What the Detective Remembered from the Doctor About Transmediality
CB Harvey
Abstract—One of the more prominent examples of transmediality associated with the Sherlock television program is the transmedial storytelling exhibited by the official tie-in web sites that complement and expand the series. In this regard Sherlock is emulating the approach of another long-running franchise, that of the science fiction and fantasy series Doctor Who, also produced by the BBC, and which similarly utilizes tie-in web sites to help deepen the story experience. As I will show in this essay, Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Who’s relationship is enduring, and often transmedial in myriad, unexpected ways. This relationship has often been manifested in the Sherlockian archetypes and iconography encountered by Doctor Who’s eponymous adventurer, even extending to storytelling strands that stretch from the Detective’s world to the Doctor’s universe, especially evident in terms of spinoff material. Sherlock is meanwhile replete with connections to Doctor Who’s past and present that operate on the levels of the intermedial and transmedial. Additionally, there exist structural similarities with regard to the two franchises’ formal approach to the implementation of transmedial content and in terms of production processes and personnel. Employing theoretical conceptions from the diverse field of memory studies and transmedial theory, I will examine these ongoing dynamics, specifically in terms of Sherlock’s web sites but also with regard to the manifold other transmedial exchanges that characterize the relationship between Holmes and Who. The resulting discussion should offer some broader, significant insights into the nature of contemporary transmedial relationships and the role memory plays in attenuating those relationships.
Sherlock Holmes has long exerted an influence on the BBC’s science fiction series Doctor Who. With the advent of Sherlock, the Doctor in his turn exerts an influence on the Great Detective. This extends from the archetypes and aesthetics populating both series to comparable relationships with the news and entertainment media seeking to report on or otherwise publicize the shows. It is evident in Sherlock’s emulation of the transmedia storytelling techniques successfully employed by the makers of the revived, post–2005 Doctor Who and apparent in commonalities in the production teams working on both franchises, commonalities that extend from the programs themselves to supporting transmedial material. A key recurring feature is, of course, Steven Moffat, who acts as the chief creative force driving the two programs.
Central to the ways in which Moffat’s Sherlock echoes Moffat’s Doctor Who are the acts of remembering, misremembering, and forgetting. As well as existing in relationship to each other, both programs exist in relation to the wider mediascape, in which their histories are necessarily implicated. In this essay I will go in search of the transmedial links, intertextual references, intramedial connections and production contexts through which the world’s only consulting detective remembers the last of the Time Lords. In my quest for evidence, I will utilize perspectives from the burgeoning field of memory studies in an analysis of the official Sherlock web sites written by Joseph Lidster, who also authored many comparable Doctor Who web sites. Through these discussions I will seek clues as to how contemporary media franchises transmedially remember their own history and also the past and present of other media.
Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Who can be understood in terms of transmedia storytelling, both having engaged in the activity long before the term was coined. The descriptor “transmedia” is used by Marsha Kinder in her wide-ranging study of children’s consumption of media, in which she identifies their active and cognizant participation in the processes involved in negotiating meaning across media platforms. Kinder suggests that the “fairly consistent form of transmedia intertextuality” these young consumers engage in is promulgated by media producers (1993). According to Kinder, children are encouraged to identify, differentiate, and merge iconography from popular genres, often working across media.
Henry Jenkins identifies transmedia storytelling as a specific kind of storytelling in which narratives sharing a storyworld are told across different media platforms (Jenkins 2008). For this process to work, consumers—in this case not just children—are encouraged to become “hunters and gatherers,” tracking the narratives across disparate media platforms and sharing their experiences with other such consumers (Jenkins 2008). The associated branding and promotion of transmedia products relies on the assumption that the consumer is “a more active spectator who can and will follow these media flows” than is ordinarily the case (Jenkins 2006). Jonathan Gray observes a key component for some—media producers and fans alike—is that transmedial storyworlds need to be “inhabitable,” in other words the fictional world offers rich enough experiences that the consumer feels he or she wants to repeatedly immerse themselves in the environment (2010,187).
As Jon Dovey has observed, for the term transmedia storytelling to possess any legitimacy, it must be a distinct process from that of adaptation and/or dramatization, enlarging the fictional universe rather than merely translating a particular story from one medium to another (2011). This is a point echoed by Joseph Lidster, author of the various Sherlock tie-in web sites, who argues that “the web sites can’t just regurgitate what we see on the screen; otherwise, there’s no point to them” (Lidster 2011).
