Sherlock Holmes was a Victorian genius. In the 21st Century, all you need is an iPhone.

Warning: Contains spoilers. Mostly inflicted by the BBC when they spoiled this well-loved classic.

Don’t you just hate it when people slag something off before they’ve even seen it? I was guilty of that on Friday, when Steven Moffat popped into the Newsnight studio to talk about his reworking of Sherlock Holmes – chirpily trailed by Gavin Esler as “a bit modern, a bit gay”. Hmm. So I thought I’d better actually watch the thing last night. And now, after 90 minutes of my life I’ll never get back, I can honestly say: I hated it.

This was Sherlock Holmes for Doctor Who fans, as it would have been done had Conan Doyle lived in our time. Who wants smog and gaslight and rickets when you can have blogs and texting and nicotine patches? (Seriously – you’re replacing cocaine with nicotine patches?)

Fortunately for the BBC, everyone else loved it – judging by the unreserved, gushing praise on Twitter. And not just from the kids who don’t know any better – from those familiar with the original text and earlier adaptations too: “Better than Jeremy Brett!” “More faithful to Conan Doyle than Basil Rathbone!” Really? I despair. But I know I’m in a minority of one on this one. OK, maybe a few more than one. My friend Anna knows a thing or two about Holmes, having written TimeOut’s “CSI: London” trail, which takes readers on a tour of his haunts. Her response to my Facebook post hit the nail on the head for me:

The genius of the original Sherlock Holmes was that he used techniques that nobody else could imagine. Yesterday he used techniques that Derren Brown, police psychologists, forensic scientists and anyone vaguely web-savvy could have used. It makes no sense why the police would employ him.
ANNA FAHERTY

The whole confusing mess of a plot makes no sense when we have forensics. A Study in Pink was very loosely adapted from A Study in Scarlet. It had some similarities and a lot of deviations from the original. So why keep in the scene where Holmes bashes a corpse with a stick to see if it bruises? In a pre-forensic Victorian era, that would have been a useful insight. But the research is in on that one now… A good one to keep was Watson returning from war in Afghanistan, an obvious modern parallel – even if the Radio Times review listed it as one of the potential objectionable modernisms.

Some viewers will recoil from the very idea of BBC1 updating Conan Doyle’s characters to modern London, with texting (lots of texting) and police tape and GPS and a Dr Watson who fought in Afghanistan.
RADIO TIMES REVIEW, 25 July 2010

There is a lot of texting. It’s even overlaid on the screen – a televisual device I’d quite like, if only it wasn’t Holmes doing it. It’s not quite “Simples, Watson, LOL SH x” – but it’s not far off.

I get the appeal of an explainable superpower – high-powered perception. It’s what makes Cracker such fun. And it is explained very well, through a combination of CSI style visuals and yet more overlaid text to illustrate Holmes’s thought processes. But in 2010, by Victorian standards, everyone is a superhero. Who needs Holmes’s high-powered perception and encyclopaedic knowledge when you have the Internet?

Our Thoroughly Modern Holmes does also use the Internet. He has his own website, and Watson’s journal, of course, becomes a blog. He also relies on a smart phone. But these tools are bluntly used, and only remind us of his redundancy. Deducing that the victim arrived from Cardiff based on a damp coat and a weather app seems a leap. And if his perception is so high-powered, why did most people on Twitter guess that the taxi driver did it before he did?

I can’t see Sherlock Holmes as a timeless character. The stories require their Victorian setting to make sense. This modern reworking seems as nonsensical as Dickens characters brandishing their iPhones in a Yates’s Wine Lodge. Why not have Oliver Twist escape from Yarl’s Wood and fall in with a gang of hoodies? Make Mr Micawber a victim of the credit crunch, having been sold a sub-prime mortgage? Have Miss Havisham delete her Facebook account for good after Internet dating goes awry? Or – as suggested by @cjjmccray – why not have a picture uploaded to Flickr slowly aging while the subject, @DorianGray doesn’t age at all? How very modern that would be.

An enjoyable romp, maybe. But this mashup of Cracker and Doctor Who for the Lily Allen generation left me as cold as the corpse Holmes was beating up. I’ll stick with Jeremy Brett, thank you.

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