“Sherlock” Season 4 DVD extras: all the other Special Features
“Sherlock” Season 4 DVD extras: ‘The Writer’s Chat’ / ‘Script to Screen’ / ‘Set Tour: John and Mary’s Flat’ / ‘Mark Gatiss Video Diary: On Set’ / ‘Mark Gatiss Video Diary: Final Scenes’ / ‘Danny Hargreaves Video Diary’ / ‘Timelapse: Building 221B’
This is a transcript of new material which appears only on various Special Features of the Season 4 DVD. It does not include a transcript of the clips from the episodes which are shown throughout the features, nor does it include descriptions of every visual moment, and I didn’t add every instruction spoken by the production crew. I also haven’t transcribed every ‘er’ and ‘um’ and stutter as the interviewees speak but I hope that it may be useful in particular to viewers whose first language is not English and who are unable to access the subtitles.
As always, please remember that some of the comments made by people may look serious in plain print but are actually meant sarcastically or humorously.
If you quote extracts from this elsewhere, a link back to this page would be much appreciated!
Season 4 DVD extra: ‘The Writer’s Chat’
[I’ve left out the many moments when one of the guys simply says, “Yeah,” or “That’s right.”]
STEVEN: We can actually trace back where Series 4 begins, ’cause it was raining when we were shooting His Last Vow. And it was bucketing. It was really bad, so we went and sheltered upstairs with the accountants on the production bus. And we just started talking about the story of the sibling. I remember, you know, the last scene of Episode 2 has been in our heads forever.
MARK: As we were approaching the end of His Last Vow there was a line which was never in the script which is, “I am not given to outbursts of brotherly affection. You know what happened to the other one,” which is a clever trick because it sounds like still brothers and it’s not at all.
STEVEN: We laboured for a long time on the precise composition of that line, ’cause it has to sound like you’re talking about a brother.
MARK: We’ve moved the show on by introducing the parents in Series 3. We were gonna sort of expand the world then. You know, there’s this non-canonical idea of there being another brother called Sherrinford which we’ve - as with so many other aspects - we’ve embraced that and made it part of the thing.
STEVEN: The order at which we do everything, you know - when Mary would die, what Sherlock’s reaction would be - we were vaguer on whatever thrill ride it was gonna be in Episode 3, but we knew we wanted the ultimate finale. We can remember the day and the place and the feeling of excitement.
MARK: Redbeard - I can remember that. That was at Beryl’s flat and we had a big conversation about that, and that’s when I said, “What if it’s not a dog? What if it’s a child?” So that was ... we pieced that together there.
STEVEN: And using the pirate thing: it all just snapped together so well.
MARK: Moriarty is a fascinating thing in that, in our sea of ongoing lies, one thing we’ve genuinely been completely consistent about is telling people he’s dead, but no-one believes it! And it’s a rather brilliant thing.
STEVEN: Yeah, and they all laugh!
MARK: And they laugh at you! They’re gonna laugh on the other side of their blown-away heads! Because he is dead!
STEVEN: He is dead, absolutely!
MARK: What was lovely, actually, this year, we went through all kinds of things, including Moriarty’s corpse with a sort of ventriloquising thing, a bit like a cartoon thing at the end of His Last Vow; and then Steve had this idea, “What if we make it a flashback, then he can be full-pomp Moriarty? He can still be as we first knew him,” which was a really refreshing thing, wasn’t it?
STEVEN: Interesting, though, isn’t it, ’cause we both now have a reputation - which is not really true - about how we are enjoying doing this. The truth is, it’s the only way to keep a secret is to make everybody distrust everything.
STEVEN: I think probably the best fun I’ve ever had as a writer was when we worked together on the finale episode. I really like the Mycroft case scene when he’s sitting in the chair because it is a very long dialogue scene between three blokes who are sitting down, and yet I think it holds. I think it ... I mean, it just ... Well, the three of you are so good, which helps. And then it ends with an explosion!
MARK: Yeah, that’s the way to ...!
MARK: What we’ve done, which I think is very successful, is get to an incredibly bleak place with everything sort of out there and the revelation of what Eurus, the sister, is and everything, and then actually put it all back together again.
STEVEN: It’s my favourite series. [I] think it’s my favourite run of them.
MARK: Oh yeah.
MARK: Series 5? Well, people ask this question all the time, but it is genuinely terribly difficult to try and get Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman and everybody else ...
STEVEN: ... in the same room.
MARK: ... back together. Planning this series took a Herculean effort, really. So, who knows? There’s a huge amount of willingness to do it, and everybody would like to. Rather than leaving Episode 3 on a cliffhanger as we usually do, we sort of leave it in the perfect place where, if that’s it, it’s a great place to leave it. But equally, because everything is restored, if we pop back - “D’you wanna come out to play?” “Yeah, all right.” - then it’s in the perfect place for that as well.
Season 4 DVD extra: ‘Script to Screen’
NARRATOR (Rupert Graves): The long-awaited fourth series of “Sherlock” has arrived and looks set to be the most exciting series to date.
MARTIN FREEMAN: I hope the audience will come away blown away by it.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH: I think they will be truly shocked.
NARRATOR: Now shown in over 240 territories across the world, “Sherlock” has become a truly global phenomenon.
ANDREW SCOTT: There’s something totally unique about working on a show that’s so loved across the world.
AMANDA ABBINGTON: We do feel like we’re making something that people are excited about seeing.
NARRATOR: But just what does it take to bring this series to the screens of so many people in so many countries?
MARK GATISS: Genuinely “Sherlock” is one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to work on. I’m very proud of it.
NARRATOR: Filmed over the course of the show’s production, Script to Screen talks to the people at the heart of “Sherlock” to find out just what is involved.
STEVEN MOFFAT: We’ve got brilliant people on this show.
BENEDICT: And it stands up on a big screen in every department, and that’s saying something.
NARRATOR: April 2016: the “Sherlock” cast and crew are locked away in a secret location for the first script read-through for Series 4.
STEVEN (reading the directions from the script): Mycroft is showing grainy security footage. It’s Sherlock and John outside Appledore in His Last Vow.
MARK: It’s a really useful process, a read-through, because it’s like sort of having a little mini version of the episode.
BENEDICT: It’s nice. It’s good. You have a kind of a rough idea of the length of it and where the kind of peaks and troughs of the drama are; where you need to cut; the jokes that work or don’t work; or what you need to do a lot of work on as an actor as well.
MARK: Everyone’s trying it out for the first time. Routinely, some actors will go for it and others won’t at all ... they usually get fired(!)
MARTIN: I like read-throughs. It’s the only time you’ll ever hear the story in completion. It’s the only time you’ll hear it until you see it. So it helps clarify things for me. If there’s a bit of the story that I’m not quite sure about, hearing it being said by the characters involved will make it clearer to me, and I like things to be clear.
AMANDA (presumably reading a line which didn’t make the final edit): Somebody asked me what my hobbies are. I said, “Silence, and going to the loo on my own.”
MARTIN: Yeah, I like read-throughs generally. I know Amanda does as well.
AMANDA: Personally I love read-throughs. I think they’re ... it’s the only time you ever get, hopefully, the entire cast in a room, and the crew in the room, and the director and the producers and the writers.