Transmedia intertextuality provides a framework to discuss the ways in which the first series of Sherlock is informed by the fifth series of the revived Doctor Who, outside of specific diegetic connections between the storyworlds of the two franchises. As I will explore, such story connections are inherited from previous iterations of both franchises across a variety of media forms, and are not explicitly articulated within either of the contemporary series. However, the trace memories of such linkages can be understood as informing the dynamics between the two shows, and between the shows and their audiences.
Intertextual references suggest conscious or unconscious allusions on the part of the creators of the media artifact to other media or cultural artifact(s). Intertextual references within the same medium, for example, television, utilizing its specific audiovisual language, can be understood as intramedial (Rajewsky 2005). Intertextual references that cross the boundaries from one media platform to another can be understood as transmedial or intermedial. Since Sherlock’s source material is constituted in the main by the original Sir Arthur Conan Doyle prose stories, it is primarily engaged in transmedial activity. As I will demonstrate, however, there is a palimpsestic quality to this, whereby other iterations of Sherlock Holmes adapted for media such as television and film also influence the Sherlock series, in terms of both remembering and deliberate forgetting: crucially, Sherlock is a memory but it is also a memory of a memory.
Clearly, transmedial storytelling and intertextual references (the latter constituted as transmedial and intramedial activity) rely for their success on the provocation of appropriate memories possessed by the audience. Whether consciously or subconsciously, both transmedial storytelling and intertextual referencing call upon the consumer of the media artifact to recall some aspect of another artifact or series of artifacts. Without such recall, the impact of the transmedial and intertextual is lost. In the case of transmedial storytelling, this involves recalling points of diegesis from the original artifact or artifacts that are then picked up again by the destination story. An intertextual reference, by contrast, might consist of an image or archetype which is referred to by the newer narrative but which does not necessarily directly tie to the diegesis of the earlier story. Crucially, as with intertexual references, while a process of remembering is central to the enterprise of transmedia storytelling, a process of forgetting or non-remembering—and sometimes of deliberate mis-remembering—is also important. What is not referred to is at least as important as what is referred to.
Evidently, then, ideas of remembering, mis-remembering and forgetting ought to be central to this discussion, and an appropriate academic framework is required. The emergent field of memory studies offers useful mechanisms for framing such a discussion. For instance, a continuing important debate within the field is the interrelationship between subjective and collective memory, helpful for contextualizing forthcoming discussions of continuity and canonicity with regard to Sherlock and its relationship to Doctor Who. Indeed, the sociologist Barbara Misztal makes understanding the interrelationship between subjective and collective remembering central to the understanding of memory more broadly (Misztal 2003), while Jenny Kidd builds on the view that although memory is psychologically located, it is articulated through culture and through language (Kidd 2009).
As I will show, Sherlock remembers Doctor Who, just as Doctor Who has in the past frequently remembered Sherlock Holmes. Disentangling where one kind of remembering ends and where another begins is a complex task, however, rendered all the more complicated by the frequent overlaps between instances of the transmedial, the intermedial, the intramedial, and the intertextual, not to mention the production contexts of the two programs.
From its inception, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s creations of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson proved very successful at the time and attracted many fans and imitators.
This popularity meant that Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, characters and motifs transported to film, theatre, radio, comic books, and video games, adapted with varying degrees of fidelity to the source material. In addition to straightforward adaptations, the figure of Holmes—and also Watson, as well as other characters and elements of the stories—have been repurposed in a wide variety of contexts. This suggests Conan Doyle’s creations possess a seemingly contradictory blend of distinctiveness but also sufficient mutability to enable them to traverse specific media artifacts and also to cross from one medium to another.
The same might be said of Doctor Who, and might similarly account for its longevity relative to other television programs. The series first appeared on the BBC in 1963, continuing until 1989 when it was effectively cancelled. It returned fleetingly in 1996 for a television movie co-produced by the BBC and Amblin Entertainment, but for the most part survived for nearly two decades in the form of tie-in and fan products. In 2005, BBC Cardiff launched a new iteration of the series, under the auspices of Russell T. Davies.
As with the Sherlock Holmes stories, as well as lending itself to straightforward adaptations—novels, two feature films, stage plays—over the years Doctor Who has spawned new stories across multiple spinoff media. Early examples of such spinoffs tended to offer only marginal fidelity with the television series, sometimes flatly contradicting events on screen. Later merchandizing tended toward greater faithfulness, reflecting the BBC’s current construction of Doctor Who as a transmedia brand.
