“Sherlock” Season 2, Episode 1 – ‘A Scandal in Belgravia’ DVD commentary, part 1 

This is not a direct transcript, nor have I written up every single comment made. This is just a selection from the commentary which I personally found interesting or fun.Further extracts may be added in due course.Please remember that some of the comments made by people may look serious in plain print but were frequently meant sarcastically or humorously.

If you quote extracts from this, especially if it includes bits which I wrote myself rather than transcribed, a link back to this page would be much appreciated!

Commentary by:Sue Vertue – “the producer”;Mark Gatiss – “co-creator of Sherlock”;Steven Moffat – “the other co-creator of Sherlock and the writer of this one”;Benedict Cumberbatch – “I am the Sherlock”;Lara Pulver – “playing Irene Adler for this episode”.

Mark: “This is the reprise of the climax of The Great Game, episode three of last year.”Benedict: “Due to budget cuts, we had to repeat it.”Mark: “Obviously we had no idea how the show was going to take off at that stage ...”Steven: “... or how to get out of this place!”

They shot the pool scene very early in the filming of the episode [although this episode was filmed last of the three].

Mark says that ideally they would have known what they were doing [i.e. that they had been commissioned for a second season] and would have shot the resolution while filming The Great Game but they had to come back almost eighteen months later. Sue used to phone the swimming pool [in Bedminster, Bristol] and ask if they’d changed anything. They told her they’d had a renovation, which worried her, but in fact they’d simply put in a disabled ramp. The production team did have to re-make a poster that had been on the wall and had since been removed.

Steven: “If you’re all feeling very cruel watching this, you are about to see people age eighteen months.”Benedict: “My face will suddenly inflate!”Sue: “Martin’s hair is how I was trying to dodge things.”Mark: “It’s very cleverly framed out, because we did actually put a wig on him, didn’t we, but it’s left out.”

Using “Stayin’ Alive” as the ringtone was Sue’s idea. The three writers (Mark, Steven and Steve Thompson) were in a restaurant when they came up with the idea of a phonecall interrupting the stand-off, deciding that after all this, a phonecall would be so funnily lame. Steven told Sue the idea and she told him a sad anecdote about a funeral where someone’s

phone had gone off with the ringtone and he thought, “Well, that’s it! That’s the one we’ve got to use!”

This commentary was recorded the day after the press launch and the ringtone had got a huge round of applause from the audience.

Mark asks Ben how he felt going back to the pool location after eighteen months.Benedict: “Nostalgic.”Mark: “Chlorinated!”Benedict: “Very, very hot.”He says that the corduroy suit wasn’t a lot of fun to wear in August.

Lara: “And there I am ... oh, rather more of me than you might have hoped for!”Steven: “Your first close up – literally cheeky!”

The revamped titles now include the characters’ faces.Steven: “We kept the faces out last time.”Mark: “Well, it was all to do with how episode one began because the first reveal of Sherlock was gonna be upside down through the zip of the body bag and we said, ‘Well, we can’t show him first’.”

There was a definite decision to “front-load” the post-credits sequence with everything that people had been missing and to have a good dose of fun, particularly the Conan Doyle in-jokes about the different stories, like The Geek Interpreter (for the ACD story “The Greek Interpreter”) and The Speckled Blonde (for “The Speckled Band”) [and The Navel Treatment (for “The Naval Treaty”)].Mark: “That doesn’t mean by any means there won’t be a story with a snake in it one day.”Steven: “Absolutely – or perhaps A Sandal in Bohemia! We can do anything!”Mark: “Someone suggested last night rather brilliantly The Copper Britches – a pair of metal trousers!”

Benedict: “I was worried about the fact that I decided to eat something – always a mistake, both as an actor and possibly as Sherlock who obviously, as we know, doesn’t eat; he just kind of gets his nourishment from air!”

Mark asks Steven where he got the idea for the Flight of the Dead. Ben promptly starts giggling over Steven’s reply which eventually he explains: “This is like An Interview with Mark Gatiss!” “I’m moderating,” Mark replies. Steven says he got the idea from a cut scene that he read about from the James Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service where there was going to be a train full of dead people and Q saying, ‘You can always get dead bodies somewhere.’

During the scene in the theatre, Sue says that she will never forget whoever was doing the steadicam that day who kept falling over all day. Ben dissolves in giggles again as he adds, “I’ll never forget Rupert falling over in the shot!” “Only one of two great comedy falls in this episode, it has to be said,” says Steven.

Steven: “And here it is!”

Lara: “The magic deerstalker moment!”Steven: “We did the first series of this and everyone was saying, ‘Oh, obviously he’s not ever going to wear a deerstalker,’ and Mark and I were thinking, ‘Of course he is!’”

Mark says that North Gower Street, where they film the exterior of 221B, is a really good match for upper Baker Street. If you go across the road from the busy touristy part, the top of Baker Street is very like that.

Sue remembers the pizza delivery man who was walking up and down trying to find a number and suddenly saw 221 on the door and they watched him going up and down the road with his pizza trying to find the right address!

Mark: “The great Una – beyond a national treasure.”Steven: “If you listed all the hit series she’s been in – she must have been in more television shows ...”Lara: “I remember that the first day we had the script read, and literally you were ticking series after series off.”Mark: “But it’s such a wonderful warm relationship. Mrs Hudson in the stories really is just a mention. Over the years in different versions, she’s generally a sort of Mrs Pepperpot figure because Holmes and Watson are usually much older, but it’s so nice to have that kind of maternal feeling there in the household.”Lara: “And she’s so like that to all of us.”Steven: “Well that’s where it came from, really. Even if you read the script of A Study in Pink, there’s no real indication of that at all. It was just Benedict giving her hugs and kisses all the time ’cause it was Una, so we just started writing it in there.”

Lara says that the valley in Wales in which they filmed the backfiring car and the hiker was beautiful, but she and Sue agree that the only problem with it was the midges.Mark: “I thought they were nanogenes!”Steven: “Gatiss, you’re on the wrong show! Bond and [Doctor] Who now – hurray! Let’s just geek out forever!”

Mark: “I’ve got some pictures I took of the crew moving the fireplace into place for the scene where the deduction is happening. People of course were driving past going, ‘What?’!”Benedict: “‘Someone is fork-lifting a mantelpiece and a fireplace and a mirror ...”Lara: “... and a sofa ...”Benedict: “... into a field’!”

Lara: “And here we have Benedict Cumberbatch as Caesar!”Sue: “Costume loved that sheet, didn’t they – over the moon about trying to get the continuity of your sheet(!)”