STEVEN (reading directions from the script): In the light from the door, the features of the Thatcher bust are thrown into stark relief.
MARK: It’s only been a year since the Special. The actual main series, as it were, has been quite a long time. You kind of feel the need to reacquaint yourself with the gang.
MARTIN: There are people who you haven’t seen for a year; there are other people you’ve never seen before. There always seem to be new faces added to production. But it’s nice. It’s a bit like a reunion.
BENEDICT: It’s been, yeah, just about a year since we all saw each other for the Christmas Special and, yeah, it was lovely. It was lovely to be back in the same room with all the team.
MARTIN: I like it, and there’s oranges and croissants and things. It’s rather nice, yeah.
NARRATOR: Although this is the first time the cast have gathered since the filming of The Abominable Bride, for the co-creators and producer, work on the much anticipated fourth series began many months before.
MARK: It takes an unconscionably long time to write a script, or it doesn’t. I mean, I started writing Episode 1 of Series 4 ... I started writing The Six Thatchers, as we can now call it, in August of 2015. So Christmas of 2015 I was deeply embroiled in writing [Episode] 1; Steven was planning [Episode] 2.
STEVEN: The Lying Detective: I stalled a bit on that. That took me a while. I personally start a script when I have to and finish it when I have to; generally speaking, when I have to start it and, you know, a couple of days after the tone meeting is when I hand it in.
MARK: Then we wrote Episode 3 really quickly. We did actually spend a really rather blissful day sat side by side like Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney, the keyboard, putting it all together and smoothing it out and hammering it back. It was really good fun. It was very, very hard work, actually, but it was great. Luckily with “Sherlock,” we have a very, very tight, small team. Mostly, everyone involved - costume, make-up, sound, design - have been with us from the beginning, so it’s a sort of nice family thing, but the actual fulcrum of it is me and Steven and Sue.
(On set, Sue bounces into view between Mark and Steven, doing jazz hands and giggling.)
STEVEN: And there’s Sue.
MARK: Photobombing.
STEVEN: Sue, who’s coming in, photobombing.
(In interview)
STEVEN: Me and Mark are in charge of the fictional side of “Sherlock.” The art of it, the fiction, the made-up part comes from our joint brains; and it is actually a joint brain now. We’ve just got the same one. So that’s what we do: we make it up.
MARK: The physical management of the budget and wrangling, every aspect of it, is Sue’s job as Producer and her production team around her.
SUE VERTUE: I see the role as Producer as selling an idea to a broadcaster and then delivering what you’ve sold them. It really starts with Steven and Mark. I tend to send them somewhere and they go and talk about the next series, and they might probably have two or three meetings and then they’ll pitch me the series once they’ve worked that out between the two of them. And then they go off and write. I stuck them in a very nice hotel in the Atlas mountains where actually they couldn’t escape or do anything apart from write, so that worked very well. And while they’re doing that, I’m sort of setting up everything else: I’m looking at directors’ reels, deciding which directors to use; getting the money together, getting the budgets together; getting the heads of departments; where we’re going to shoot; we’ve got to go and find studios. So quite a lot’s done while we’re waiting for the script. In fact, the scripts come ... (pointedly) ... later. The budget tends to be done before the script, you know, so you have to sort of move it around a bit. I really try and read the script without looking at the budget first, and then there are some things I ask them to change. You know, “Can we not see the helicopter?” You know, quite often you can do things without actually seeing the helicopter. And then other things you’ve got to work out that really is important: they really do want the helicopter there, so we just have to try and find a way around of doing it, really. Production values are amazing now. I think what’s happened is people aren’t any more saying, “It’s just television.” They’re making the best possible show they can, and they’re making it for television.
BENEDICT: You know, I think the final rendering of what we produce is very filmic, very quality. I mean, it stands up on a big screen. There are certain sort of cut-off points to where you can swing a camera, but everywhere that camera goes is exquisite.
NARRATOR: Once the scripts are written and the budget has been worked out, ensuring the show looks as good as it possibly can is largely down to Production Designer Arwel wyn Jones and his team in the Art department.
ARWEL: The way I always describe my job to someone who’s never seen what we do or anything is that what you see on screen that’s not human tends to come via our department. Well, I’m involved from quite early on, from when the script is available, really. You start with making a list of the locations and requirements from that script; work closely with the Locations Department then, and the Director as to what we need to find as location or what we need to build as part of the structure for it. And then from that, then the design process comes. We work on the characters involved and work out what their environment would be. Yeah, I’ve always said they’re individual movies. They’re not like a TV series, you know. And this series, this series definitely is that, you know. They’ve been three little movies.
NARRATOR: And for the Governor’s office, there was only one film series in mind when Arwel and his team set out to create “Sherlock”’s biggest set to date.
ARWEL: The Series 4 is definitely the biggest we’ve done. You know, the sets are bigger. Unfortunately we lost Ken Adams this year, the old designer of the great classic Bond movies, or quite a few of the Bond movies, and I was allowed to have a little bit of an homage to him in Episode 3 because what was scripted essentially became the Bond villain’s lair, you know? So I got to kind of play with that a little bit.
STEVEN: You know, we’ve got brilliant people on this show. I think some of Arwel’s work this year has been absolutely astounding, absolutely brilliant, so you just get very excited. I always get very thrilled when I see what the sets are gonna be like.
ART MALIK (the Governor): The great surprise for me was seeing the set. I mean, I’ve worked on some fairly spectacular big-budget movies and to see sets that remind me of True Lies or the James Bond films that I’ve done, it’s like, “Wow! Okay.”
MARK: Amazing set, directly inspired by our love of James Bond. It’s an underground lair, really! It’s a beautiful, brutalist concrete and glass and rock. It’s fantastic.
ARWEL: What’s nice is that it’s a great script, and when they do up the ante, you have to up your game as well, so, you know, it pushes you. And it’s a great programme to be involved, to be able to do that.
NARRATOR: With the sets created and the cameras in place, the costumes designed and the make-up applied, it’s now the actors’ turn to bring the script to life. But by Series 4, just how do the stories and characters continue to keep us entertained?
MARTIN: With this show, it’s always a fine balance, I think, between maintaining what we have and honouring what we have, but also just moving it on incrementally in tiny ways so it doesn’t just stay stuck.
MARK: If you want the characters to develop, you have to keep thinking what you can do with them. It’s like, what happens if Mrs Watson gets killed and it’s Sherlock’s fault? If you put it like the logline of a movie poster, then you’ve got something new to do.
LOUISE BREALEY: It’s funny, having played Molly - I think it’s seven years - living with a character for that amount of time is an interesting experience. You want to make sure that there is something that’s purely her, always, so I think that’s really interesting, is trying to make sure that there’s something essentially her, but also, you know, a bit of elbow room to, you know, to grow and change.
ANDREW: The real chief pleasure of it is that I feel like I’ve played lots of different parts. He came in as a little geeky guy in Series 1, and that just seems like so long ago. And, yeah, I’ve shot myself twice, and I’ve been in a straitjacket, and I’ve just landed from a helicopter like a rock star, and worn a wedding dress; and yeah, it’s been brilliant.