If the early series of Doctor Who borrowed most obviously from H.G. Wells and the idea of the Victorian explorer, by the time of Jon Pertwee (1970–1974) the Holmesian influences are altogether clearer. The character of the Master was introduced by then producer Barry Letts as a “Moriarty” to the Doctor’s Holmes, and Roger Delgado’s portrayal assiduously obeyed that template. During the so-called gothic era of Doctor Who, when Phillip Hinchcliffe was producer and Robert Holmes script editor, Sherlockian iconography is recurrent. It is most obvious in the 1976 serial The Talons of Weng Chiang, in which Tom Baker’s Doctor dons deerstalker and cape in a deliberate transmedial echo of Basil Rathbone’s cinematic version of Holmes. Indeed, Baker himself makes the point that this particular story led to him being cast as Holmes in the later film version of The Hound of the Baskervilles (Baker 1997), a further example of the palimpsistic character of some transmedial activity.
Fittingly for this discussion, conceptions of what constitutes canon in Doctor Who have drawn upon precedents established by Sherlock Holmes fandom. As Lance Parkin observes, the definition of the term canon with regard to Doctor Who is informed both by F.R. Leavis’ “Grand Tradition” and also by the Biblical conception of “canon” (Parkin 2007). An additional “third meaning of the word ‘canon’ is used by fans of the Sherlock Holmes stories” to describe the fifty-six short stories and four novels authored by Conan Doyle but excluding an additional range of Sherlock Holmes material which we might (at least in some cases) identify as transmedial—a plot outline, self-parodies, and stage plays—also written by Conan Doyle (Parkin 2007, 246–262). According to Parkin, Doctor Who fans negotiate those aspects of the spinoff media they consider canon leading to the oxymoronic idea of personal canon: arguably a canon is only canon if it is agreed upon collectively by a mass of participants. This in turn recalls the complexity involved in accounting for the subjective and collective with regard to memory (Kidd 2009; Misztal 2003).
For some fans, Doctor Who can be understood as one continuing story across multiple media platforms, taking in the television series but also associated audio adventures, novels, short stories, comic strips, graphic novels, video games, stage plays, and web sites (Wood 2007).
Those fans engaging with both Moffat’s Sherlock and Moffat’s Doctor Who might therefore perceive diegetic links between the two series in addition to the transmedial intertextual links through which Doctor Who has remembered Sherlock Holmes. Two Doctor Who spinoff novels published by Virgin—Andy Lane’s All-Consuming Fire (1994) and Paul Cornell’s Happy Endings (1996)—in fact feature Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson as characters. The Faction Paradox range, itself a spinoff from the Doctor Who spinoff books, features Kelly Hale’s Erasing Sherlock (2006), in which a young doctoral candidate travels back in time to observe Holmes’ early career. Jago and Litefoot is an ongoing series of audio adventures produced by Big Finish and featuring two characters who originally appeared in the Doctor Who television serial The Talons of Weng Chiang, in which the echoes of Holmes and Watson remain resonant. Though explicitly connecting the classic rather than “Nu” era of Doctor Who to Sherlock Holmes, such spinoff media can be seen as part of a wider tapestry, of which Sherlock and the new Doctor Who are necessarily also a part.
Within the diegesis of the new Doctor Who television there exist a number of junctures at which “facts” about the Whoniverse are utilized from spinoff media, thus arguably legitimizing such media in its entirety. On this basis there is therefore a transmedial flow moving from the original Sherlock stories and their adaptations via the classic television series of Doctor Who and its spinoff media, which in their turn inform post–2005 Doctor Who and, by extension, the Sherlock series. Clearly such memories are little more than traces, evident to few but hidden to many, again recalling the tension between subjective and collective memory.
