Tag Archives: 2015

Happy New Year – From TwentyTeens to Twenties, a Decade of Change (part II)

This is part two of my last decade’s reflections on self and society, mainly the former, but ‘who I am’ resides in a gender constructed society too, and that has been my journey working out how to be me, whoever that is, in a world that gives me just two boxes, neither of which fit. I’ve written nearly half-a-million words in my diary the last ten years, it’s been a rough but rewarding ride and I’m re-reading them all, selecting what stands out, to see how I feel now. Part One can be read here. This was meant to be the next five years but instead, it’s just 2015, the year of shock Tory election win, the year before Brexit, the year before my op. Terrorism, gender dysphoria, mental health, PIP, CBT, squirrels, dreams, death (not my own), language, poetry, orchids and Doctor Who.

Diary entries – 2015

Katy Jon Went, playing Doctor Who, 2015New Year is marred by the Charlie Hebdo magazine offices massacre. Whatever one’s beliefs about their satirical output, freedom of speech is vital. #JeSuisCharlie rises in response and millions gather in Paris and across France in mourning and protest. Even in Norwich, French nationals and locals numbering some 200 gathered at a vigil

Had a fabulous time, apart from the early start, scriptwriting from scratch under pressure and filming with BBC Voices in the TARDIS and green screen, playing Doctor Who, with Esther as my assistant, encountering a future version of Earth without stigma or discrimination for Time to Change. I took Jelly babies on set as a homage to Tom Baker. My regeneration was more of a transformation!

At One Billion Rising event, chatted to a friend who said “I don’t think I have ever covered so many topics of conversation in the space of about 10 mins in my life before” – try being inside my head!

Great fun being an atypical speaker at a school sixth form during LGBT History Month and doing an alphabet soup sex and gender ed talk. Perhaps my own current label bio might read along these lines: Greysexual, Pomomental, Metasexual, Sapiosexual, Emosexual (I get aroused when people cry!), Agnostigender, Polysensual, Gynephile, Androappreciative, Biflirty! I love how young MOGAI folk are moving beyond LGBT to hundreds of ever-evolving identity reflections. 

Our regular Gender and Sexuality (GAS) group met to discuss Feminist no-platforming, SWERFS, TERFS & biological sex essentialism – a topic that was only going to get more toxic in coming months. So-called ‘TERF’ wars kicking off online – a turf war between sex and gender and their intersection.

We launched non-binary east anglia online as a support and information group. Did not anticipate its growth and how many younger trans people are more inclined to non-binary identities and semi-transitions. I’m certainly drawn to the human (h)interland.

Sleep all over the place and having bonkers dreams that I can’t decipher the origins of. For instance, this one, an odd dream, seemingly in Colchester in a conference centre needing to find a loo, there was a queue and then a girl in front says come in with me and it’s a double loo with heated seats so we co-share. Ending up, in the dream, going back in to get a coat I’d left there, after it was shut, and girl accompanies me, opens up, cries, I get aroused, console, then out of nowhere her kid appears and they both notice my arousal which I apologetically say that never happens on HRT (except when girls cry – now what’s the Greek for tears?) next her estranged boyfriend/child’s father shows up to get kid. I explain to her my current asexuality and sort of fudge description of my existing relationship. Meantime I start tidying stuff, that wasn’t there – tools, clothes, boxes and emerge from loo with not just my left behind coat but boxes of tidied stuff. Come out to my partner in the car park and try to explain I only went in for my coat and why it’s several hours later and I’ve loads more stuff with me! I tell Esther the dream and she says I should have gone for it with her, I said not with the kid and the father in the toilet too! My mind would have a field day with Freud and Jung.

Next day, on the loo, I come up with a dystopian novel plot set in futuristic post-austerity Greece with an opening chapter set at a modern bisexual Socratic dinner party akin to Plato’s Symposium and the ascending ladder of sex, love and beauty. I’ve always been drawn to the aesthetic and sapiosexual side of love rather than the act of sex which I’ve mostly found painful and an anticlimax even with the best partners, contexts and deepest longing and loving. I’m increasingly comfortable with being asexual and suspect it will continue post-op, if I go through with it.