MARK: A huge part of writing it now is knowing everyone involved and, you know, you can just tailor things to suit. I know how Benedict is going to say things; I know how Martin will say them. That’s the benefit of having done it now for many years: you sort of write it to suit and it happens quite quickly that way.
STEVEN: Ninety minutes is a slot length that makes it have to be a sort of novel-length story as opposed to a short story. If you’re doing a full ninety minutes, to justify ninety minutes people’s lives have to change. You have to say that Sherlock and John go into the episode and come out the other end of it slightly different people.
NARRATOR: And after four series with characters as complex as Sherlock and John, it seems theirs and everyone else’s lives have changed dramatically.
MARTIN: For this show, John and Sherlock’s friendship has to stay central to why the show works.
BENEDICT: Sherlock’s humanisation, I’d say, is complete by the end of this series. It doesn’t mean he drops the ball as far as his brilliance goes.
MARTIN: I think John has definitely been instrumental in the humanising of Sherlock, yes, and that’s Steven and Mark’s idea, obviously, to make that a central theme, you know, to show that Sherlock is brilliant.
NARRATOR: Once filming and editing is finished, there’s one important final stage to complete.
STEVEN: The music in “Sherlock” is intensely important. It can define a scene. Well, with David and Michael, we’ve got just a couple of geniuses that are amazing.
DAVID ARNOLD (Composer): Every episode of “Sherlock” has a score, a musical score and that needs someone to write it and arrange it and record it, and that’s where we come in.
WOMAN in the recording studio: One more like that?
DAVID: One more like that. Can we have a little dim, cello-wise, bar 20, 22 ...
MICHAEL PRICE (who is directing the orchestra): Let’s just do it again from the top, then we’re covered.
MICHAEL (in interview): Really, from the script stage we’ll read the original ideas. Dave and I will talk about what the musical consequences of those stories are. Really from that point starts the process of trying to actually write the many hundreds of thousands of notes that get written!
DAVID: Part of it, as well, is actually conceiving of and creating an identity, musically which - away from the show - will give you a feeling, more than anything, about what’s happening or who it’s happening to.
NARRATOR: With the music scored, a live orchestra is brought in for the final recording.
SUE: It’s now November, quite a long way down the road from April when we started filming, so we’re very near the end now, and this is one of my favourite days.
DAVID: Producers and directors always like scoring days ’cause they can sit down, have a bit of cake and a cup of tea and listen to and, you know, and they enjoy the process.
SUE: I love it, ’cause you just look at a whole load of people doing something that you can’t start to understand. They’ve got their own little scripts - it’s just that it’s all music - and there’s nothing I can say or do. I can just enjoy what they’re doing.
MICHAEL: Today we get the chance to roast as quickly through as we can with these brilliant, brilliant players. I conduct, David produces from inside the control room, and somehow we get through a thick stack of music. One of the key things that makes a recording session go well is that everybody’s focusing at the same thing, which is making that bit of music fit that bit of picture as effectively and as beautifully as possible.
DAVID: It’s a team sport and we are very much a part of this ensemble that creates this beast, which is the show. The show demands certain things, so you accede to those demands. Musically it tells you what it needs and, unless you satisfy that need musically, then you feel that there’s something wrong. So the film and the show is always the governor. It’s always that. It’s a massive amount of work that gets done by an awful lot of people. It always feels like it’s personal, everything that’s written for this show.
(The orchestra finishes playing a piece.)
DAVID: Masterful.
MICHAEL: Beautiful. Thank you very much, everybody.
STEVEN: Every episode has to be a statement about the show. It has to be an attempt to make the best one ever, so everyone has to be operating on all fronts.
ANDREW: There’s a great sense of everybody being involved and I’m just very grateful, really, to be involved with these people.
AMANDA: It’s like coming home to a family, ’cause everyone does really get on and we have a lovely time, so it’s like coming home. I love it.
UNA STUBBS: The thing I love about being in “Sherlock” and I’m so grateful for is the quality of the writing, of the directing, of everything about it. It’s a real quality piece, and I’m very lucky.
SUE: I love “Sherlock.” I am terribly proud of it. It’s a joy to do, and we feel very, very lucky and privileged, I think, to all be a part of it. It doesn’t happen every day.
MARK: “Sherlock” has changed all our lives. It’s just one of those things that occasionally happens, and you’re very, very lucky to be a part of it.
MARTIN: I like being in a hit, and this is a big hit. That you’re proud of yourself is the best thing ever, you know.
BENEDICT: What we’ve done all the way through in this show, I hope, is that we’ve tried to better it. Yeah, it’s popular, but let’s make it more popular rather than just playing to old strengths. I think they’ve come up trumps in this series.
Season 4 DVD extra: ‘Set Tour: John and Mary’s Flat’
ARWEL WYN JONES (Production Designer): We’re just outside the latest incarnation of John and Mary’s flat. There’s a little bit more happening in John and Mary’s this year, so it didn’t make sense really to have to go back to a location and then split into a set, so we built the whole thing. So we’ve seen glimpses of it all along but we’ve never really seen it as an entire home, so we’ll be seeing more of that this time. We’re about three weeks in from the first kind of scribbles on a piece of paper, so not that long really when you think about it. This has taken about a week’s worth of construction so far. There’s paper designs that tend to be little sketches and stuff and then we draw it on a computer and you can build a 3D model in cyberspace so you can work things out, tweak things a little bit. Then after that I like to build a cardboard model, a white card model so that you can hold it in your hands and you can check camera angles a bit better. Then, after that bit, when everyone’s happy with that, then you discuss it with DoP [Director of Photography], Director, Producer. You then get the drawings made up to give to the construction crew and they build it for real.
Well, this is the front door of John and Mary’s. I’ll take you through and show you through. Now this bit is a replica of the actual porchway to go into the exterior we’ve used in the past. This helps us enormously. We’ve been able to do transitions over the doorstep, ’cause we can do a certain amount in the real location and we can do a certain amount inside looking out with the door opening and still have coverage without it having to be a big massive cheat. So it’s, you know, it’s quite a handy little device for getting us into the house.
So this is the inside of John and Mary’s. We’ve had to duplicate some things that we’ve seen before. So we had a very significant wallpaper again, one of my nice little touches. And there were these fitted cupboards that were there, so very distinctive, so we had to duplicate them and make this wall very, very noticeable. And then by looking back the other way we’ve got the stairwell, ’cause that’s also a significant part. So the reason for the stairs to nowhere, as it were, it’s a nice shape. I suppose in our world it goes to another spare bedroom or, you know, it’s a communal hallway upstairs, but it’s a nice feature. It breaks up the wall anyway, so it’s kind of nice.
I’ve kind of given them a nice extension, as it were, but also it gives us a nice space to film in and work in. So this is kind of a nice new kitchen for them.
Features we have in a set, for example, are that wall [behind the sofa] and a bit of that one behind the stairwell. They can float, so they can come out. When we say, ‘float,’ so they can be removed so that the camera can be, as it were, in an impossible situation where you can’t have it in the real world where it’s a solid wall. You can move it so you can get all the equipment there and still be able to see the whole room.