Lara asks how they did the Skype camera thing. Ben explains that either he was carrying the camera itself or Dai Hopkins, the Grip, was carrying the camera and Ben was holding onto the end of it. He assumes that Martin did similarly in the field.

Mark: “Now, as with last year with the Van Buren Supernova [in The Great Game], we of course exist in a world where Skype connections never break or you can’t get a signal on

your phone!”Sue: “’Cause we know there was no signal [at the field location] at all!”

Mark says that Steven has had the Skype idea for some time. Steven agrees that he pitched it twice to Mark: once for an episode of Doctor Who which Mark was writing (“Night Terrors”) and then again for Baskerville but Mark didn’t want it either time. Steven finally said to himself, “Okay, I’ll stop trying to get Mark Gatiss to write it; I’ll write it!”

(As Sherlock turns around to speak to a previously-unseen Phil sitting in John’s chair)Lara: “I love that moment.”Mark: “Yeah, it’s a cool one, isn’t it?”Sue: “’Cause I always forget he’s there!”Steven: “It’s horribly cruel, but it’s also ... we do try and move the character on [and] now Sherlock is trying a little bit to be nicer to people. Hedoes in this episode, [but] he assures the man so badly; tells him that he’s a dying porn freak!”Lara: “With halitosis!”

Steven: “And here’s [Sherlock’s] instant deductions [on Plummer from the Palace], some of which are slightly more obscure than others. These are the best ones he never had to explain!”Benedict: “The best ones he never had to learn!”

The aerial shot of Buckingham Palace is stock footage, but the Sherlock production team put the reflection onto the glass of the helicopter.

The interior of Buckingham Palace was filmed at Goldsmith’s College.

Lara says that the scene in the palace is her favourite from the whole episode. She says that the boys seem to have so much fun.Benedict: “Well, it’s interesting, isn’t it – we’ve moved on and although there are patterns of behaviour which are still tiresome to both of us as characters ...”Lara: “You’re enjoying each other!”Benedict: “[We’re] really actually beginning to enjoy it ...”Lara: “Look at you both!”Benedict: “... as is just about to become apparent! I don’t know what [John’s] looking at!”Steven: “He’s thinking it through. ‘How bad is this? ... It’s pretty bad.’ It’s one of the ambitions that Mark and I had – but it’s quite hard to do in the ninety-minute versions – is them having fun.”Mark: “They are so bonded as friends but they have such a good time, and that’s something you rarely see – not just in the thick of a fight or a chase or the action; it’s actually just that they have a good laugh.”Steven: “It’s also, that’s how they would look to other people; they would look like a couple of schoolboys.”

Lara especially loves what she describes as the “enter the Queen” moment.Mark: “Outrageous. I don’t know how I allowed you [Steven] to get away with that. The implications!”Steven (laughing): “Not only wrote it in but made you perform it!”

Sue says that this is the kind of location that Paul McGuigan, the director, loves – all long symmetry and mirrors.Steven: “There was one terrifying moment when someone was threatening to move one of the sofas.”Sue: “Yes, Martin said, ‘Well, wouldn’t I sit on a chair?’”Steven (as Paul): “‘No, no, symmetry, symmetry!’ Look at every shot – in some way or other, something balances something else. That’s why it is always so beautiful to look at.”

Benedict: “The other comic fall was at this point. I over-stepped my sheet’s limit and just fell.”Steven: “Fell like a tree! Because he couldn’t move his arms; he couldn’t move his legs!”Benedict: “I was dedicated to the moment.”Lara: “Do I dare ask what broke your fall?”Benedict: “Er, the carpet!”Steven: “And the thing is, he falls over obviously quite painfully but because it is so funny, everyone just laughs! You hear him go hwnnk, crunching onto the floor and there’s Martin [laughing].”Benedict: “I’ve had quite a year of falling over with very little clothes on, and so – to be honest – it was a very soft landing.”Mark: “Where’s the Gag Reel?”Benedict: “Where is the Gag Reel?”Steven: “We’ve gotta get those two great falls onto this DVD somehow.”

Lara (as we see Irene being driven home during the Palace scene): “That was a stunning car.”Sue: “I don’t think anyone was looking at the car, to be honest with you!”The white dress Irene is wearing in that scene is by Alexander McQueen. Lara says that the designer did a wonderful job of putting together Irene’s wardrobe.Steven: “In those scenes where you have one!”Mark: “She has a wardrobe – I’ve seen it!”Lara: “Whether I choose to wear it is another thing!”

Steven: “It was a tricky part to cast, Irene, because she’s such a terrible person. If you actually look at what she actually does in this show, she’s quite abominable.”Lara: “It’s so much fun!”Steven: “You have to be so caught up in the fun that Irene has that you sort of forget that she’s pretty terrible.”Lara saw the first episode of season 1 on PBS while living in America and thought “it was the most intelligent, witty, mischievous piece of television that I’d seen.”Steven: “That’s why she got the part. I remember she rang me and said ...”Mark: “Praise! That’s how it’s done!”Lara: “But the amount of people that go, ‘Why do you only make three? Why? Why?! Don’t tease us!’”Steven: “To keep them wanting more.”Mark: “Also because there aren’t enough months in the year, as we sit here having not actually finished all three yet, when they’re broadcast in three weeks!”

When Sherlock’s looking at the equerry, Steven threw in the “half Welsh” deduction at the last moment because he suddenly realised that “dog lover” had been repeated.

“How we’ve managed to cover everything, I’m not entirely sure!” says Lara as Irene, wearing a negligee and not much else, opens the doors to her walk-in wardrobe. The shot of her doing that and then going inside the wardrobe was done in an insane last fifteen minutes of a day when about four scenes were being shot at once. Across the studio, Martin was going into the ‘pipe room’ in the lab for Hounds.Benedict: “I had no reason to walk between the two studios, yet I still found one.”Sue: “It was a closed set, wasn’t it?”Benedict: “Yes, closed-ish.”Sue: “And I’ve never seen so many electricians saying they had to go and put that light up. All the chippies loitering around.”Lara: “The best was when a gent walked in and one of the ADs said, ‘I’m really sorry, it’s a closed set,’ and he said, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ and instead of turning round and walking back the way he came, he decided to walk to the completely diagonally opposite exit door!”

The interior of Irene’s house was shot in Newport.Steven: “For scheduling reasons, this was all [filmed] in the dead of night, wasn’t it, with big lights at the windows to make it look as though it was day time, which really does cure you of being tired, somehow.”Benedict (tiredly): “Does it?!”Sherlock dressing as a vicar was a nod to the original Scandal in Bohemia where Holmes dressed as an elderly clergyman and let off a smoke bomb to get Irene to reveal where the photograph was.