Spend the week draining most of emo-psych energy worrying about forthcoming car MOT and how I’ll afford it, expending huge effort not to spend, to save enough for any car bills. In the end, my reliable 8yo Zafira passes with no costs – the two broken tail-lights held together with sellotape passed. The whole process and worry exhausted me, so I spent the afternoon and early evening sleeping to recover! People without mood disorders don’t realise the energy required sometimes just to hold it together – like my sellotaped lights, exercise self-restraint and save for bills like this. And by people I mean my psychiatrist!

Next, it was my turn for an MOT, with my lovely GP surgery which feels more like an audience for my bipolar comedy routines. Apparently, I do entertain them, brighten up their day, especially after other patients show up late, or complain a lot. So lovely phlebo-nurse says I’ve shrunk, put on weight, and my bad cholesterol has been very naughty, but my daily drinking habits are fine – something with which my psychiatrist would strongly disagree, and did! 20 units of rioja and 10 of whisky on bad sleep weeks. So I am now 12 stone 1, but 11 stone 11 with my boots off, less once I’d stripped more layers off, anyway we compromised and agreed to put 11 stone 7 in the notes, after all, breasts must weigh something!

Amnesty Campaign Against Torture UEAGetting busy on the talks front speaking at UEA for Amnesty on human rights and torture and at Aviva on gender and mental health this week. Who would have thought that this scared of public speaking kid would ever be talking or teaching in front of others.

Bipolar moods mean that when I’m up I’m on top of the world and also in a world of my own where little affects me. When I’m down, I’m like a flat balloon where every comment punctures and deflates me further, I feel everything, with the world that I’m usually on top of, instead, weighing me down, sitting on my shoulders, like a weary muscle-worn Atlas.

Had tea with my ex-vicar of 5 years ago, and we discussed how I felt about trans op possibility (he was also a psych nurse). He ended up saying I should write a book.

Financial stress, internal politics at a work project making me feel like no longer being involved – wrote an angry email but did not send. I’m anxious about my op too and appropriately taking cats in for neutering, stressful in itself. Not feeling like waking up tomorrow. Outside vicious 50mph winds ripped the felt off the shed roof. 

Did 4 hours DIY and clearing today. It has taken me 5 years to get round to rebuilding some shelves, only this time with estrogen I swear they took twice as long, I screwed in all the wrong places, assembled them upside down, and ended up one leg short!

Katy Jon Went, 2015To op or not to op? Part of me wants to just get it out the way, I’m 48 and still have persistent dysphoria, so not a passing fad, Over 40 years of feeling this way, nearly 10 years of living as Katy but avoiding the more drastic physical options. I’m quite happy some of the time as genderqueer non-binary and am quite realistic that an operation won’t make me fully female, yet society makes being in between even harder than being traditionally binary transgender, so it feels like having to opt for one or the other and meantime juggling the endocrinology-bipolar-energy issues.

It’s 70 years today since the liberation of Bergen Belsen, another example of man’s inhumanity to man and what happens when you scapegoat an entire – or rather several – people groups, dehumanise, persecute, incarcerate and attempt to wipe them out. It is 33 years since I visited Belsen as a 15-year-old, the same age as Anne Frank who died there just months before its liberation. It left indelible memories on me and a life-long belief in human rights for all people.

Reflecting that it’s 1095 days since my last suicide attempt, feels like Suicides Anonymous Recognising that one is only a dashed moment away from mental health relapse gives my wellbeing a dose of respect and regular reality check. 

In May, Esther finds a new place to live and moves out. Initially, a shock and many including my mum think that we’ve broken up. Instead, it actually feels fine and liberating to have my space back and to still be in a relationship yet each of us able to express ourselves and our environment the way we like.

Election day and apparently, you can vote in your pyjamas, whilst drunk, or high – mental incapacity of any kind does not lose you your right to vote, being in prison does. 

As usual, I stay up all night to follow the results. 

Tory majority of 10. How? All three other male leaders resign. Women leaders of minority parties all stay – after all they improved their vote share. LibDems lost 15% and Scottish Labour was reduced to a single seat, losing 40 of its 41 seats to the SNP, Labour gained in London but not enough to balance losses elsewhere. I suspect we will have a Tory government for some time to come and the LibDems will be tarnished by being in coalition, also for years to come.

Katy Jon Went, Some People Are Trans Get Over It, 2015Charing Cross GIC appointment and endocrine with Dr Leighton Seal, breast exam, genital exam including rather oddly a testicle sizing with a cross between what looked like prayer beads or anal beads, like a ring sizer! Was told breasts were well above average development and C going on D. Not sure what letter size my soon to be ex-balls were!

