I like Sherlock's sense of humour for the most part. I loved the way that Moriarty was reinterpreted from a grim mathematician into a gleeful suicide bomber. I liked the banter between Holmes and Irene Adler in A Scandal in Belgravia. But ultimately Sherlock is not a comedy series with mysteries in it: it is a mystery or thriller series with some comedic elements or moments. This might not seem like a great difference on paper, but any bigger shift from the latter to the former could severely compromise the show. By tackling John Watson's marriage, the show has devoted more of its time to character interaction rather than cases. That's fine in theory, but in practice it's meant that episodes have been largely devoted to characters taking the mickey out of each other, and not always in a manner that develops their relationships. Sherlock now spends more time embarrassing John or making a fool of himself than he does getting to the bottom of a given mystery in short, he's doing less and less of the very thing that makes him so compelling. Take the stag night section of The Sign of Three as an example. On paper, this could have been a nice little passing gag, the short of thing which in earlier series would have been dropped into conversation, seen in flashback and then never spoken of again. Here, however, it's milked for everything it has and quickly stops being funny, much like the comments about John being gay (more on that later). In trying to be funny all the time, the writers have made it harder to spot and enjoy the genuinely funny moments. To paraphrase Mycroft, it's time they started behaving like grown-ups and got back to taking things a little more seriously.
Freelance copywriter, film buff, community radio presenter. Former host of The Movie Hour podcast (http://www.lionheartradio.com/ and click 'Interviews'), currently presenting on Phonic FM in Exeter (http://www.phonic.fm/). Other loves include theatre, music and test cricket.