Steven: “And d’you know there’s an awful lot of other versions, I regret to inform you, viewers, of that shot [of Irene’s arrival with all her rude bits perfectly blocked from our view by Sherlock] where it didn’t all work out quite so perfectly!”Mark: “This must have been a curious time for you, Lara.”Lara: “It came about three weeks in. In hindsight I think I would have preferred it if it was out of the way quite soon. However, after Take 1 of being in nothing but Louboutin shoes, Martin and Benedict were both so unbelievably supportive – as the whole crew were – that it no longer became a challenge and, in a weird way, it became really empowering.”Mark: “What listeners don’t know is that Lara is naked as she speaks now. She was so empowered by it, she’s carried it through! In fact, we allare!”Lara: “But at one point I was literally straddling your [Ben’s] thigh, naked, with my boobs in your face!”Benedict: “I remember.” (He laughs.) “It’s not an easy thing to do and even though it was a controlled situation it takes an awful lot of guts to do it. It’s brilliant, because it utterly works. He [Sherlock] has no idea what to do.”Lara: “And that’s the main thing. If it’s nudity for nudity’s sake, then you kind of ... yeuch, but this completely serves the story.”Mark: “It’s also a very neat parallel that they’re both trying to work out what to wear to meet each other. Sherlock eventually decides on one tiny detail ...”Benedict: “It’s like every first date, then!”Steven: “The funny thing about this scene is, I had real trouble writing it ... and it wasn’t until I put John into the scene that it worked. If you just have the two of them meeting, with

no-one to witness how preposterous it is, it’s just these two fantastically exotic creatures, and you sort of feel left out.”Mark: “And Martin, of course, who is the king of reaction here, is gonna make that work.”Steven: “Yes; the moment anyone’s done anything funny in Sherlock, you wait to see what Martin thinks of it.”Lara: “I remember in one take standing in front of Martin when you [Ben] say, ‘I don’t think he feels entirely comfortable,’ and I would not move and say the next line until he’d looked at my boobs. I just stood there going, ‘Come on, Martin Freeman, I’m gonna make you do this’!”Benedict: “It’s funny you had to make him do it; that’s so different from his normal behaviour(!)”

Benedict: “I do love the only moment [Sherlock] verbally stumbles – and I sort of did it deliberately – was because [he] sensed a bit of competition in Watson starting to turn on the charm, and in trying to desperately get in there to impress you, I went, [he talks gibberish].”

Benedict frets a little about the transition from him standing up in the sitting room to him squatting down beside the car. He feels that, having had a fairly neutral expression for the rest of the scene in the sitting room, as he squatted down he frowned too much in anticipation of not being able to have his eyes as wide in the fresh air and wind at the roadside.

One of the decisions they had to make during the switch from the sitting room to the exterior scene was which soundtrack to use – and nobody can now remember which one they did use.

Mark: “D’you think we should market a lady version of the Coat?”Benedict: “Definitely!”Mark: “Sherlocketta.”Benedict: “Belstaffina.”Mark: “It was taken in, wasn’t it, so it didn’t swamp you completely.”Lara: “It was adjusted. It was mainly the length of your arms.”Benedict: “Yeah, sorry about that. I have long limbs.”

Benedict: “I really like this bit [the super slo-mo fight sequence with the CIA men] coming up. I have to say the boy in me was thrilled. I’ll be proud to show this one to my grandchildren. It’s just a lot of fun to be asked to do stuff like this.”Lara: “And the special effects with the hydraulics of the mirror moving.”Benedict: “That was not so much fun because there’d be times when it’d get stuck or it would go at an angle.”Lara: “When you’d just nailed your take.”Mark: “Three stuntmen were actually killed.”Benedict: “But [the fight] was all over in about two seconds so it was thrilling to have a look at the monitor afterwards, ’cause the Phantom camera’s an extraordinary thing.”Sue: “... expensive thing!”Benedict: “It’s really expensive.”Lara: “And all of a sudden you see how your jaw makes the worst, most unattractive shapes!”

Benedict: “Yeah. You talk about having a ... let’s say a sexually heightened face; you also apparently have a kind of combat/fight face as well!”Lara: “And they’re not dissimilar!”Benedict: “Wow!” (In a quiet voice) “I hope they’re not [the same].”Lara: “Well, I’ve yet to see your sex face, Ben, so you’re fine!”

Mark (as Sherlock flips Neilson’s pistol): “Here’s a little jiggery-pokery here.”Lara: “Nice!”Benedict: “The gun twist. I am a sucker for picking things up and twiddling them in this. I must calm that down next time! It’s not in the books; it’s not in the scripts – it’s just me having fun with props. It’s lovely just to show him being incredibly at ease with things that are surprising, and I think that’s what’s wonderful about the book.”Steven: “What, you’re talking about the gun twist? I love that. It just looks so cool.”Benedict: “And actually he does need to train it on the person he’s just coshed with the butt of it – there is a practical element to it ...” (He trails off and laughs, clearly not even convincing himself!)

Benedict: “We had a lot of trouble being able to film in this location. Am I allowed to talk about that?”Sue: “... Er ...”Benedict (giggling): “Maybe not! ’Cause they might be listening! But I was very charming to some very uncharming people when there’d been a bit of a ... bit of a ... yeah, just a confusion.”

Lara: “Do you think at the screening last night when that [image of the lock on the phone] first came up, anyone put two and two together with the ‘I am SHERlocked’?”Mark: “I don’t.”Sue: “No.”Steven: “I think that’s why we got the round of applause on ‘I am SHERlocked’ [when it was finally revealed at the end of the episode].”Mark: “Just for a moment I thought, ‘I wonder if anyone’s gonna shout it out’.”Steven: “Not at all, because by the time it came round it was such a moment.”Benedict: “I completely agree: the minute I saw it on the screen [in Irene’s house] I thought, ‘Oh my God, it’s obvious!’”Lara: “I thought that too!”Sue: “But it’s only obvious if you know it.”

Lara: “Look how beautiful the design of [Irene’s] bedroom is.”Steven: “Where’s all her stuff?! That’s what I wanna know.”Lara: “You haven’t seen under the bed.”

Steven: “And here’s an idea resurrected from the pilot. It was in the pilot originally when he went after the taxi driver, and the taxi driver drugs him with a hypodermic.”Mark: “What it doesn’t have, because she takes it out, is the absolutely horrible thing of the syringe hanging from him, which ... it really made me feel funny.”Steven: “When he was trying to reach for it, yeah.”