The production contexts in which Sherlock and Doctor Who are produced add an additional layer of complexity to discussions of the transmedial and intertextual. Steven Moffat is the most obvious point of commonality, producing and acting as lead writer on both series, having previously written a number of critically well-regarded episodes for the first four series of the revived Doctor Who when it was produced by Russell T. Davies. Sherlock, like the new Doctor Who, is made at the BBC’s base in Cardiff, Wales. Euros Lyn, a frequent director on the new Doctor Who, directed the second episode of Sherlock, entitled “The Blind Banker.” Mark Gatiss, Moffat’s co-creator and author of Sherlock’s third episode “The Great Game,” also plays the recurring character of Mycroft in Sherlock; Gatiss wrote for the first, second, third and fifth series of the new Doctor Who, as well as appearing in several episodes. Gatiss’ involvement in Big Finish-produced Doctor Who audio productions as writer and performer constitutes a way by which Doctor Who spinoff media is sutured with the “official” iteration of the show and linked by extension to Sherlock.
These myriad intersections between textual and production crossovers are further exemplified in the way the separation between on-screen intertextuality and off-screen production context is easily elided. The July 27, 2010 edition of the British tabloid newspaper The Sun carried a story headlined “Holmes: I turned down Dr Who job” (www.thesun.co.uk). The article contends that Benedict Cumberbatch refused the role of Doctor Who, having been offered it at the conclusion of David Tennant’s tenure. The reason Cumberbatch gives in the article is the worry of typecasting, saying “I didn’t really like the whole package—being on school lunchboxes.” Again, this suggests the tension between subjective and collective conceptions of remembering, except that this time it is anticipatory, itself built on Cumberbatch’s perception—and therefore memory—of how past actors have had to subjectively cope with the experience of being remembered in a collective fashion by an adoring fanbase.
The article further maintains that Cumberbatch might yet be offered the role once Matt Smith, the incumbent Doctor, chooses to give it up. This particular association—and the fact that both shows were nominated for BAFTAS in 2011, with Sherlock winning—further reinforces the links between the two shows, potentially re-inscribing any future performances by Cumberbatch in the role of Holmes with this intertextual trace; or at least enhancing this trace for those audience members who have already made the association. Additionally, should Cumberbatch eventually take up the role of the Doctor, this will carry intramedial intertextual associations of Sherlock for subsequent viewers of Doctor Who.
Since 2005 the BBC have sought to exploit the transmedia potential of the new series of Doctor Who in a more considered fashion than ever happened with regard to the “classic” iteration of the show. The success of this strategy is reflected in the BBC’s belief that Doctor Who now constitutes the paradigm for transmedia storytelling to the extent that other properties owned by the Corporation should emulate this approach (Perryman 2008), although as Elizabeth Jane Evans demonstrates the BBC’s Spooks had previously utilized web games for the purposes of transmedial storytelling (2008). In the case of post–2005 Doctor Who this transmedial storytelling extends from the television shows to novels, comic serials in the officially licensed Doctor Who Magazine published by Panini, to graphic novels, a role-playing game, video games, and a toy range produced by Character Options (Richards 2005).
An important aspect of the wider transmedia storytelling process are the web sites tied to the new series of Doctor Who. These range from largely prose-based ‘fake’ web sites ‘updated’ by characters or organizations mentioned in the diegesis of the show, to short stories and web comics written by authors responsible for other spinoff artifacts, such as officially licensed audio dramas, novels and comics. Doctor Who’s two BBC produced spinoff shows, the adult-oriented Torchwood (BBC 2006– ) and child-oriented The Sarah Jane Adventures (BBC 2007–2010) both utilize similar transmedial techniques.
Perryman identifies the Doctor Who metatextual web sites in terms of what Will Brooker has characterized as “television overflow,” in which media producers use the Internet to enhance the television program and afford interaction with it (2008, 29). In encouraging audience interaction with the ur-text, the Sherlock tie-in web sites might be seen as borrowing an approach trialed with other BBC programs but exemplified by Doctor Who. The transmedia intertextuality promoted by producers of children’s media and identified by Kinder has conceivably spread to adult consumers, perhaps aging with them as they have themselves aged (1993).
As with the links between the Sherlock program itself and the wider Doctor Who franchise, connections between the transmedial storytelling aspects of the two franchises are evidenced in the production processes governing the Sherlock web sites. The Sherlock tie-in web sites were all written by Joseph Lidster, well-known in Doctor Who fandom for authoring many BBC-licensed audio dramas produced by Big Finish. More recently, Lidster has written for both The Sarah Jane Adventures and Torchwood television programs, and has also authored Torchwood radio plays. Most significantly in this context, Lidster additionally wrote tie-in metatextual web sites for Doctor Who, including the MySpace page for Martha Jones (played by Freema Agyeman), the Doctor’s main companion in Series Three of the revived program. My discussion of the Sherlock web sites is augmented throughout by insights offered by Lidster during an interview conducted in February 2011.