Then, as we come through ... so this is their bedroom, and then this, once again, is a floating wall, so we can remove that. You know, all the camera crew can be looking in from there so that, you know, you’ve got plenty of room.
This is the ensuite bathroom. This is where he famously said he doesn’t shave for Sherlock Holmes.
And then if we come back out here [into the living room], you can see ... Part of the thing about doing a set like this is we can tweak where the walls go, where there’s gaps, where there’s things that wouldn’t maybe be for real, so you’ve got real depth running through from the bedroom right the way through to the living room, and equally backwards when you’re in the living room looking back this way, you’ve got depth and layers of things to shoot through and stuff, so there is always something of interest in the frame.
Season 4 DVD extra: ‘Mark Gatiss Video Diary: On Set’
MARK GATISS: I don’t know if that even worked. I’ll try again. ... Morning. I’m actually at BBC Roath Lock. I’m severely jetlagged, having just come back from Comic-Con, and today is a very big day for “Sherlock.” We have a massive end-of-series montage, the reconstruction of Baker Street at a sort of 360 degree burst of cases. Let’s see how we get on, eh?!
MARK: This is a little mini-tour of what’s left of the studio. Little bits of Morocco; little bits of Culverton Smith wall; all the detritus of a three-month shoot; and then round the corner into Baker Street. Exterior looking a little worse for wear these days. It’s all right, ’cause we’re about to blow it up! (He laughs manically.) Say hello, Glyn.
GLYN RAINER (Floor Runner): Hello.
MARK: Describe your duties in full.
GLYN: I make Mark cups of tea every single day, every hour, every second.
MARK: On the hour. Every second on the hour.
GLYN: Got a little code. (He makes a ‘T’ shape with his hands.)
MARK: Yes. It’s a simple one, and it works; works for us.
GLYN: Yeah. Would you like one now?
MARK (looking into his camera and speaking pointedly): Yes I would, Glyn. Thanks.
GLYN: No problem.
MARK: Right, David Arnold. Explain yourself. Tell us a little about your composition for this end piece.
DAVID ARNOLD (Composer): Well, in the script it said it needs to be the saddest thing ever heard. I guess it says more about Sherlock’s humanity that we don’t get to see all that often. And that’s what music does, isn’t it? I mean, it’s the stuff that we feel that we can’t ever really talk about a lot of the time.
MARK: It comes from a place of sort of shared melancholy.
DAVID: Uh, yes. They both have lost something profound, I think.
MARK: Here’s Rupert Graves.
RUPERT: Hey, hello!
MARK: Speak into this camera.
RUPERT: Hello, camera! How are you? You all right?
MARK: Look! Isn’t it amazing?! It’s a miracle!
RUPERT: I know! Does it work, that camera? It’s tiny. It’s like a little fly.
MARK: It’s a tiny little steadicam, look.
RUPERT: It’s beautiful.
MARK: Is this your last day?
RUPERT: It is.
MARK: Ever?
RUPERT: “Ever”?!
MARK: On Earth?
RUPERT: “On Earth”?!
MARK: Is it The Rapture?!
RUPERT: If it’s The Rapture, I might just become naked and become an angel.
MARK: Yeah?
RUPERT: I might. I’m hoping, anyway.
MARK: What are you doing today? Silent?
RUPERT: I’m doing some silent acting. I’m doing the last scene that I’m ever gonna be in.
MARK: No, not “ever.”
RUPERT: Not ever. I mean, ever gonna be in in this ...
MARK: Yeah.
RUPERT: ... in this, um ...
MARK: ... setup. Series.
RUPERT: ... story. Series, yes.
MARK: Thank you.
RUPERT: Thank you.
MARK (mock-formally): Goodbye.
RUPERT (mock-formally): Goodbye. (He waves and speaks in a silly voice as Mark walks away.) Thanks for coming. Thanks very much.
Season 4 DVD extra: ‘Mark Gatiss Video Diary: Final Scenes’
MARK (pulling awed faces and then whispering as he walks through the kitchen in 221B): Quite creepy, isn’t it. Oh, all the time I’m filming, I’m filming myself! I forgot about it; I keep forgetting!
(He and a nearby woman giggle.)
SOMEONE OFF-CAMERA: Shh!
MARK (whispering): Silence!
(Mark aims his camera into the living room. Benjamin Caron, the Director, looks at him and points at his camera.)
BENJAMIN: Is that filming?
MARK: No! It’s just the way I’m standing.
MAN (possibly the DoP): Mark, could you please join the unit as Second Director?
MARK (turning his camera to film himself): Okay.
MARK (now dressed as Mycroft): And now Mycroft stood up for these little cut-aways which we didn’t get the other day. This is Eurus’ cell, which is ...
(He gets close to the glass and films himself in the reflection, trying to sound like Anthony Hopkins’ version of Hannibal Lecter.)
MARK: I’ve been inside this room eight years now, Clarice. I know they’ll never ever let me out while I’m alive.
Una Stubbs’ last scene, Series 4
The crew applaud. Martin walks over and kisses and hugs Una, then Benedict hugs her, followed by Sue and Mark.
MARK: The sad remains of Baker Street. Look at this! It’s all all right, though. We’ll put it all back together again.
MARK (looking exhausted and half-asleep): There we are. That’s the end of a slightly crazy and very full day. Night-night.
Season 4 DVD extra: ‘Danny Hargreaves Video Diary’
DANNY: Hello. Welcome. I’m Danny Hargreaves. I’m the Physical Special Effects Supervisor for “Sherlock.” Now, what that means is I’m in charge of all the the cool stuff that you see in the show: all the complicated rigs, the bullet hits, the explosions and fires and stuff. And I’m on my way now to a location, a secret location, to do a car explosion. So my team are already at the location. They’ve been doing preparation, getting the car rigged and ready for the big explosion ready for this evening. So when it gets dark, it’ll go bang. There’s many, many things I need to do to prepare for the explosion, one of which is to strip out the car - believe it or not - of all its flammable materials. What we want to try and do is, once it explodes, we want to be able to put it out as quick as possible. You’ve got many, many things to consider when trying to achieve these massive explosions or dramatic sequences. My primary concern is obviously safety. It’s a very dangerous thing that we’re trying to achieve this evening, so it’s taken a number of years to learn what I do; so kids, please don’t go out and blow up cars, okay?!
So this house is quite a historic house for film and TV purposes. I’ve blown up a massive explosion here for Torchwood a long, long time ago. It’s nice to be back, doing another type of explosion.
(To his crew) Okay, we’ve confirmed everything’s running?
WOMAN (offscreen, possibly Rachel Talalay the Director): Okay, everything running.
DANNY: Okay. Start smoking up, then, Don. ... Okay, quick as you like, then, Don. ... Okay, ready?
WOMAN: Ready.
DANNY: Okay, firing: three, two, one!
(The car blows up.)
DANNY (running to the burning car, probably to check that all the explosives went off): Yeah. It’s all ... it’s all gone. Okay.
(Laughing, he high-fives one of the crew.)
DANNY: Thank you. Thank you. (He hugs her.)