Steven: “And one of the things that really worried me – and I said to Mark – ‘I haven’t got the

really important line in: “She’s the woman who beat him”’ – and of course in the end she doesn’t, so I wrote this bit in ...”Mark “... literally just for that!”Benedict: “She really did literally beat me that night.”Lara: “But I recall you saying to me, ‘It’s okay, you can go harder on me, Lara, I can take it,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, okay! There we go!’”Mark: “Famous last words – literally, for many people: ‘Is that the best you can do?’!”Benedict: “It was ... yeah. I had welts.”

Mark: “I absolutely love you [Lara] backflipping down that rope. It’s so audacious. It’s like something from a sixties spy film.”Steven: “Oh, she goes very Diana Rigg here, doesn’t she?”Benedict: “I just love the feet; I love the little bit of ankle. It’s very sexy.” (He watches the footage for a moment.) “Oh, actually, more than a little bit of ankle!”Mark: “Yes, that’s an interesting view of the ankle you've got there!”Steven (as Irene flips out of the window): “And there she goes.”Lara: “Being caught by two stuntmen.”

Benedict enthuses about how great it is to work with Paul McGuigan – and with Fabian Wagner the Director of Photography – and their ways of using the camera. Lara agrees that it’s like dancing with the camera.Benedict: “I’m no technical expert but I do love trying to dance with the camera, and he knows I’m a tart for it, so he facilitates that in most fantastic ways. This was a case in point: when the bed comes up [in the field] we got a round of applause [from the crew].”Mark: “It’s also wonderful because it’s an in-camera effect: a hydraulic bed, Danny [Hargreaves, the Special Effects Supervisor] and the boys.”Benedict: “It’s one of the best special effects I’ve ever seen. This is a bed on hydraulics being raised up from a normal position to horizontal with the pillows and the duvet and everything attached.”Sue: “I remember Paul saying that to Danny in that meeting: ‘That’s what I want’; and Danny going, [calmly] ‘Okay’.”Mark: “I remember the first run-through, it was absolutely perfect and it was like, ‘It’ll never be that good again,’ but it was.”

Mark: “Now I love this bit [when Sherlock wakes up in his own bed], principally ...”Benedict: “I know what you’re gonna say ...”Mark: “... because ...”Benedict: “Don’t say it!”Mark: “... theatre fans ...Benedict: “Don’t say it.”Mark: “... this is a little bit of Benedict’s monster ... creature from Frankenstein preserved for all time.”Benedict: “It’s not supposed to be.”Mark: “I know! I don’t mean that in a bad way.”

Benedict: “This is my favourite line: ‘The woman woman’.”

Mark gave Arwel Wyn Jones, the Production Designer, a list of things they wanted in

Sherlock’s bedroom, and the room was changed several times, including the wallpaper. As well as the periodic table on the wall, there’s a little picture of Edgar Allen Poe – as Sherlock Holmes was inspired by one of Poe’s creations, C. Auguste Dupin. Steven says that in this alternate universe, Poe would probably be the writer of the most famous detective. Above the bed are the rules of bartitsu, the Japanese martial art which got Holmes out of the situation at the Reichenbach Falls in The Final Problem. With the periodic table, Mark felt that if Sherlock had any art in his room, it would in fact be science. Sue says there was also Sherlock’s collection of tobacco but we never saw it on screen.Mark: “We’ll see it next time ... if there is a next time.”

Benedict: “Oh, look: ‘Refit for Historical Hospital’ [as a headline in the newspaper which Sherlock is reading]. Hmm!”(He and the writers snigger.)Mark: “Some scaffolding that never happened!”Benedict: “Can we talk about that? Turn off your commentary guide now if you haven’t yet seen episode 3, but if you have ...”Mark: “The climax of episode 3 is on the top of Bart’s Hospital and [the newspaper headline] was a sort of seeding for the idea that there was some building work going on, which actually didn’t happen.”Lara: “And, Steven, what brought about the whole orgasmic text noises?”Mark: “That’s his usual one.”Steven says that during the scenes where Sherlock and Irene don’t meet but were just thinking about each other, communicating by text would be fun but even putting the messages on the screen wasn’t very interesting, so he thought of a funny noise, and a little orgasm noise in the middle of 221B would be so inappropriate.Lara: “So, at ADR, Sue and I ... How many did I give you?”Sue: “Lara’s in New York, I was in London ...”Lara (as Sue): “‘Could you climax for us, Lara?’! ‘Could you make it a bit longer and bit more oozy?’!”Mark: “’Cause the temp one actually sounded like someone in terrible pain!”Lara: “Constipated!”Steven: “[Like] someone had just been gut-punched!”Ben worries that the text alerts didn’t sound very loud at the screening last night; Sue thinks that they couldn’t hear some of them because the audience was already laughing.

“Sherlock” Season 2, Episode 1 – ‘A Scandal in Belgravia’ DVD commentary, part 2 

Return to part 1

Steven: “Sue, what was the recipe for Benedict’s hair eventually?”Benedict: “Little bit of oatmeal; some milk; a tiny bit of ...”Steven: “Wasn’t it something to do with tomato sauce?”Sue: “Ah, it was tomato sauce. [We’re] talking about if your hair goes green.”Benedict: “I quite like swimming and there was a danger that the chlorine might turn [the

hair dye], so I was advised to put ketchup on it so it didn’t go green.”Sue: “And then wrap it up in clingfilm and sleep in it overnight.”Mark: “That’s why we’re standing so far away from him.”

(As Sherlock starts playing “God Save The Queen” on the violin)Benedict: “Oh God. I can see every bow that’s wrong!”Mark: “You mean it’s not you?!”Benedict: “We had a specially muted violin; every now and again you could hear that I was actually playing the right notes to ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas’ or ‘God Save The Queen’. I can play about three or four pieces. If I do anything between now and next year – other than the usual necessary things, which is to improve my memory – I will definitely be playing more violin more frequently.”Mark: “But honestly, in the time that you had, when you scraped away, it was definitely ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas’ or ‘God Save The Queen’. Everyone was properly impressed, ’cause it was quite a feat.”Sue: “I don’t think ‘scraped away’ ...”Benedict: “Oh, I do.”

(As Molly arrives for the Christmas ‘do’ at 221B)Sue: “Can we, in this scene, look at Rupert ...”Benedict: “... looking at her!”Sue: “Also, after Sherlock says about his wife having an affair – the looks from Rupert.”Steven: “A little comedy masterpiece from Rupert.”Mark: “He’s so dishy.”Lara: “He is, isn’t he?”Benedict: “Yeah, he is.”Steven: “Yeaaah. We all fancy you, Rupert.”They all pause to watch Lestrade’s reaction as what Sherlock just said about the PE teacher sinks in, and laugh delightedly at his expression.