For the most part, the Sherlock web sites constitute an example of what Jason Mittell has described as “centrifugal transmedial storytelling,” radiating outward from the ur-text of the television program (2011). Each site borrows thematic concerns, plot points and characters from the Sherlock program which Lidster then extemporizes around, largely limiting himself to material derived from the television show rather than the Conan Doyle source material (Lidster 2011).
One of the Sherlock web sites, “The Science of Deduction,” purports to be written by Sherlock Holmes himself (www.thescienceofdeduction.co.uk). The title is set against a stripped backwash which serves to frame the web site’s written material, displaying an image of central London—the view from the South Bank, including the Thames and St. Paul’s Cathedral—remembering aspects of the credit sequence from the Sherlock program and associated branding of the program. A series of buttons runs across the top of the main section, entitled Home, Forum, Hidden messages, and Case files. An image of blue lights causing lens flare also evokes the program’s content, the haziness of the picture suggesting an ambiguous, fuzzy attitude toward law and order.
The accompanying text, written in first person, tells us that Sherlock Holmes is “the world’s only consulting detective,” rearticulating a central premise from the original stories. Here, though, the phrase is elevated to become the franchise’s “high concept,” uniting the different iterations of the Sherlock transmedial product. The approach is comparable to that employed in the post–2005 Doctor Who, in which the eponymous hero is constructed as “The Last of the Time Lords.” In both cases such slogans connect the ur-text of the television program to the web site in question but they are clearly chosen because they represent something essential about the premise, in both instances associated with the significance of the central character’s individuality. In these instances the importance of storyworlds being seen as “inhabitable” in terms outlined by Gray may owe much to the quirky allure of the central character and the idea that the fans would want to spend time with the character, or indeed be the character (2010, 187).
The prose element of the site goes on to explain that the author will not go “into detail about how I do what I do because chances are you wouldn’t understand,” invoking Sherlock’s aloof attitude from the series but also remembering a key characteristic from both the original stories and other iterations. The author goes on to tell us that he can be contacted about “Interesting cases,” before explaining his criteria for investigating criminal cases:
This is what I do:
1. I observe everything.
2. From what I observe, I deduce everything.
3. When I’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how mad it might seem, must be the truth [www.thescienceofdeduction.co.uk].
This list clearly reinvents the archetypal Sherlockian conceit from Conan Doyle’s stories: “When you eliminate the impossible whatever remains—however improbable—must be the truth.” In so doing, the web site’s prose remains consistent with the Sherlock series’ transformation of key aspects of the original stories. The approach to remembering the source material remains the same, because the transmedia product dictates it should. Lidster admits that he was not able to use the Conan Doyle source material as much as he would have liked, “because you never know what Steven [Moffat] and Mark [Gatiss] will want to use in the TV series” (2011).
Clearly, those concerned in the creation of the Sherlock program maintain strong links with those involved in the creation of the complementary web sites. Lidster’s close ties with the Sherlock program’s chief architects recall Gray’s contention that some media producers ‘see the creation of [the] paratext as part of the act of creating the text in general’ (2010:214). Interestingly this is a departure from Lidster’s experience of working on the Doctor Who web sites, where he had less direct contact with Russell T. Davies or any of the television writers; Lidster suggests that this might be because the Sherlock team is considerably smaller (2011).
Sherlock’s particular, studiously selective approach to remembering or discounting its own history is consistent with the post–2005 Doctor Who franchise in terms of its attitude to its past as manifested in the series proper and the associated spinoff media. In the Sherlock television program a “three pipe problem” transforms into a “three patch problem,” alluding to Holmes’ attempts to give up smoking and securing a transformation of the character from the Basil Rathbone archetype—deerstalker, cape, pipe—to a suitably contemporary reinvention. A comparable process is evident with regard to the setting of both the series and the web sites in contemporary London as opposed to the source material’s then contemporary setting in the late Victorian/early Edwardian period. This recalls the point about the fixedness of the Sherlock character and the character’s seemingly contradictory mutability but also suggests a comparable tension between the rigidity and fluidity of the wider Sherlock Holmes format: while aspects of the character and his milieu are retained and entrenched, other aspects can be satisfactorily discarded by drawing attention to their absence. Our prior knowledge means that we are aware of what we are being asked to forget.