Season 4 DVD extra: ‘Timelapse: Building 221B’
[Your transcriber puts her feet up and lights a cigarette, because there are no spoken words in this Special Feature.]
A full list of episode transcripts, DVD commentary summaries/transcripts, and transcripts of the DVD special features can be found here.
This is a transcript of new material which appears only on various Special Features of the Season 4 DVD. It does not include a transcript of the clips from the episodes which are shown throughout the features, nor does it include descriptions of every visual moment, and I didn’t add every instruction spoken by the production crew. I also haven’t transcribed every ‘er’ and ‘um’ and stutter as the interviewees speak but I hope that it may be useful in particular to viewers whose first language is not English and who are unable to access the subtitles.
As always, please remember that some of the comments made by people may look serious in plain print but are actually meant sarcastically or humorously.
If you quote extracts from this elsewhere, a link back to this page would be much appreciated!
Season 4 DVD extra: ‘The Writer’s Chat’
[I’ve left out the many moments when one of the guys simply says, “Yeah,” or “That’s right.”]
STEVEN: We can actually trace back where Series 4 begins, ’cause it was raining when we were shooting His Last Vow. And it was bucketing. It was really bad, so we went and sheltered upstairs with the accountants on the production bus. And we just started talking about the story of the sibling. I remember, you know, the last scene of Episode 2 has been in our heads forever.
MARK: As we were approaching the end of His Last Vow there was a line which was never in the script which is, “I am not given to outbursts of brotherly affection. You know what happened to the other one,” which is a clever trick because it sounds like still brothers and it’s not at all.
STEVEN: We laboured for a long time on the precise composition of that line, ’cause it has to sound like you’re talking about a brother.
MARK: We’ve moved the show on by introducing the parents in Series 3. We were gonna sort of expand the world then. You know, there’s this non-canonical idea of there being another brother called Sherrinford which we’ve - as with so many other aspects - we’ve embraced that and made it part of the thing.
STEVEN: The order at which we do everything, you know - when Mary would die, what Sherlock’s reaction would be - we were vaguer on whatever thrill ride it was gonna be in Episode 3, but we knew we wanted the ultimate finale. We can remember the day and the place and the feeling of excitement.
MARK: Redbeard - I can remember that. That was at Beryl’s flat and we had a big conversation about that, and that’s when I said, “What if it’s not a dog? What if it’s a child?” So that was ... we pieced that together there.
STEVEN: And using the pirate thing: it all just snapped together so well.
MARK: Moriarty is a fascinating thing in that, in our sea of ongoing lies, one thing we’ve genuinely been completely consistent about is telling people he’s dead, but no-one believes it! And it’s a rather brilliant thing.
STEVEN: Yeah, and they all laugh!
MARK: And they laugh at you! They’re gonna laugh on the other side of their blown-away heads! Because he is dead!
STEVEN: He is dead, absolutely!
MARK: What was lovely, actually, this year, we went through all kinds of things, including Moriarty’s corpse with a sort of ventriloquising thing, a bit like a cartoon thing at the end of His Last Vow; and then Steve had this idea, “What if we make it a flashback, then he can be full-pomp Moriarty? He can still be as we first knew him,” which was a really refreshing thing, wasn’t it?
STEVEN: Interesting, though, isn’t it, ’cause we both now have a reputation - which is not really true - about how we are enjoying doing this. The truth is, it’s the only way to keep a secret is to make everybody distrust everything.
STEVEN: I think probably the best fun I’ve ever had as a writer was when we worked together on the finale episode. I really like the Mycroft case scene when he’s sitting in the chair because it is a very long dialogue scene between three blokes who are sitting down, and yet I think it holds. I think it ... I mean, it just ... Well, the three of you are so good, which helps. And then it ends with an explosion!
MARK: Yeah, that’s the way to ...!
MARK: What we’ve done, which I think is very successful, is get to an incredibly bleak place with everything sort of out there and the revelation of what Eurus, the sister, is and everything, and then actually put it all back together again.
STEVEN: It’s my favourite series. [I] think it’s my favourite run of them.
MARK: Oh yeah.
MARK: Series 5? Well, people ask this question all the time, but it is genuinely terribly difficult to try and get Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman and everybody else ...
STEVEN: ... in the same room.
MARK: ... back together. Planning this series took a Herculean effort, really. So, who knows? There’s a huge amount of willingness to do it, and everybody would like to. Rather than leaving Episode 3 on a cliffhanger as we usually do, we sort of leave it in the perfect place where, if that’s it, it’s a great place to leave it. But equally, because everything is restored, if we pop back - “D’you wanna come out to play?” “Yeah, all right.” - then it’s in the perfect place for that as well.
Season 4 DVD extra: ‘Script to Screen’
NARRATOR (Rupert Graves): The long-awaited fourth series of “Sherlock” has arrived and looks set to be the most exciting series to date.
MARTIN FREEMAN: I hope the audience will come away blown away by it.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH: I think they will be truly shocked.
NARRATOR: Now shown in over 240 territories across the world, “Sherlock” has become a truly global phenomenon.
ANDREW SCOTT: There’s something totally unique about working on a show that’s so loved across the world.
AMANDA ABBINGTON: We do feel like we’re making something that people are excited about seeing.
NARRATOR: But just what does it take to bring this series to the screens of so many people in so many countries?
MARK GATISS: Genuinely “Sherlock” is one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to work on. I’m very proud of it.
NARRATOR: Filmed over the course of the show’s production, Script to Screen talks to the people at the heart of “Sherlock” to find out just what is involved.
STEVEN MOFFAT: We’ve got brilliant people on this show.
BENEDICT: And it stands up on a big screen in every department, and that’s saying something.
NARRATOR: April 2016: the “Sherlock” cast and crew are locked away in a secret location for the first script read-through for Series 4.
STEVEN (reading the directions from the script): Mycroft is showing grainy security footage. It’s Sherlock and John outside Appledore in His Last Vow.
MARK: It’s a really useful process, a read-through, because it’s like sort of having a little mini version of the episode.
BENEDICT: It’s nice. It’s good. You have a kind of a rough idea of the length of it and where the kind of peaks and troughs of the drama are; where you need to cut; the jokes that work or don’t work; or what you need to do a lot of work on as an actor as well.
MARK: Everyone’s trying it out for the first time. Routinely, some actors will go for it and others won’t at all ... they usually get fired(!)
MARTIN: I like read-throughs. It’s the only time you’ll ever hear the story in completion. It’s the only time you’ll hear it until you see it. So it helps clarify things for me. If there’s a bit of the story that I’m not quite sure about, hearing it being said by the characters involved will make it clearer to me, and I like things to be clear.
AMANDA (presumably reading a line which didn’t make the final edit): Somebody asked me what my hobbies are. I said, “Silence, and going to the loo on my own.”
MARTIN: Yeah, I like read-throughs generally. I know Amanda does as well.
AMANDA: Personally I love read-throughs. I think they’re ... it’s the only time you ever get, hopefully, the entire cast in a room, and the crew in the room, and the director and the producers and the writers.
STEVEN (reading directions from the script): In the light from the door, the features of the Thatcher bust are thrown into stark relief.