Lara: “You have rather a harsh tongue in this scene.”Benedict: “It’s one of those moments which I love because he’s trying to do the right thing in a way, but also he’s just flaring up because he can’t stand the usual niceties of Christmas; and it’s a part of the episode where all empathy for him goes out of the window. He really is on full throttle, so he’s outplayed through his cruelty.”Mark: “I love that: John actually says, ‘Take a day off’.”Benedict: “Being in the company of somebody who sees every detail [and exposes] people’s secrets or thoughts is ... it must be exhausting to live with.”Steven: “It’s an odd second act, isn’t it, ’cause [Sherlock and Irene] don’t actually meet, and I got to this part of the plot without a clear idea of what exactly I was going to do. She has to send him a message and it’s gotta be the phone. What the hell do I do now?”Mark: “Kill her.”

Mark: “I was really struck last night by Loo Brealey as Molly. The audience, they absolutely adore her.”Lara: “Oh, they empathise so much.”Sue: “They want them together, don’t they?”Mark: “It was very touching in the fact that she suffers so much. She’s a sort of identifier.”

Steven: “And she’s the only of our regular characters who doesn’t have any equivalent in the original stories at all. It was just because we cast Loo in this tiny little part in the pilot and she was so good that I immediately came up with another idea.”

Mark: “And our favourite place – Merthyr Tydfil morgue!”Lara: “I’ll never forget this young girl came up to me and went, ‘I was your body double yesterday!’ and I was like, ‘... Great! Thank you!’”Steven (as Lara): “‘Where were you for the nude scene?’!”

(During the scene in the corridor outside the morgue)Sue: “It’s beautifully shot, I think – well, it’s beautifully acted as well.”Mark: “Thank you. It’s a lovely scene, this one.”Lara: “Yeah. The whole profile shot of the two of you ...”Mark: “It’s on all the stamps.”Sue: “Shot in Bristol ’cause you still can’t smoke inside in Wales.”Mark: “We had to go back to England to have a cigarette.”Benedict (as Sherlock exhales his first lungful of smoke): “Oh, look at the enjoyment. That was enjoyable for the first take.”Sue: “Yeah, and by take twenty ...”Benedict: “I had nicotine poisoning and I didn’t sleep properly that night and I had a huge scene to do the next morning. Kids, don’t do it. It screws you up, smoking – it’s not fun.”

Ben frets about the emphasis he gave on the line, “This is low tar.”Mark: “We’ll fix it.”Steven: “Fix it live on the commentary!”Benedict: “Let’s talk over it!”

Steven remembers watching the rushes for Scandal and thinking, ‘This is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.’ Paul is very good at ensuring that the most important person in the scene is the most prominent. Steven remembers the first deduction scene in A Study in Pink when Sherlock is defining himself: the camera moves in on him while the equivalent shot of John is pulling out and he’s getting smaller. He says that it’s excellent storytelling.

(As Sherlock types the stuck blog counter number into Irene’s phone)Mark: “1895 – that got a good laugh! Some of them got that.”Steven: “Does everyone get that? 1895 – for those of you that don’t know – is supposedly the year when Sherlock Holmes was at the peak of his game in the original stories, and there’s a wee poem about it always being 1895 – so now he’s got a blog that is always 1895!”Mark: “It was my favourite year.”Steven: “Did you like it? Did you solve lots of crimes that year?”Benedict: “Terrible winter.”

Sue: “There’s the problem of trying to shoot winter in the middle of summer at night in London!”Benedict: “Yeah, that rather fetching Christmas jumper that Martin’s in was a bit of a ... it was a thing to bear in June.”

Sue: “But also you have about two hours of night time in London before you have to leave the streets because it’s residential.”Mark: “And a lot of greenery.”Steven: “Greenery! Don’t talk to me about greenery!”Lara: “And we had the gift of riots!”

(As John, having just ranted about Mycroft having a power complex, is driven to Battersea Power Station)Mark: “Power complex! Hard cut always works!”Benedict (as we see the beautiful shot of the car pulling up inside the power station): “If Paul McGuigan doesn’t get an advertising campaign for Jaguar, I’ll stop doing the voiceovers for them.”Sue: “A great location.”Mark: “It’s a great scene, this [i.e. the conversation between John and Irene]. Got a round of applause yesterday.”Benedict: “Rightly so. It’s an extraordinarily beautifully played and stunningly written scene. You get everything of John’s love – man love, not any other kind of love ...”Mark: “‘Muv’. Let’s call it ‘muv’!”Benedict: “It says everything about their relationship. It says what the bond is and the care is, and it’s everything that they don’t say to each other but he’s allowed to say, thinking that he’s not there. That’s where – as a romance – it’s an incredibly British affair. There’s an awful lot of beautifully understated subtlety and nuance to it.”Lara: “It was wonderful as well ’cause it was also the moment where I think we [Irene and John] bond as two characters.”Benedict: “It’s stunningly shot. Look at the way it’s lit. It’s just beautiful.”Mark: “Also a real privilege to film in Battersea Power Station. This room is in Monty Python’s Meaning of Life.”Sue: “And The King’s Speech.”Benedict: “Was it in Brazil as well?”Mark: “I think it might be, yeah.”

It’s a protected building and they had to take up the boards covering the parquet floor and put them back afterwards. They also had to wear hard hats in certain areas.Steven: “I’m cherishing a picture of you in that hat!”Benedict: “It was my screensaver for a while. I loved it.”Lara remembers her hair designer’s face when they were trying to put a hard hat over her creation!

Lara: “[Martin] played this scene with every colour and every emotion. He was just wonderful. He’s a genius as an actor, the way he just flips things around...”Mark: “He’s a gactor! [he pronounces it as ‘jaktor’] I’m gonna keep playing this game! ‘Gactor’ and ‘muv’!”Lara: “There’s gonna be a Book of Gatiss, isn’t there?!”Benedict: “Godtiss.”Steven: “Fairly easy day for you, there, Benedict, I have to say. You get the punchline.”Lara: “I think that’s the day where you started showing me a text of an orang-utan somewhere in the news in The Independent or The Guardianand thought it looked like Martin Freeman! No – it wasn’t an animal at all – it was a tribe ...”

Steven: “Where’s this going?!”Lara: “Do you not remember?”Benedict: “I can’t remember!”Lara: “You said it looked like Martin in his Hobbit outfit! I’m sure it was a picture of a dancing tribe.”