Cooked a rather extravagant and fabulous 5-course Italian “Mum Dine With Me” meal for my mum’s 80th birthday. An age that I doubt I’ll ever make or want to.

Collected and kicked out over a hundred slugs during late-night slug and snail patrol around the raised veg beds. Aided and abetted by cats clambering on my back as I bent down to scoop up the slimy invaders and other kittens trying to knock over my collecting jar!

Got involved in mediating a mental health intervention and advocating for a friend in trouble at local Uni. Exhausting but a revelation to support and witness another bipolar/BPD sufferer and realise how I sometimes come across to people, ie space invading, intense, hyper, racing, loud, forceful. It’s tough being me or around me sometimes and I appreciate those that understand me.

Dreamt I woke up in bed with a topless Barack Obama! Now, what’s that about?

GKaty Jon Went, NHS magazine photoshoot, 2015et interviewed in NHS magazine about my transition.

Begin regular Wellbeing support meetings with excellent mental health staff helping to ground me. Also, start CBT sessions – shame you only get 6. 

Go to the dentist for the first time in fifteen years – terrifying and lucky I didn’t leave it any longer as gums were beginning to get seriously damaged. Hadn’t been able to afford it but now I’m on part benefits I can get free NHS dentist. Fortunately, the dentist is female, friendly and foreign, my favourite trio. 

Life is and has been hard for 10 years and despite the downs and dark days, I am simultaneously at my happiest…But need to end this chapter of indecision and move forward…Because I’m stuck. In no man’s land … literally… Neither one thing or the other…Can’t swim or beach as still a half-and-half entity that doesn’t feel a whole…My bits don’t function have always been anorgasmic and get aroused by touch, empathy, intelligence during dinner and not in bed, lol…So just want rid really of something that’s non-functional. Surgery probably won’t correct the feelings in my head but it will stop the debate in my head and end a chapter that I really want to be closed so that I can live my 50s rather than be on constant pause as my 40s have been.

I’ve taken up drawing again and find guitar, music, reading, gardening, cooking, photography and writing settle and calm my mood better than any pills I’ve ever been prescribed.

Hosted a party at mine but then crashed mentally, a friend took over the food, Esther introvertly hid, and my only calm point was playing the guitar on weed.

Did a Human Library for dozens of 15yo pupils at a school in Acle and it topped the day. Their questions, and reflections on us as books and how honest and open we were without taking offence, was, well, how ‘light touch’ rather than ‘over-examined’ education should be.

Few people go out to dinner and end up discussing Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Malay, Nabatean, Linear B, Dutch, Italian, Cuneiform and Hieroglyph! But thanks to Esther, Alison, Ng and his family – we did.

Transgender talk at Norwich Pride, photo by Matt DartfordPride again and thousands attend. Also, did a trans diversity and growth talk with Christian opposition in attendance and a politics panel, sharing the stage with Lady Phyll and Clive Lewis MP.

My series of CBT sessions is ending and I’m trying to work out how I will self-manage going forward. Write myself a SANITY acrostic:

S – Self-acceptance/self-love
A – Authenticity, being yourself
N – Natural/your ‘normal’ state/neurodiverse/nurturing self
I – Integrated & intact/holistic wholeness
T – Treasuring your voyage, travelling YOUR journey
Y – You-nique, enjoy being one-of-a-kind, not one-of-a-crowd

I can be MAD, BAD and SAD (a trio of affective disorders) but I can also be glad but rarely trad and who I am is no fad!

My neighbour and friend, CJ, and partner of Linda Bellos dies of cancer after years of pain and survival. For all Linda’s criticism of gender and our fiery but friendly discussions, they have both respected and supported me through my transition and I will miss CJ’s kindness, humour and big Irish heart immensely.

I’m in a good place right now but I’m continually reflective on the times when I’m not. I’m also acutely aware of how I can be overwhelming, or lack a filter, and how hard that is to self-control. Yet the same energy also makes me hyper-productive and creative, it just comes with a side effect of inappropriate! I’m not dissing the meds I could be on, I just found they numbed me, and I was more at risk on them than off them. I’ve battled 3 years off them and have been the better for it. But getting human health support has been a struggle all the psychs want to give out is pills for my ills, not talk for my walk!

