Monday’s screenings of Sherlock, a BBC One program, speak volumes as to the relationship between the BBC’s charter, the history of popular culture in Britain, and the success and public image of the channel. There is a unique sense of pride in the BBC, and the channel is quite successful in using advertising and programming to construct this aura of dignity.
We’ve discussed in class how unlike in America, British popular culture centers around the written word. While we focus on the visual—television, movies, and the rise of YouTube can attest to such a notion—Britain has a great tradition of literature that is widely respected and probably held in higher regard than any visual entertainment. Professor Becker even mentioned how John Reith, former Director-General of the BBC, considered television coarse entertainment in the days when the BBC was just a radio corporation.
With such pride in literary history, it should be no surprise such a popular and critically acclaimed program as Sherlock calls the BBC home. Considering the BBC’s mission to “inform, educate, and entertain,” Sherlock is a carefully concocted stew of entertaining drama and elements of British literary greatness, which ultimately help the channel live up to its mission. As the show is fictional, it cannot be considered informational or educational in a scholastic sense like nature documentaries or news programming might be. Rather, though it may be visual entertainment, Sherlock taps into this pride and tradition of great literature through exceptional scriptwriting, acting, and direction. Though it may contain modern elements that make it such an entertaining show, it is also critically successful—“bad” television can be entertaining or popular, but Sherlock lives up to the three elements the BBC defines itself on. The program could be argued to be a continuation of a defining element of British culture.
We saw how important this element of respect for tradition in British culture (in particular, television) in one of the BBC advertisements for 2012 we watched in class. After cutting through a wardrobe with costumes and props of many old British TV shows, a montage of Olympic moments and older British programming (such as Absolutely Fabulous) ran. It is hard to argue that television is vulgar entertainment for the masses after being presented with such a powerful visual reminder of the tradition of the medium. Additionally, such an advertisement stirs up two feelings—patriotism in the tradition of the BBC and the point that such tradition is even being created with current programming. The BBC may get its knocks for various reasons, but it certainly isn’t doing so without a fight.
One of my favorite things about “Sherlock” really relates to how you frame the literary tradition of Britain and its role in contemporary popular culture. I love Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Sherlock Holmes” stories and while there have been many good and many not so good adaptations of the stories, what I love about “Sherlock” is how the modernization of the stories effectively, in my mind, help a modern viewer feel as one of Conan Doyle’s contemporary readers might have reading the stories in the late 19th century. This can’t be entirely true, of course, as we all grew up in some way familiar with the clever and observant sleuth, but I think that Sherlock’s use of technology and the ways his skills of deduction have been updated to what we’re used to amaze us in many ways similar to how Sherlock amazed back in the day. While Guy Ritchie’s films add Hollywood pizazz and flare to the classic stories, “Sherlock” really utilizes its setting not just to appeal to a new audience, but to help capture for them the amazing qualities of Sherlock Holmes himself.