(As Sherlock returns to 221B)Mark: “This is one of my favourite bits.”Sue: “Oh yes, the look on [Sherlock’s] face.”Steven: “It’s the big shot at the end, isn’t it, when he steps out of frame to bring hell on someone.”Mark: “You absolutely believe he’s almost capable of anything, that’s what’s brilliant about it.”Steven: “What’s useful within the story is that you’ve just seen him really be vulnerable for a couple of scenes; you’re really slightly worried he’s not on form, that he might not be the great Sherlock Holmes – but at this bit you think, ‘Oh dear God’.”

Benedict: “When we were filming the bit before I detect that someone’s messed with my Mrs Hudson, when I’m on the [film] dolly [outside 221B] I was being driven around on Upper Gower Street and it was very funny because, now we’re so popular and we’ve got a following, there was a huge street theatre crowd of about a hundred people watching, going, ‘What the hell is going on?! What is that?!’ It was quite nice doing it, them not knowing what the hell was going on!”Sue: “I think there was also a lot of crew in the background as well, ’cause none of us believed the shot was gonna work!”

Lara: “D’you know how many emails I’ve had about [Sherlock’s] Coat? ‘Where can we get the Coat?’!”Sue: “I don’t know why they don’t make more Coats.”

(As Sherlock twiddles the can after spraying Neilson in the face)Benedict: “Another twiddle. I’ve got to stop twiddling.”

As Sherlock kneels in front of Mrs Hudson and then turns to fix a really menacing stare on Neilson, Benedict comments, “Not finished with himyet!”

(Seeing the handwritten note attached to the door of 221B as John comes home)Mark: “Interestingly, Sherlock’s handwriting – ’cause he’s in a hurry – has deteriorated into ...”Steven: “... into somebody else’s!”Mark: “... a three year old child!”Benedict: “Thank you very much. That is my handwriting.”Steven: “[Sherlock] deleted it from his brain, good handwriting, to make space for something else.”Mark: “Todd Boyce [Neilson] has been playing Americans in Britain forever and he wears extremely well, I must say. I saw him in Miss Marplerecently and thought, ‘You must have something in the attic’.”Benedict: “I did one of my first ever jobs with him – a version of Hills Like White

Elephants and we haven’t seen each other since.”

Lara (at the sight of Sherlock and Lestrade outside Speedy’s): “Look at those two handsome men!”Mark: “These are the kind of shows we want to watch, aren’t they?!”

Benedict: “Wiping my feet and then going into the fridge is something I do at home; it’s something Una’s son does at home.”Steven: “That’s my favourite piece of business in this, is you going into the fridge. Was that your idea?”Benedict: “Yeah.”Steven: “I think that’s beautiful. It absolutely explains who they are to each other, the fact that he just goes and raids her fridge. He doesn’t even think about it: ‘What’s in here? There we go’.”Mark: “It is a bit like coming home as a student, dropping a bag of washing and going, ‘What’s in the fridge, Mum?’”Benedict: “It’s an abusive but very loving relationship.”Lara and Benedict (simultaneously quoting Sherlock): “England would fall.”Steven: “That got a little round [of applause] last night, didn’t it?”Benedict: “It’s not just us that love Una.”

(As the boys go back upstairs)Sue: “That’s a huge glass of wine [John’s] having there, isn’t it?”Benedict: “I think that’s a whisky, isn’t it? You wouldn’t put wine in a glass like that.”Steven: “If you watch this show carefully, there is a subtext about John drinking. John’s just hammered by every midnight!”Benedict: “Come on – it’s New Year’s Eve!”Mark: “Even he forgets the names of his girlfriends, and that’s why!”Benedict: “Has that glass changed shape, or is that just me?”Steven: “I think it’s just you. I don’t think he’s capable of doing that. Many and great are his powers; however ...”Benedict (as Sherlock twiddles his bow before playing the violin): “Another twiddle. I’ve got to stop twiddling!”Mark: “We had a big discussion about Christmas cards and, of course, Sherlock Holmes in the original stories would never have had any time for Christmas at all, so obviously they all come from Doctor Watson’s side; and we couldn’t work out a way of showing that essentially there might be one card for Sherlock from his mum.”

(As we see Irene getting Sherlock’s text message)Benedict: “That’s a wonderful wipe. But it’s a beautiful coat.”Lara: “I remember shooting that just outside St Paul’s, waiting for a bus so we could get the reflection in the glass. The entire shot was about the bus, so I would stand at the end of the road and scream, ‘Bus!’ at the top of my lungs to our First AD so that we could then roll.”

(In the lab at Bart’s)Benedict: “Look how pretty Loo looks. She’s so sparkly and looking so pretty and he’s being such an arse. But it’s one of my favourite lines: ‘What, you think because she’s my girlfriend I’m X-raying her phone?’!”

Mark: “It’s also a very revealing line when she says, ‘We all do silly things,’ and he says, ‘Yes, they do, don’t they?’ like an alien.”

(As Sherlock gets home and starts sniffing on the landing)Steven: “And here’s his woman-sensing nose!”Sue: “This was the funniest thing in an edit, d’you remember – at one point there wasn’t a picture of [Irene] in the bed and Steven said to Paul, ‘There has to be a picture of her in the bed, otherwise it could be anything – it could be a shaved ape’.”Steven: “And they kept arguing all day and I said, ‘No, we have to actually see what they see. It could be anything – a shaved chimp,’ so I got a slightly sulky email, I thought, from Paul McGuigan saying, ‘Well, look, this is what you asked for; I’m giving it to you,’ and it was a shaved ape! They must have spent about three hours doing this – it was beautifully edited in!”Sue: “And I couldn’t open it, and then you replied to Paul going, ‘Well, I think it’s fine, but Sue, d’you think Lara’ll be okay with that pose?’ And to this day, every time we get to that, I just have this fear that it’ll turn up!”Benedict: “There’s gonna be a lot of slash fiction now!”

(During the scene in the sitting room)Steven: “I love all this competing bit. This is where we really see them flirt, I suppose.”Lara: “Their idea of flirting.”Mark: “It’s intellectual flirting, ’cause he thinks he’s just trumped her there and she’s trumped him.”Steven: “That would be sex for them.”Lara: “That’s orgasmic!”

