsley is joint chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces and is known for presenting popular history TV series including A Very British Murder, British History’s Biggest Fibs with Lucy Worsley and its follow-up series, American History’s Biggest Fibs and Royal History’s Biggest Fibs, and Agatha Christie: Lucy Worsley on the Mystery Queen.