While retaining fidelity with both the Sherlock series and refracting elements of the original stories, the official Sherlock web sites must simultaneously intramedially evoke the approach of specific kinds of web site. In the case of “The Science of Deduction,” this takes the form of a kind of help site for individuals wanting assistance. According to Lidster, “Some of the ‘archived case files’ are variations of Conan Doyle titles” (2011). The intention, clearly, is that these references are offered up to fans in possession of suitable prior knowledge of Sherlock Holmes: in other words they are fragments of memory designed for Jenkins’ “hunters and gatherers” to seek out.
Scrolling down the homepage reveals the title “Latest Forum Activity” with “Found. The Bruce-Partington Plans. Please collect. The Pool. Midnight—SH.” Referencing the content of the show directly, this fractured approach is consistent with the series and its thoroughly engaged attitude to new media, whereby Conan Doyle’s source material is reimagined in terms of new technologies. As Lamerichs observes elsewhere in this volume, the deployment of technology in the context of Sherlock is presented unobtrusively, as a “perfect fit” (2011, 6).
Lidster in fact suggests that there are clues and jokes embedded in each of the web sites and indeed “Characters crossover from one web site to another and have little storylines of their own” (2011). Again, for such techniques to succeed, the consumer of Kinder’s transmedia (Kinder 1993) and Jenkins’ transmedia storytelling (Jenkins 2006) must be suitably active. Such techniques also recall Misztal’s conception of “culture’s active meaning-making” whereby individuals’ personal experience has to be actively transfigured to become part of the collective memory (Hamilton 2010).
Dr. John Watson’s blog supplies a series of entries commenting on the events of the television series as they transpired (2010; www.johnwatsonblog.co.uk). In the right hand corner of the screen, adjacent to a picture of Martin Freeman portraying Watson, is a description of the character headed “About me” and consistent with the approach of this kind of blog. Watson describes himself as “an experienced medical doctor recently returned from Afghanistan.” These character details are remembered from Conan Doyle’s original version of A Study in Scarlet, though clearly attenuated for the contemporary context of the Sherlock series and the supporting transmedial framework.
Watson’s entries begin with fairly nonsensical notes of the kind made by someone trying to grapple with new technology, again consistent with Freeman’s portrayal of Watson in Sherlock. As the entries progress further details about Watson’s personal life are revealed: in one entry Watson talks of going drinking with his rugby club friends, consistent with a figure heralding from a military background. Other entries concentrate on adumbrating the character of Holmes as perceived by Watson. The entry for February 7, entitled “A Study in Pink,” voices Watson’s surprise that while Sherlock is able to deduce facts from limited details he knows nothing of more commonplace details.
This morning, for example, he asked me who the Prime Minister was. Last week he seemed to genuinely not know the Earth goes round the Sun. Seriously. He didn’t know. He didn’t think the Sun went round the Earth or anything. He just didn’t care. I still can’t quite believe it. In so many ways, he’s the cleverest person I’ve ever met but there are these blank spots that are almost terrifying [2010; www.johnwatsonblog.co.uk].
As with the details about Watson’s military and medical experience, the sentiments of this passage are remembered from A Study in Scarlet via the Sherlock program. Such memories are both constituted by a process of adaptation and transmedial extension, a process which might again be seen as palimpsistic in its remembering of a memory. Once again, similar strategies are employed here as have come to characterize post–2005 Doctor Who: a biography for the character of Sarah Jane Smith contains some memories but omits others, in an attempt to finesse the character’s insertion into the franchise’s contemporary transmedial diegesis. Watson’s blog is in its turn alluded to in the third episode of the Sherlock television series, with Sherlock angry at Watson for revealing his lack of basic knowledge concerning astronomy.
Arguably, however, this particular instance constitutes an inversion of the dominant centrifugal mode of transmedia storytelling that otherwise constitutes the relationship between the television series and the web sites (Mittell 2011). The appearance of Dr. Watson’s blog prior to the airing of the third episode in the first series arguably renders this particular example a kind of “centripetal transmedial storytelling,” informing the program rather than vice versa. This perhaps suggests that temporality is liable to disrupt the spatial parameters by which centrifugal or centripetal definitions of transmedia storytelling are otherwise determined.