Mark: “‘Hamish’ is from the Rathbone films, isn’t it?”Steven: “No. Doyle when he wrote these stories was appalling on continuity. Continuity was so bad, he once forgot Doctor Watson’s name and had his wife call him James. He’s called James for a whole story!”Benedict: “Maybe she just forgot the name!”Steven: “Someone came up with this brilliant theory that the middle name was Hamish – ’cause it’s John H. Watson in the stories – and Hamish is the Scottish version of James, so she called him by his middle name.”Benedict: “I like to think of that rather than him being crap with continuity.”Sue: “But didn’t he also call Mrs Hudson ‘Mrs Turner’ once?”Benedict: “That’s slightly harder to Scottish-ify, isn’t it?”Steven: “In one story she turns into Mrs Turner. We’ve referred to it as Mrs Turner next door in A Study in Pink.”Mark: “The one thing we haven’t addressed is that Professor Moriarty and his brother have the same Christian name!”Steven: “But we are thinking of it ... maybe! We are on the case! We sorted out the wound in the first story – Watson’s war wound’s in his shoulder, then it migrates to his leg mysteriously, so we sorted that out.”Mark: “What’s great is, the lack of Doyle’s continuity is a great field for in-jokes.”

(As Sherlock goes into his deductions after seeing the email on Irene’s phone)Lara: “I have to praise you non-stop for this scene, Benedict, ’cause – gosh – that dialogue.”

Benedict: “This was the one that was the night after the nicotine poisoning. The first time we did this, it was incredibly hard. I was very hot as well and I found it so hard and it was a bit of a disaster. We came back to it the next morning and I nailed it the first time. It’s a beautiful thing but it took an awful lot of work.”

(As Irene does her “I would have you right here on this desk” line)Benedict: “I love that moment but I should have spoken the minute I opened my mouth, ’cause – if the audience reaction last night is anything to go by – they laughed the minute I ... ’cause I think they expected me to have a sort of goldfish moment. I should have just spoken, but thatis him being tongue-tied.”Steven: “I think he just shuts down for a moment. ‘I’m trying to process this; I have no response; oh my God. Where’s all the blood gone from my brain?’”

Steven: “I want to talk about Mycroft’s extraordinary house with its life-size chess pieces! Oh dear God what does he do all alone of an evening?!”Mark: “I think perhaps that’s the Holmes ancestral home. Maybe that’s where we were brought up.”Sue: “Does he live on his own?”Steven: “Ah, well, these things have all got to be thought about.”Mark: “I think certainly that Christmas night Mycroft was alone.”Sue: “Probably has a housekeeper.”Mark: “He has Mrs Turner!”

(When Sherlock and Irene are alone at 221B)Steven: “You could hear, last night, I thought, the beating hearts of all the fans saying, ‘Oh my God, they’re not actually going to?! ’Cause it looks like it’s going to happen’.”Lara: “This was our first scene we shot together, wasn’t it? This was our first day together.”Steven: “And I draw your attention to Irene’s evil hair. She’s currently got her nice hair, ’cause she’s being nice but when she goes – after this scene – to see them on the plane, she’s reached for that concealed switch on the nape of her neck that just turns her hair evil again!”Lara: “I remember Paul noting that every male crew member all of a sudden was in the room to see what you and I were going to be up to!”

Lara: “This was the first time I was exposed to your fans.”Steven: “And the very last shot you did.”Sue: “There was quite a lot of Twitter activity about this.”Steven: “That you were wearing the dressing gown.”Mark: “I always think it’s very interesting when people see just fragments and they’re actually trying to work out an entire story from one shot at a window.”Sue: “And which dressing gown it was...”

Sue: “We were at some point thinking of shooting this [scene on the plane] during the day and tenting the Jumbo jet, and then somebody mentioned what if it was windy.”Steven: “Then someone said, ‘What about night?’!”Benedict: “[Sherlock arriving at the plane] was the last shot of the whole night shoot.”Mark: “Ah, yes, it was the other way around, wasn’t it, as dawn came up as opposed to dusk.”

Steven: “I remember the shooting of the interior. I had just finished the script for the Doctor Who Christmas special and I was so tired, I just came along and sat in a chair [on the plane] and slept.”Lara: “In Business Class!”Mark: “The whole shoot – I never really encountered anything like it, because we were in Business Class and obviously one side entirely full of extras who then proceeded to go to sleep. Some of them just snored ...”Benedict: “But the worst was when they moved in the middle of their sleep and suddenly the dead were coming alive.”Steven: “One guy – in the middle of what I thought was a particularly good take – just went ... [he does a snorting snore while everybody else yawns noisily]!”Mark: “But on the other side of the curtain, the rest of the crew were all in Business Class curled up fast asleep.”Benedict: “Dai – the very very butch huge rugby-playing Grip – was fast asleep and, according to everyone else who was there, was heard to say, ‘No, Jamie, Jamie, no, no’! Jamie’s our Focus Puller ... and, God, does he deserve a mention. What a difficult job to do ...”Sue: “... at four o’clock in the morning!”Benedict: “Any any clock o’morning.”Sue: “But, Steven, I hadn’t seen you for a few days; you’d been away. They made us a nice little twosome seat, didn’t they, in there?”Lara: “Aww!”Sue: “Apart from the fact that you were asleep ...”Mark: “... within seconds!”Steven: “I was very tired!”

Mark: “I thought, on first reading this, the elaborate lengths that Mycroft goes to make a point.”Steven: “Originally I suggested the idea of putting the lights on to reveal them. Originally Mycroft was going to be sitting there and he puts hislight on.”Mark: “And I said, ‘That actually means he’s been sitting there for hours with their stinking bodies’!”Steven (as Mycroft): “‘Is he here yet? I might go out and come back in again’!”

Sue: “We were trying to work out how to feed them all and I just couldn’t see what was wrong with actually just giving everybody plane food and keeping them in their seats, but that didn’t go down well.”Mark: “They all woke up and thought they were in Marbella.”Sue: “I remember Cesco [Francesco Reidy, the First Assistant Director] saying, ‘Okay, everybody: make sure the person next to you is awake at the beginning of the take. It’s an eight minute long take. Make sure they’re not snoring before we start’!”

(As Irene arrives on the plane)Steven: “And here she is. She’s operated the concealed switch and her hair has shot back to evil mode.”Lara: “Look at that outfit. It looks kind of leather on camera.”Sue: “Who’s that made by?”Lara: “She’s a designer in Knightsbridge. I can’t even remember the name. The fabric was

kind of starchy but it wasn’t leather. It was really interesting.”

(At Mycroft’s house)Mark: “Now we find Sherlock absolutely at the bottom, I think. He’s totally outplayed. I wonder at what point the penny drops? I’m interested in this part, because he’s obviously already taken her pulse and he’s done these things...”Lara: “It’s during the Moriarty section, isn’t it?”Mark: “That, I think, gives him extra incentive, that he’s not going to be beaten.”Steven: “As she’s explaining how impenetrable her phone is, he is thinking, ‘Is it? Come on... I can get that, I can do that...’”Lara: “Is that really what you were thinking, Benedict?”Benedict: “Mmm. And I’m wondering if I can stay awake for another two minutes ...”