Meanwhile, my self-comforting OCDs get crazier. I now order my books by colour and size and have recently taken to only reading books that match my outfit or room colour!

Get community mental health help filling in a PIP application, an exhausting process I couldn’t do on my own.

I know I’m ever so slightly nuts but I think I am a metahuman hybrid – crossed with a red squirrel, yes red not grey – I am an endangered scarce breed, indeed I am unique – the human squirrel. I have just beaten Bonnie and Clyde, the resident garden grey squirrels, to the walnut tree harvest this year, they started on it yesterday. Today, I crawled along branches, climbed ladders, and harvested 480 walnuts (I counted them) – and there’s still the same number left in the tree. Over the next week, I collected another 1900 more, also hand-counted. Found that I can make walnut ink from the husks, garden paths from the broken shells, and could actually eat the walnuts, if only I liked them!

National Poetry Day and I attempt only my second poem in 30 years, it is pretentious and certainly doesn’t scan, called ‘First Light’ I enjoyed the creative distraction and process of writing, even if not the resulting form:

Night’s obsidian obscurity
draped in its sable cloak
As a necromancer’s nefarious
theft of yesterday’s sun

The dark Cimmerian conspiracy
Inconsistently lunar lit
Stolen illustrious illumination
Swift to flight, slow to return

Just as Stygian stealth enveloped
Sun’s setting the night before
Swirling caliginous clouds obfuscate
And bury its subdued disc

Sleep inconveniently intervenes
Sending all to slumber
Except the stars that puncture
Night’s indistinct ink

Yet dawn’s crepuscular creep
First blush of orange and pink
Painting pastel perimeters
Drawing forth pre-dawn

Light leaks, dispels darkness
Night’s mourning veil withdraws
Dawn declares its intent
A new canvas is prepared

Twilight tweets its birth
Nature’s nests peep forth
Panes of windows warm
Rivulets of moisture drip

Aurora invokes sleepy sunrise
Calls to creation’s creatures
Awake, shake off the night
Day’s divine design awaits

Speak at and attend a demo with local Muslims and Quakers among others including a veteran Labour MP opposing the bombing of Syria

Wow, NHS Charing Cross GIC rang me offering a transfer to Mr Bellringer at Parkside for private surgery. The surgery would be in a couple of months, not a couple of years. The offer is being made to only longest-standing/waiting patients. Shocked, pleased, petrified now. What do I say/do? I asked what the difference would be, apart from the timescale, they said better food! That’s enough for me.

SHIT Trans Op date is 6 Feb 2016!!!!
Crumbs, cripes, Holy crap Batman, Parkside ring up with my health roadmap for the next few weeks and months mapped out and all on dates I can make – no excuses! No turning back.

Psych appointment with a quiet unassuming Doctor who, after 75 mins, had me down as bipolar II with Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD) – so now I’m MAD, BAD, SAD, and GAD!

Pre-op GIC appointment with Mr Bellringer and the wonderful nurse Iffy, they totally relaxed me with their own humour and hugs. Esther offered herself as a model upon which to make my post-penectomy and orchidectomy labia, Mr Bellringer said with wicked seriousness and humour “I have to work with the available material”. Thanks mate!

Always found it odd that the most beautiful of flowers – the orchid with four times as many varieties as mammals on the earth, is so called because of its ugly testicular root tuber! Greek ὄρχις orchis means “testicle”. Happy to go ahead with a conversion from testicles to flower though! I’m always rescuing forlorn garden centre orchids and nursing them back to beauty on my bedroom windowsill.

Now onto the 6 weeks of pre-op HRT withdrawal.

Diary entries – 2009-14, 2016-19

Part I is here. Obviously, a part III is needed as 2015 was full-on and 2016 was significant. I write some 25,000-75,000 words a year in my diary and this was a thin year word-count wise but I hope the selections above offer an insight into the madness, melancholia,  mayhem and musings that are me.

BBC’s Sherlock returns for 4th Season and 2015 Special – The game is afoot!