Other of the web sites authored by Lidster deal with supporting characters from the Sherlock program. “Molly Hooper” is constructed as a blog-cum-diary for the character of the same name from the first episode of Sherlock, “A Study in Pink” (2010; www.mollyhooper.co.uk). A garish wallpaper backwash surrounds text written in pink; three kittens adorn the perimeter of the frame. A series of dates travels vertically down the right hand side of the web page, offering links to entries supplied by Molly Hooper. The entry marked April 1 sits at the top center of the page and is followed by this prose:
Jim, are you reading this? I’m sorry we argued and I don’t mind if you’re gay or not but where are you? Please, I miss you and I’m worried about you! Why aren’t you answering your phone? And why aren’t you at work? Your manager’s going mental! Please!! Just get in touch!! Let me know you’re okay!! [2010; www.mollyhooper.co.uk].
Again, the web site must simultaneously echo the Sherlock series and its refracted idea of the Conan Doyle original, whilst also intramedially deploying tropes and techniques familiar from a particular, popular genre of web site. Necessarily the idiom is contemporary and suited both to the character as established in the corresponding episode from the television series and to the particular instance of the online blog. Clearly the web site is not intended to be an entirely realist rendering of comparable web sites: just as the series itself plays with the audience’s prior knowledge of the Sherlock Holmes stories to ironic effect, the Molly Hooper web site utilizes our existing appreciation of the blog genre of web site.
Lidster makes the point that “it’s often easier to use the more secondary characters such as Mickey Smith in Doctor Who or Molly Hooper in Sherlock as I can have more fun with them without disrupting the television episodes’ narrative” (2011). Once again, the interplay between subjective experience and a communal experience is brought to the fore: Lidster stresses the importance for himself—as a writer—of telling a story personal to him, while at the same time remaining consistent with the storyworld established by the Sherlock television program. Evidently—unsurprisingly—the creators of Sherlock are as subject to competing memories as the audience of the program Lamerichs identifies (2011).
According to Lidster, the processes governing the production of material for the Sherlock web sites echoed that of the processes by which the Doctor Who web sites he worked on were produced (2011). In both cases he was given access to scripts and rough edits of the episode in question. Lidster was then able to discuss those fertile elements in the scripts he thought could be tied to online content with the producer of both the relevant television episode and those responsible for producing the online content. Once agreed, he would work on the material before handing it over for online development. Again this illustrates the symmetries guiding the transmedial development of Sherlock with the post–2005 Doctor Who, as well as reinforcing Hoskins’ point that collective memory is not just “directed and made visible through new media technologies” but simultaneously formed by media cultures and through the practices of those media professionals constituting those media cultures (Hoskins 2009).
The transmedial and intertextual linkages between Sherlock and Doctor Who are manifold and complex. In part this arises from the longevity of Sherlock Holmes as a popular fiction figure and the relative longevity of Doctor Who in televisual terms. That the two icons remain so linked in the popular imagination may owe much to the influence of the original Sherlock Holmes stories, their formal characteristics and subsequent media adaptations on both the format and diegesis of Doctor Who; and the influence of both icons on the current generation of producers, writers and performers in relation to both Sherlock and Doctor Who, an influence that is often palimpsestically realized.
The diegetic links between the storyworlds of the first series of Sherlock and the fifth series of Doctor Who, inherited from the “classic” era of Doctor Who, are a matter of negotiation on the part of fandom and subject to conceptions of continuity and canonicity. More broadly, arguably digitality—DVDs, web sites, mobile technology—abets fandom’s ability to check “facts” and immerse themselves in the object of their fascination, so that contemporary transmedia storytelling strives for consistency where spinoff merchandizing in the past was content with only broad fidelity to the style of the show. In addition, digitality facilitates “peer-produced relationships” (Hoskins 2009), rendering easier and more immediate the ability of fans to discuss with one another specific memories concerning the piece of transmedia storytelling. Digitality also, of course, allows the fanbase to access medium-specific material that expands the storyworld of the program, such as the web sites authored by Joseph Lidster for both Sherlock and Doctor Who. For at least a proportion of the fan base of Sherlock and Doctor Who, the multiple, enduring relationships connecting the two franchises are a subject for explicit discussion, informed as much by a knowledge of commonalities in production personnel and processes as by textual links.