They discuss the fact that they reblocked the scene three times, trying it out with the actors in different locations, at one point with Mycroft in front of the fireplace, before they were happy with it.Benedict: “The most important thing was the idea that [Sherlock] is separate because of what he has to go through. He’s the disgraced younger brother. He’s the beaten player in the game.”Lara: “And victory is so nearly mine!”Steven: “It’s a horrible thing he does to you, though. Because he wins by demonstrating that she’s in love with him. Having said that, she was perfectly prepared to humiliate him, take the money, and presumably pick him up in her yacht later.”

Mark: “There’s a little thing there, sadly not captured, when I make the note about James Moriarty: I wrote it on my cuff, which is something Sherlock does in the original stories and I thought, ‘Maybe that’s a family thing’. I brought my own propelling pencil!”Steven: “Wasn’t it because cuffs used to be detachable? Mycroft is so rich, he just disposes of the cuffs!”Mark: “I never wear the same shirts twice. I give them to my chess pieces ... or maybe some of the dead people I’ve got in my freezer!”

(As Sherlock takes hold of Irene’s wrist)Steven: “That’s not in the script. Was that you, Benedict?”Benedict: “It was my idea, as was the lean-in, because I like the idea of him being in shadow because it’s such a dark thing he’s playing with, deconstructing love into pure chemistry.”Steven: “Hopefully the idea is you should start this scene hating her and end hating him.”

Steven: “We toyed for a long while with whether the letters should come up as he [types them into Irene’s phone]. I’m glad we didn’t.”Mark: “A man in front of me last night just went [softly], ‘Ohhh,’ at that part.”Sue says that the close-up of the phone was the last shot of the entire shoot.Mark: “And that was done elsewhere.”

(As Sherlock stands near the door)Steven: “Every time we cut back to Irene, Sherlock swaps what hand’s in what pocket.”Benedict: “Actually, not at all. My left hand’s out of the pocket; the right hand goes in the pocket, I think you’ll find.”

(Outside Speedy’s in the pouring rain)Mark: “Now this was ...”Sue and Mark (simultaneously): “... riot day!”Mark: “This bit was all right, and then I think we’d done one take of the scene inside. It was the summer riots and the police had already said we’d have to stop before it got dark. We were all prepared for that and there’d been some incident the night before where some scaffolding had been stolen; and then we were doing this and suddenly the rain machine stopped and I think the First [AD] came in and just said, ‘Go,’ and the police just said, ‘Go,’ and we fled; we absolutely fled. It was the weirdest atmosphere.”

Mark: “We talked about this a lot in the early stages, that of course John isn’t present for the whole of the [previous] act, but it’s no kind of problem – not just because it’s so much about Sherlock and Irene – but actually because of this [scene], I think; that in the end he’s the one who’s going to come and have to do it. I think it’s a measure of confidence that you’re not thinking, ‘Oh God, why isn’t this major character in it?’ It’s actually because the story is doing exactly what it needs to do.”Steven: “Also – and I’m just nicking this from Billy Wilder[’s film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes] – but you take John out of the equation and Sherlock is instantly more vulnerable. You’re more fearful for him when he hasn’t got his wing man.”Lara: “I feel like I’m in a room full of story-telling geniuses, listening to you two talk.”

Mark: “I want to see the flashback to Sherlock as a pirate!”Steven: “There’s a little bit from Mark there where [Mycroft] says, ‘He used to be a pirate,’ and suddenly he goes into a little fugue state for a moment, which I think is lovely.”Mark: “Ah, there’s a lot of history there which we can never explore. We’ll open little windows onto it.”

Steven: “And [Martin’s] so clever [in] each stage of that indecision – when’s he gonna do it?”Lara: “He layers it beautifully.”Sue: “I can see why [Sherlock] wants the phone, though – it’s an expensive phone!”Mark: “It was gonna be leopard-skin or something, wasn’t it, just to make it very identifiable. It’s actually got lovely sort of diamonds studded into it; but because of the pink phone last year we didn’t want it to be seen as similar to that.”

Mark: “Now here’s a question: we refer to it constantly as a ‘camera phone’. Did we do that just so people knew that’s what it was? You would actually say, ‘Oh, my phone’.”Steven: “And I also wanted a keyboard that would have letters and numbers on it, though in actual fact the expression ‘camera phone’ is a bit out of date, isn’t it; people don’t really say ‘camera phone’ any more. But what can you do?! We’ve screwed up history enough as it is, I think!”

Mark: “I just love this. Every time I’ve watched this – several hundred times – it always makes me weep. You’re so convinced that was the last text she sent – the day she died, she thought of him. And I remember reading ... ’cause we’d of course talked about it a lot, but I thought, ‘Oh, she’s dead; he’s killed her,’ and then the surprise ...”Sue (to Steven): “Yeah, ’cause you didn’t tell us when you wrote it, did you?”Steven: “I kept that secret. I knew I was gonna save her [but] I told Mark and Sue that I was

probably gonna kill her off and the big dilemma [would be] does John tell him or not? So I wanted to see how they reacted when I said at the last minute, ‘No, he doesn’t. Of course he saves her!’”Sue: “I think you do sell the dummy that this is the end of the show when it goes to black.”Mark: “I had a panic yesterday that people were gonna start applauding in the black-out.”Steven: “And there he is. Lawrence.”Mark: “Lawrence of Cumberbatch.”

Lara: “Oh – and another twiddle.”Benedict: “That’s the last one.”Mark: “And people always wonder, ‘Is it The Woman, or The Woman?’ It’s both!”Steven: “It’s lovely when the music comes in and you hear one last bit of Lara’s Theme and finally it resolves. You never hear it end before.”Mark: “But also, rather beautifully, he closes the drawer ...”Benedict: “... and he closes the episode.”Steven: “But that’s it over. He doesn’t think about it again – oh, he does think about it sometimes – but, you know, back to work, back to being Sherlock Holmes.”Mark: “Back to the adventures.”

Mark: “Well, thank you very much for listening. Well done for your patience. I imagine you’ve listened to this in several chunks.”Lara: “We’ll reward anyone who got the whole way through in one take!”Steven: “And we will see you for The Hounds of Baskerville.”

Sue: “That’s an attractive end card, isn’t it?!”Steven: “I think we should get some more names on that!”

Transcriber’s note: Thanks to  verityburns, whose check-through and additions have made this even more accurate.

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Source: http://arianedevere.livejournal.com/36505.html