MARK: It’s only been a year since the Special. The actual main series, as it were, has been quite a long time. You kind of feel the need to reacquaint yourself with the gang.
MARTIN: There are people who you haven’t seen for a year; there are other people you’ve never seen before. There always seem to be new faces added to production. But it’s nice. It’s a bit like a reunion.
BENEDICT: It’s been, yeah, just about a year since we all saw each other for the Christmas Special and, yeah, it was lovely. It was lovely to be back in the same room with all the team.
MARTIN: I like it, and there’s oranges and croissants and things. It’s rather nice, yeah.
NARRATOR: Although this is the first time the cast have gathered since the filming of The Abominable Bride, for the co-creators and producer, work on the much anticipated fourth series began many months before.
MARK: It takes an unconscionably long time to write a script, or it doesn’t. I mean, I started writing Episode 1 of Series 4 ... I started writing The Six Thatchers, as we can now call it, in August of 2015. So Christmas of 2015 I was deeply embroiled in writing [Episode] 1; Steven was planning [Episode] 2.
STEVEN: The Lying Detective: I stalled a bit on that. That took me a while. I personally start a script when I have to and finish it when I have to; generally speaking, when I have to start it and, you know, a couple of days after the tone meeting is when I hand it in.
MARK: Then we wrote Episode 3 really quickly. We did actually spend a really rather blissful day sat side by side like Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney, the keyboard, putting it all together and smoothing it out and hammering it back. It was really good fun. It was very, very hard work, actually, but it was great. Luckily with “Sherlock,” we have a very, very tight, small team. Mostly, everyone involved - costume, make-up, sound, design - have been with us from the beginning, so it’s a sort of nice family thing, but the actual fulcrum of it is me and Steven and Sue.
(On set, Sue bounces into view between Mark and Steven, doing jazz hands and giggling.)
STEVEN: And there’s Sue.
MARK: Photobombing.
STEVEN: Sue, who’s coming in, photobombing.
(In interview)
STEVEN: Me and Mark are in charge of the fictional side of “Sherlock.” The art of it, the fiction, the made-up part comes from our joint brains; and it is actually a joint brain now. We’ve just got the same one. So that’s what we do: we make it up.
MARK: The physical management of the budget and wrangling, every aspect of it, is Sue’s job as Producer and her production team around her.
SUE VERTUE: I see the role as Producer as selling an idea to a broadcaster and then delivering what you’ve sold them. It really starts with Steven and Mark. I tend to send them somewhere and they go and talk about the next series, and they might probably have two or three meetings and then they’ll pitch me the series once they’ve worked that out between the two of them. And then they go off and write. I stuck them in a very nice hotel in the Atlas mountains where actually they couldn’t escape or do anything apart from write, so that worked very well. And while they’re doing that, I’m sort of setting up everything else: I’m looking at directors’ reels, deciding which directors to use; getting the money together, getting the budgets together; getting the heads of departments; where we’re going to shoot; we’ve got to go and find studios. So quite a lot’s done while we’re waiting for the script. In fact, the scripts come ... (pointedly) ... later. The budget tends to be done before the script, you know, so you have to sort of move it around a bit. I really try and read the script without looking at the budget first, and then there are some things I ask them to change. You know, “Can we not see the helicopter?” You know, quite often you can do things without actually seeing the helicopter. And then other things you’ve got to work out that really is important: they really do want the helicopter there, so we just have to try and find a way around of doing it, really. Production values are amazing now. I think what’s happened is people aren’t any more saying, “It’s just television.” They’re making the best possible show they can, and they’re making it for television.
BENEDICT: You know, I think the final rendering of what we produce is very filmic, very quality. I mean, it stands up on a big screen. There are certain sort of cut-off points to where you can swing a camera, but everywhere that camera goes is exquisite.
NARRATOR: Once the scripts are written and the budget has been worked out, ensuring the show looks as good as it possibly can is largely down to Production Designer Arwel wyn Jones and his team in the Art department.
ARWEL: The way I always describe my job to someone who’s never seen what we do or anything is that what you see on screen that’s not human tends to come via our department. Well, I’m involved from quite early on, from when the script is available, really. You start with making a list of the locations and requirements from that script; work closely with the Locations Department then, and the Director as to what we need to find as location or what we need to build as part of the structure for it. And then from that, then the design process comes. We work on the characters involved and work out what their environment would be. Yeah, I’ve always said they’re individual movies. They’re not like a TV series, you know. And this series, this series definitely is that, you know. They’ve been three little movies.
NARRATOR: And for the Governor’s office, there was only one film series in mind when Arwel and his team set out to create “Sherlock”’s biggest set to date.
ARWEL: The Series 4 is definitely the biggest we’ve done. You know, the sets are bigger. Unfortunately we lost Ken Adams this year, the old designer of the great classic Bond movies, or quite a few of the Bond movies, and I was allowed to have a little bit of an homage to him in Episode 3 because what was scripted essentially became the Bond villain’s lair, you know? So I got to kind of play with that a little bit.
STEVEN: You know, we’ve got brilliant people on this show. I think some of Arwel’s work this year has been absolutely astounding, absolutely brilliant, so you just get very excited. I always get very thrilled when I see what the sets are gonna be like.
ART MALIK (the Governor): The great surprise for me was seeing the set. I mean, I’ve worked on some fairly spectacular big-budget movies and to see sets that remind me of True Lies or the James Bond films that I’ve done, it’s like, “Wow! Okay.”
MARK: Amazing set, directly inspired by our love of James Bond. It’s an underground lair, really! It’s a beautiful, brutalist concrete and glass and rock. It’s fantastic.
ARWEL: What’s nice is that it’s a great script, and when they do up the ante, you have to up your game as well, so, you know, it pushes you. And it’s a great programme to be involved, to be able to do that.
NARRATOR: With the sets created and the cameras in place, the costumes designed and the make-up applied, it’s now the actors’ turn to bring the script to life. But by Series 4, just how do the stories and characters continue to keep us entertained?
MARTIN: With this show, it’s always a fine balance, I think, between maintaining what we have and honouring what we have, but also just moving it on incrementally in tiny ways so it doesn’t just stay stuck.
MARK: If you want the characters to develop, you have to keep thinking what you can do with them. It’s like, what happens if Mrs Watson gets killed and it’s Sherlock’s fault? If you put it like the logline of a movie poster, then you’ve got something new to do.
LOUISE BREALEY: It’s funny, having played Molly - I think it’s seven years - living with a character for that amount of time is an interesting experience. You want to make sure that there is something that’s purely her, always, so I think that’s really interesting, is trying to make sure that there’s something essentially her, but also, you know, a bit of elbow room to, you know, to grow and change.
ANDREW: The real chief pleasure of it is that I feel like I’ve played lots of different parts. He came in as a little geeky guy in Series 1, and that just seems like so long ago. And, yeah, I’ve shot myself twice, and I’ve been in a straitjacket, and I’ve just landed from a helicopter like a rock star, and worn a wedding dress; and yeah, it’s been brilliant.
MARK: A huge part of writing it now is knowing everyone involved and, you know, you can just tailor things to suit. I know how Benedict is going to say things; I know how Martin will say them. That’s the benefit of having done it now for many years: you sort of write it to suit and it happens quite quickly that way.