Sherlock BBC Benedict CumberbatchWe can’t get enough of Benedict Cumberbatch and the BBC‘s ‪‎Sherlock, fortunately the Beeb have announced they are to return with filming of a 2015 Special beginning next January and then another 3 episode fourth season later in the year to hit our screens in 2016. The dripfeed of tantalising information began last Tuesday with a BBC One tweet:

Sherlock BBC hashtag 221back facebook Of course the hashtags, #221back and #Sherlock, gave it away but talk about teasing foreplay and dangling this before us and yet making us wait over a year. It is because both the actors and writers are so good that they are in such demand elsewhere too. Cumberbatch on Star Trek, Martin Freeman on Fargo and both of them in The Hobbit. Then at precisely 2:21pm GMT, simultaneously in the UK and US, the BBC announced, and serially re-announced, the news formally, again via the trending ‪#‎221back‬ hashtag:

The new series will be “deeper and darker” than before, and Moriarty could be back. Steven Moffat hinted that “the very next thing to happen to Sherlock and John, is the very last thing you’d expect.”

And so “the game is on” – again!

What has become a catchphrase of Sherlock, “the game is on”, is an update to “the game is afoot” which was originally uttered in just one Sherlock story, The adventure of the Abbey Grange:

“It was on a bitterly cold and frosty morning during the winter of ’97 that I was awakened by a tugging at my shoulder. It was Holmes. The candle in his hand shone upon his eager, stooping face and told me at a glance that something was amiss. ‘Come, Watson, come!’ he cried. ‘The game is afoot. Not a word! Into your clothes and come!’ Ten minutes later we were both in a cab and rattling through the silent streets on our way to Charing Cross Station.”

“The game is afoot” was not an original Conan Doyle inspiration but rather a phrase borrowed from that other English master craftsman, Shakespeare, some 300 years earlier. It first appears in a Shakespearian play, spoken by the Earl of Northumberland, in Henry IV, Part 1, Act 1, Scene 3:

“Before the game is afoot, thou still let’st slip.”

It also appears in the famous speech of King Henry beginning, “Once more unto the breach, dear friends…” and ending:

“I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips, Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot: Follow your spirit, and upon this charge Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!'” (Henry V, Act 3, Scene 1

Appeal of Sherlock Holmes

Many people, especially women, find intelligence attractive – “brainy is the new sexy”, but self-confessed cold aloofness and detachment?

Sherlock BBC Benedict Cumberbatch Brainy is the new sexySo why the appeal of Sherlock with his narcissistic superior personality not to mention narcotic escapism on the side. Just why is Sherlock so addictive? Is it that we too are escapist fantasists wishing for an attachment with someone so detached, or do we want to be him, as intelligent and as apparently not needy? Although, it is clear from his weaknesses for drugs and Dr Watson, that he is, however idealised, still far from emotional self-sufficiency.

“My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence.” – Sherlock Holmes

It’s not as if Sherlock is great marrying material, given his views on the subject:

“Let’s talk about…murder. Did I say murder? I meant to say marriage. But, you know, they’re quite similar procedures when you think about it. The participants tend to know each other, it’s over when one of them’s dead. In fairness, murder is a lot quicker though.” – Sherlock, BBC

Sherlock himself was not one for emotional attachment, as the modern Sherlock says, “Sentiment is a chemical defect found in the losing side”, but his one weakness was for Irene Adler, whom Conan Doyle describes thus:

“To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen…. And yet there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.” – The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Holmes Paget 1903 The Empty House - The Return of Sherlock Holmes
Holmes and Watson in the The Empty House – The Return of Sherlock Holmes, illustrated by Sidney Paget, 1903

I’ve loved Sherlock ever since reading all 60 stories – published over a 40 year period, aged 15, and writing my English OA level special paper on him. I love his intelligence, but not his supposed rational avoidance of emotion for it is clear he loves Watson, not to mention the allusions to attraction and love for Irene Adler.

Elementary my dear Watson

Whilst the US adaptation of the Sherlock brand, the TV series Elementary (Season 1 – 2012, 2 – 2013/14 and Season 3 announced), has been running nearly as long, it takes a different road. Sherlock, played by Jonny Lee Miller, gains the first female crime-busting sidekick with Lucy Liu as Dr Joan Watson – Sherlock’s sobriety companion, a form of addiction counsellor. Sherlock in this is more gritty, troubled, emotional – indeed more human, but no less intelligent despite essentially being in rehab.

It would be a massive SPOILER ALERT for watchers of the US series to reveal the clever twist in just who Moriarty may be. More details, if you already know, or don’t care, on the Wiki list of Moriarty portrayals.