Just as fans of both programs struggle to reconcile their subjective memory of either program with collective ideas of canon—some fans engaging with the web sites, others choosing not to participate in such transmedial storytelling, others perhaps ignorant of the web sites’ existence, despite the BBC’s marketing—so do the production crews. In creating the transmedial landscape of Sherlock, Moffat, Gatiss, Lidster, and other individuals are negotiating their own subjective experiences—of Conan Doyle’s stories, of other iterations of Sherlock Holmes, of authoring Doctor Who in a wide variety of production contexts—with a shared, transmedial memory of what Sherlock Holmes is.
Indeed, the transmedial, intramedial, and intertextual aspects linking Sherlock to Doctor Who are further complicated by the production contexts of both shows and the production contexts of the transmedia storytelling supporting the two shows. These associations are palpable and extensive, and are reflected in the media reportage of the two series. In some cases individuals working on both shows also serve to link Doctor Who’s transmedial past with its transmedial present, and in doing so link Sherlock with its own past and that of Doctor Who.
Importantly, while the Sherlock tie-in web sites articulate the memory of the Sherlock series through transmedia storytelling and transmedial intertextual references, they are also tasked with emulating the web site as a medium. Not only that, they must also remember specific kinds of web site: the help site, the blog, the diary. Transmediality and intertextuality suggest a merging and a convergence of form; but in order for the transmedial to function, a specificity of medium—and of genre—must evidently remain distinct. In its blend of distinctiveness and flexibility of format, the Sherlock Holmes storyworld has lent itself to transmedia storytelling and intertextual borrowing while simultaneously retaining its beguiling identity. In an era in which transmedia storytelling has become considerably more formalized, the case of the detective offers manifold clues as to a future that will assuredly become more transmedial.
Baker, Tom. 1997. Who on earth is Tom Baker? An autobiography. London: HarperCollins.
Brooker, Will. 2003. Overflow and audience. In The audience studies reader, ed. Will Brooker and Deborah Jermyn, 322–335. London: Routledge
Cohen, Gillian. 1996. Memory in the real world. East Sussex: Psychology Press.
Cornell, Paul. 1996. Happy endings (New Doctor Who adventures). London: Virgin.
Dovey, Jon. 2011. “Web drama? Designing transmedial narrative.” Technologies of Transmediality Conference. Bristol, January, 8.
Gray, Jonathan. 2010. Show sold separately: Promos, spoilers, and other media paratexts. New York: New York University Press
Hamilton, Paula. 2010. A long war: Public memory and the popular media. In Memory: Histories, theories, debates, ed. Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwartz, 299–311. New York: Fordham University Press.
Harvey, CB. 2010. Canon, myth, and memory in Doctor Who. In The mythological dimensions of Doctor Who, ed. Anthony Burdge, Jessica Burke, and Kristine Larsen, 22–36. Crawfordville: Kitsune Books.
Hoskins, Andrew. 2009. The mediatisation of memory. In Save as: Digital memories, ed. Joanne Garde-Hansen, Andrew Hoskins, and Anna Reading, 27–43. London: Palgrave.
Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Fans, bloggers, and gamers: Essays on participatory culture. New York: New York University Press.
_____. 2008. Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York: New York University Press.
Kidd, Jenny. 2009. Digital storytelling and the performance of memory. In Save as: Digital memories, ed. Joanne Garde-Hansen, Andrew Hoskins, and Anna Reading, 167–183. London: Palgrave.
Kinder, Marsha. 1993. Playing with power in movies, television, and video games. London: University of California Press.
Lane, Andy. 1994. All-consuming fire (New Doctor Who adventures). London: Virgin.
Lidster, Joseph. 2011. Interview by CB Harvey. February 28.
Misztal, Barbara. 2003. Theories of social remembering. Maidenhead: Open University Press.
Mittell, Jason. 2011. Strategies of storytelling on transmedia television. Storyworlds Across Media conference. Mainz, June 30.
Parkin, Lance. 2007. Canonicity matters: defining the Doctor Who canon. In Time and relative dissertations in space: Critical perspectives on Doctor Who, ed. David Butler, 246–262. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Perryman, Neil. 2008. Doctor Who and the convergence of media: A case study in transmedia storytelling. Convergence 14: 21–39.
Rajewsky, Irina O. 2005. Intermediality, intertextuality, and remediation: A literary perspective on intermediality. Intermedialities 6: 43–64.
Wood, Tat. 2007. About time: The unauthorized guide to Doctor Who 1985–1989, Seasons 22 to 26, the TV Movie. Des Moines: Mad Norwegian Press.