STEVEN: Ninety minutes is a slot length that makes it have to be a sort of novel-length story as opposed to a short story. If you’re doing a full ninety minutes, to justify ninety minutes people’s lives have to change. You have to say that Sherlock and John go into the episode and come out the other end of it slightly different people.
NARRATOR: And after four series with characters as complex as Sherlock and John, it seems theirs and everyone else’s lives have changed dramatically.
MARTIN: For this show, John and Sherlock’s friendship has to stay central to why the show works.
BENEDICT: Sherlock’s humanisation, I’d say, is complete by the end of this series. It doesn’t mean he drops the ball as far as his brilliance goes.
MARTIN: I think John has definitely been instrumental in the humanising of Sherlock, yes, and that’s Steven and Mark’s idea, obviously, to make that a central theme, you know, to show that Sherlock is brilliant.
NARRATOR: Once filming and editing is finished, there’s one important final stage to complete.
STEVEN: The music in “Sherlock” is intensely important. It can define a scene. Well, with David and Michael, we’ve got just a couple of geniuses that are amazing.
DAVID ARNOLD (Composer): Every episode of “Sherlock” has a score, a musical score and that needs someone to write it and arrange it and record it, and that’s where we come in.
WOMAN in the recording studio: One more like that?
DAVID: One more like that. Can we have a little dim, cello-wise, bar 20, 22 ...
MICHAEL PRICE (who is directing the orchestra): Let’s just do it again from the top, then we’re covered.
MICHAEL (in interview): Really, from the script stage we’ll read the original ideas. Dave and I will talk about what the musical consequences of those stories are. Really from that point starts the process of trying to actually write the many hundreds of thousands of notes that get written!
DAVID: Part of it, as well, is actually conceiving of and creating an identity, musically which - away from the show - will give you a feeling, more than anything, about what’s happening or who it’s happening to.
NARRATOR: With the music scored, a live orchestra is brought in for the final recording.
SUE: It’s now November, quite a long way down the road from April when we started filming, so we’re very near the end now, and this is one of my favourite days.
DAVID: Producers and directors always like scoring days ’cause they can sit down, have a bit of cake and a cup of tea and listen to and, you know, and they enjoy the process.
SUE: I love it, ’cause you just look at a whole load of people doing something that you can’t start to understand. They’ve got their own little scripts - it’s just that it’s all music - and there’s nothing I can say or do. I can just enjoy what they’re doing.
MICHAEL: Today we get the chance to roast as quickly through as we can with these brilliant, brilliant players. I conduct, David produces from inside the control room, and somehow we get through a thick stack of music. One of the key things that makes a recording session go well is that everybody’s focusing at the same thing, which is making that bit of music fit that bit of picture as effectively and as beautifully as possible.
DAVID: It’s a team sport and we are very much a part of this ensemble that creates this beast, which is the show. The show demands certain things, so you accede to those demands. Musically it tells you what it needs and, unless you satisfy that need musically, then you feel that there’s something wrong. So the film and the show is always the governor. It’s always that. It’s a massive amount of work that gets done by an awful lot of people. It always feels like it’s personal, everything that’s written for this show.
(The orchestra finishes playing a piece.)
DAVID: Masterful.
MICHAEL: Beautiful. Thank you very much, everybody.
STEVEN: Every episode has to be a statement about the show. It has to be an attempt to make the best one ever, so everyone has to be operating on all fronts.
ANDREW: There’s a great sense of everybody being involved and I’m just very grateful, really, to be involved with these people.
AMANDA: It’s like coming home to a family, ’cause everyone does really get on and we have a lovely time, so it’s like coming home. I love it.
UNA STUBBS: The thing I love about being in “Sherlock” and I’m so grateful for is the quality of the writing, of the directing, of everything about it. It’s a real quality piece, and I’m very lucky.
SUE: I love “Sherlock.” I am terribly proud of it. It’s a joy to do, and we feel very, very lucky and privileged, I think, to all be a part of it. It doesn’t happen every day.
MARK: “Sherlock” has changed all our lives. It’s just one of those things that occasionally happens, and you’re very, very lucky to be a part of it.
MARTIN: I like being in a hit, and this is a big hit. That you’re proud of yourself is the best thing ever, you know.
BENEDICT: What we’ve done all the way through in this show, I hope, is that we’ve tried to better it. Yeah, it’s popular, but let’s make it more popular rather than just playing to old strengths. I think they’ve come up trumps in this series.
Season 4 DVD extra: ‘Set Tour: John and Mary’s Flat’
ARWEL WYN JONES (Production Designer): We’re just outside the latest incarnation of John and Mary’s flat. There’s a little bit more happening in John and Mary’s this year, so it didn’t make sense really to have to go back to a location and then split into a set, so we built the whole thing. So we’ve seen glimpses of it all along but we’ve never really seen it as an entire home, so we’ll be seeing more of that this time. We’re about three weeks in from the first kind of scribbles on a piece of paper, so not that long really when you think about it. This has taken about a week’s worth of construction so far. There’s paper designs that tend to be little sketches and stuff and then we draw it on a computer and you can build a 3D model in cyberspace so you can work things out, tweak things a little bit. Then after that I like to build a cardboard model, a white card model so that you can hold it in your hands and you can check camera angles a bit better. Then, after that bit, when everyone’s happy with that, then you discuss it with DoP [Director of Photography], Director, Producer. You then get the drawings made up to give to the construction crew and they build it for real.
Well, this is the front door of John and Mary’s. I’ll take you through and show you through. Now this bit is a replica of the actual porchway to go into the exterior we’ve used in the past. This helps us enormously. We’ve been able to do transitions over the doorstep, ’cause we can do a certain amount in the real location and we can do a certain amount inside looking out with the door opening and still have coverage without it having to be a big massive cheat. So it’s, you know, it’s quite a handy little device for getting us into the house.
So this is the inside of John and Mary’s. We’ve had to duplicate some things that we’ve seen before. So we had a very significant wallpaper again, one of my nice little touches. And there were these fitted cupboards that were there, so very distinctive, so we had to duplicate them and make this wall very, very noticeable. And then by looking back the other way we’ve got the stairwell, ’cause that’s also a significant part. So the reason for the stairs to nowhere, as it were, it’s a nice shape. I suppose in our world it goes to another spare bedroom or, you know, it’s a communal hallway upstairs, but it’s a nice feature. It breaks up the wall anyway, so it’s kind of nice.
I’ve kind of given them a nice extension, as it were, but also it gives us a nice space to film in and work in. So this is kind of a nice new kitchen for them.
Features we have in a set, for example, are that wall [behind the sofa] and a bit of that one behind the stairwell. They can float, so they can come out. When we say, ‘float,’ so they can be removed so that the camera can be, as it were, in an impossible situation where you can’t have it in the real world where it’s a solid wall. You can move it so you can get all the equipment there and still be able to see the whole room.
Then, as we come through ... so this is their bedroom, and then this, once again, is a floating wall, so we can remove that. You know, all the camera crew can be looking in from there so that, you know, you’ve got plenty of room.