Whilst Elementary is quite different, both play upon the original stories and cleverly leave us guessing as to how they will interweave Victorian plots and book references whilst remaining gripping narrative arcs with surprise twists. That said, Elementary drifts ever further from the originals and seems to exhibit little loyalty to the originals, not that Moffat and Gatiss are renowned for traditional faithfulness either, especially with the way they’ve reinvented Doctor Who – albeit, in my opinion successfully and brilliantly.

Holmes, House and 221B

Although, contextually further away from the criminal detection, the American series House, again with a British actor playing the lead, transposes Holmes and to a lesser extent Watson, to a medical milieu. In many ways, it has been argued, the series is more faithful to the character of Holmes whilst straying almost completely from the plots. In this case it is Dr Gregory House, played by Hugh Laurie with his medical friend Dr James Wilson, same initials as Dr J Watson. They both live at 221B’s, House actually on Baker Street. Their first patient is named Rebecca Adler and later a reference is made to another patient, Irene Adler.

Modern Film Interpretations

Sherlock Holmes theatrical release poster WikiSherlock Holmes has also been brought back to the big screen, so that we have three adaptations of him running simultaneously, along with the BBC version and US Elementary. In 2009, Guy Ritchie directed the first instalment of a British–American film series, produced by Joel Silver. It was more than sufficiently successful to  merit a sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, coming out for Christmas 2011.  A third film announced that year by Warner Bros is still, according to Jude Law in 2013, at scripting stage. Robert Downey Jr played a believably narcissistic Holmes to Law’s suave updated, rather than bumbling, Watson. Whilst the films were more action based than the originals, they have been updated for our times, just like the TV series, but with bigger budgets.

David Stratton, writing in The Australian, in a piece calledThe Swinging Detective disliked the first film’s Indiana Jones-styled interpretation of the original stories concluding, “The makers of this film are mainly interested in action; that, they believe, is all that gets young audiences into cinemas today. They may be right, but they have ridden roughshod over one of literature’s greatest creations in the process.” The fact that there are literally dozens of versions, though, and that each may drive young readers back to the books, is surely a good thing. Just like stage plays and films of Shakespeare one can go for authenticity or adaptation, if not reinvention, it does not diminish the original, rather it shows how versatile and enduring the stories are.

Actors who’ve played Sherlock Holmes

Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes
Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes

Holmes is the most portrayed character in movies, of all time, with some 70+ actors playing him. Of all his portrayals, though, I’ve always loved the classic Basil Rathbone on TV and the sharper, perhaps less likeable, Jeremy Brett. Probably the worst, for me, at least, were Charlton Heston, Roy Hudd, Roger Moore and Edward Woodward – not that I didn’t like these actors in other roles, the latter in Callan, for instance.

On radio, a medium quite well suited to the stories, I loved Clive Merrison, the only actor to cover every story and thus the entire canon of Sherlock Holmes. Carleton Hobbs managed 56 of the stories in 80 radio productions. In the war years, Sir John Gielgud performed several radio versions.

The updated television versions make extensive use of visual demonstrations of Holmes’ thought processes, not to mention texting and phone technology, an advantage of television over radio, which lends itself to modernisation rather than authenticity. It may surprise you to know that John Cleese played Sherlock Holmes in a 1977 comedy spoof The Strange Case of the End of Civilization as We Know It. Other unlikely actors included Larry Hagman of Dallas fame playing him in another comedy drama made for television movie as a motorcycle cop who after an accident believed himself to be Sherlock Holmes. Peter Cook and Dudley Moore also paired up in a comic version.

More seriously, Leonard Nimoy, perhaps as the emotionless Spock well suited to the role, played Sherlock on stage for the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC).

A Growing Audience

It is to be hoped that modern reworkings of Sherlock Holmes in Sherlock, Elementary and the film franchise will create a new young audience for Conan Doyle’s character and send them back to books to marvel at Victorian penmanship.

Sherlock’s Facebook page has 3.7m likes and no doubt after 10 million Brits watched him rise from the dead, that figure will just rise and rise again.

Sherlock BBC 221back facebook

 

[An earlier version of this article first appeared here]

Image credits:

BBC public domain facebook image of Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch in Sherlock   BBC public domain facebook image of Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch in Sherlock BBC public domain facebook image of Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes WikiMedia Commons