This is the ensuite bathroom. This is where he famously said he doesn’t shave for Sherlock Holmes.
And then if we come back out here [into the living room], you can see ... Part of the thing about doing a set like this is we can tweak where the walls go, where there’s gaps, where there’s things that wouldn’t maybe be for real, so you’ve got real depth running through from the bedroom right the way through to the living room, and equally backwards when you’re in the living room looking back this way, you’ve got depth and layers of things to shoot through and stuff, so there is always something of interest in the frame.
Season 4 DVD extra: ‘Mark Gatiss Video Diary: On Set’
MARK GATISS: I don’t know if that even worked. I’ll try again. ... Morning. I’m actually at BBC Roath Lock. I’m severely jetlagged, having just come back from Comic-Con, and today is a very big day for “Sherlock.” We have a massive end-of-series montage, the reconstruction of Baker Street at a sort of 360 degree burst of cases. Let’s see how we get on, eh?!
MARK: This is a little mini-tour of what’s left of the studio. Little bits of Morocco; little bits of Culverton Smith wall; all the detritus of a three-month shoot; and then round the corner into Baker Street. Exterior looking a little worse for wear these days. It’s all right, ’cause we’re about to blow it up! (He laughs manically.) Say hello, Glyn.
GLYN RAINER (Floor Runner): Hello.
MARK: Describe your duties in full.
GLYN: I make Mark cups of tea every single day, every hour, every second.
MARK: On the hour. Every second on the hour.
GLYN: Got a little code. (He makes a ‘T’ shape with his hands.)
MARK: Yes. It’s a simple one, and it works; works for us.
GLYN: Yeah. Would you like one now?
MARK (looking into his camera and speaking pointedly): Yes I would, Glyn. Thanks.
GLYN: No problem.
MARK: Right, David Arnold. Explain yourself. Tell us a little about your composition for this end piece.
DAVID ARNOLD (Composer): Well, in the script it said it needs to be the saddest thing ever heard. I guess it says more about Sherlock’s humanity that we don’t get to see all that often. And that’s what music does, isn’t it? I mean, it’s the stuff that we feel that we can’t ever really talk about a lot of the time.
MARK: It comes from a place of sort of shared melancholy.
DAVID: Uh, yes. They both have lost something profound, I think.
MARK: Here’s Rupert Graves.
RUPERT: Hey, hello!
MARK: Speak into this camera.
RUPERT: Hello, camera! How are you? You all right?
MARK: Look! Isn’t it amazing?! It’s a miracle!
RUPERT: I know! Does it work, that camera? It’s tiny. It’s like a little fly.
MARK: It’s a tiny little steadicam, look.
RUPERT: It’s beautiful.
MARK: Is this your last day?
RUPERT: It is.
MARK: Ever?
RUPERT: “Ever”?!
MARK: On Earth?
RUPERT: “On Earth”?!
MARK: Is it The Rapture?!
RUPERT: If it’s The Rapture, I might just become naked and become an angel.
MARK: Yeah?
RUPERT: I might. I’m hoping, anyway.
MARK: What are you doing today? Silent?
RUPERT: I’m doing some silent acting. I’m doing the last scene that I’m ever gonna be in.
MARK: No, not “ever.”
RUPERT: Not ever. I mean, ever gonna be in in this ...
MARK: Yeah.
RUPERT: ... in this, um ...
MARK: ... setup. Series.
RUPERT: ... story. Series, yes.
MARK: Thank you.
RUPERT: Thank you.
MARK (mock-formally): Goodbye.
RUPERT (mock-formally): Goodbye. (He waves and speaks in a silly voice as Mark walks away.) Thanks for coming. Thanks very much.
Season 4 DVD extra: ‘Mark Gatiss Video Diary: Final Scenes’
MARK (pulling awed faces and then whispering as he walks through the kitchen in 221B): Quite creepy, isn’t it. Oh, all the time I’m filming, I’m filming myself! I forgot about it; I keep forgetting!
(He and a nearby woman giggle.)
SOMEONE OFF-CAMERA: Shh!
MARK (whispering): Silence!
(Mark aims his camera into the living room. Benjamin Caron, the Director, looks at him and points at his camera.)
BENJAMIN: Is that filming?
MARK: No! It’s just the way I’m standing.
MAN (possibly the DoP): Mark, could you please join the unit as Second Director?
MARK (turning his camera to film himself): Okay.
MARK (now dressed as Mycroft): And now Mycroft stood up for these little cut-aways which we didn’t get the other day. This is Eurus’ cell, which is ...
(He gets close to the glass and films himself in the reflection, trying to sound like Anthony Hopkins’ version of Hannibal Lecter.)
MARK: I’ve been inside this room eight years now, Clarice. I know they’ll never ever let me out while I’m alive.
Una Stubbs’ last scene, Series 4
The crew applaud. Martin walks over and kisses and hugs Una, then Benedict hugs her, followed by Sue and Mark.
MARK: The sad remains of Baker Street. Look at this! It’s all all right, though. We’ll put it all back together again.
MARK (looking exhausted and half-asleep): There we are. That’s the end of a slightly crazy and very full day. Night-night.
Season 4 DVD extra: ‘Danny Hargreaves Video Diary’
DANNY: Hello. Welcome. I’m Danny Hargreaves. I’m the Physical Special Effects Supervisor for “Sherlock.” Now, what that means is I’m in charge of all the the cool stuff that you see in the show: all the complicated rigs, the bullet hits, the explosions and fires and stuff. And I’m on my way now to a location, a secret location, to do a car explosion. So my team are already at the location. They’ve been doing preparation, getting the car rigged and ready for the big explosion ready for this evening. So when it gets dark, it’ll go bang. There’s many, many things I need to do to prepare for the explosion, one of which is to strip out the car - believe it or not - of all its flammable materials. What we want to try and do is, once it explodes, we want to be able to put it out as quick as possible. You’ve got many, many things to consider when trying to achieve these massive explosions or dramatic sequences. My primary concern is obviously safety. It’s a very dangerous thing that we’re trying to achieve this evening, so it’s taken a number of years to learn what I do; so kids, please don’t go out and blow up cars, okay?!
So this house is quite a historic house for film and TV purposes. I’ve blown up a massive explosion here for Torchwood a long, long time ago. It’s nice to be back, doing another type of explosion.
(To his crew) Okay, we’ve confirmed everything’s running?
WOMAN (offscreen, possibly Rachel Talalay the Director): Okay, everything running.
DANNY: Okay. Start smoking up, then, Don. ... Okay, quick as you like, then, Don. ... Okay, ready?
WOMAN: Ready.
DANNY: Okay, firing: three, two, one!
(The car blows up.)
DANNY (running to the burning car, probably to check that all the explosives went off): Yeah. It’s all ... it’s all gone. Okay.
(Laughing, he high-fives one of the crew.)
DANNY: Thank you. Thank you. (He hugs her.)
Season 4 DVD extra: ‘Timelapse: Building 221B’
[Your transcriber puts her feet up and lights a cigarette, because there are no spoken words in this Special Feature.]
A full list of episode transcripts, DVD commentary summaries/transcripts, and transcripts of the DVD special features can be found here.