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RUSSELL: How long did it take you to find the kind of style of how you wanted them both to dress?
STEVEN: Oh! That’s a good question ... and I pass it over to people who understand those things!
SUE: Well, the Coat ... we wanted something iconic but modern, but without being modern just for the sake of it.
RUSSELL: Yeah. You didn’t wanna put him in a puffer jacket.
MARK: In the original stories all it really says is that ‘he has a certain quiet primness of dress’; and in the illustrations he wears what an average Victorian man would wear – the frock coat – and he looks very neat. So that sort of formed the suits, didn’t it, with a bit of colour. But the Coat is one of those things, and Ray Holman, who was the original costume designer, found this incredible Coat. You know it when you see it. He put that little detail of the red buttonhole in, actually – he just sewed that in, which was lovely. But it’s a Hero Coat. We also did a funny thing, because we knew – unlike last time – that these stories weren’t gonna be set in the depths of winter, and in fact eventually we would be filming in the summer, that maybe Sherlock should have a summer version, a lighter weight one; and Sarah Arthur made one, and it just didn’t work. It has to have the weight, doesn’t it? It looked curious, very curious.
RUSSELL: What time of year was this, when we shot it?
MARK: This was May, but eventually we went on into July.
SUE: Well, we finished in August.
MARK: And that’s why we don’t do more than three a year, dear listener!
STEVEN: Three a year is actually an epically large number when you consider that they are ninety minutes long ... and really good! Stop whingeing!
In answer to Russell’s question, they explain that it was the BBC’s decision to ask them for three ninety-minute episodes after initially commissioning them to do six sixty-minute episodes. They think the BBC’s decision came about because of the recent success of Wallender.
STEVEN: We were pulled out of our read-through for Doctor Who, weren’t we, with you on the phone saying, ‘They want to do it but they want to do it as three nineties,’ and we just said, ‘Well, YES!’ I think ninety has really suited it. It just gives you space to do the scenes that you’d never get round to. We’d never have had that Christmas Day scene in a sixty-minute episode.
(As Henry is terrorised by the goings-on in his garden)
STEVEN: This is a ... I have to say two things: beautifully shot by Paul McGuigan, absolutely amazingly shot; but it’s a brand new scary idea from Mark Gatiss. I remember reading this and thinking, ‘This is new! The security light coming on and something’s out there – this is absolutely new! I am reading a new scary thing!’
RUSSELL: And what about the performance?
STEVEN: Yeah, well, d’you know, there was always one thing!
MARK: Where I write in my house, the security light is very eccentric ...
SUE (as Henry goes closer to the window and something thumps against it): This makes me jump every time.
MARK: ... and [my security light] just popped on and you just go, ‘Woah, what – there’s something has caused that.’ Probably just a squirrel.
RUSSELL: I love the music coming in. This’ll be good for my show reel!
MARK: D’you remember, Russ, I actually talked you through ...
RUSSELL: You did, yeah! You were sitting there behind the kitchen island. You were sitting there ...
MARK: ... forever, until eventually I stripped the stage direction down ’cause I thought ...
RUSSELL: ... ‘he’s got it now’!
MARK: Yeah. ‘He gets off of the sofa. He gets the gun. He is frightened.’
MARK: This is the lovely Sasha [Behar], who is the dishiest Doctor Mortimer there’s ever been.
STEVEN: We used that, didn’t we, because that’s how Sherlock gets [John] to say, ‘Why should I go and interview her?’ ‘’Cause she looks like this’!
MARK: Martin has a real thing about talking to himself as a character. People don’t really do it, although I have to say ...
STEVEN: I do it endlessly!
MARK: I was doing it this morning: I was taking Bunsen for a walk and I was going through a list in my mind and thought, ‘I am actually doing this.’ You would never do this in a film – it looks too ridiculous.
RUSSELL: I always walk along the street doing lines and really exaggerated facial expressions. People must think I’ve got something seriously wrong with me.
MARK: You do have a reputation for that(!)
STEVEN: Crazy Tovey.
SUE: Steven has that: you walk around – depending on whether it’s comedy or drama – you walk around either laughing hysterically at yourself on the street ...
RUSSELL: ... or crying.
MARK: ... or stabbing people.
STEVEN: On the days when I was writing comedy, I just looked happy but mental; but then when I was writing Doctor Who it was the worst thing to write because you end up just seething – you’re thinking ... [he puts on an evil voice] ‘So, Doctor ...’. I remember once waiting for a plane and taking my laptop off to a corner – as I thought – and thought, ‘Right, I can just do some more Doctor Who,’ and I was doing it out loud: I was going [in an evil voice], ‘The Vashta Nerada, they are over-running the Library!’ and when I finally got up and turned around, there was a guy sitting directly behind me, and he was sitting a little rigidly! I don’t know why he didn’t have me arrested! I must have sounded like a mad terrorist!
MARK: They even sound like a terrorist! ‘Apparently the Vashta Nerada are going to strike ... at Heathrow.’
Sue points out that the tor on which Sherlock stands the morning after his breakdown is called Hound Tor.
MARK: And that – fact fans – is where [the Doctor Who serial] ‘The Sontaran Experiment’ was shot. I didn’t know until we finished filming. I don’t know what I’d have done differently ...
STEVEN: You’d have phoned me!
MARK (to Russell): What were your thoughts about how [Henry] dressed? We didn’t get on to talk about John Watson but there is a similarity.
RUSSELL: I think originally there was gonna be ... We are quite similar in clothes ...
MARK: We got a job lot.
RUSSELL: It’s just a nod to the past, isn’t it?
MARK: Yeah, there’s like a Norfolk jacket, which is absolutely a modern Norfolk but it could equally be an Edwardian coat.
Sherlock’s and John’s scene in the graveyard was the first day of shooting.
STEVEN: I remember just getting these rushes through – ’cause I was looking after the kids while you were bedding down in the car with Mark Gatiss – to suddenly see Martin and Benedict say lines they hadn’t said before. I’m so used to the other three episodes [and was thinking], ‘Oh no, they’re back!’
MARK: I must say I don’t like that coat on Martin.
SUE: No – we called it the scarecrow coat, didn’t we?
RUSSELL: It’s ’cause of the string hanging out.
STEVEN: It does look as though you could pull those strings like a parachute or something.
MARK: It feels wrong for John, and the string thing does make me think of farmers in All Creatures Great and Small who didn’t have a belt; they used to have a piece of string around their coats.
RUSSELL: You saying this was the first scene you shot – as an actor you do end up shooting, like, a big meaty end-of-episode scene on the first day, which is always so challenging.
MARK: And this was a Steadicam scene as well. It was very tough.
(As the boys turn out of the graveyard and the pub car park comes into view)
SUE: Oh. My car!
STEVEN: That was the same car that that woman was sitting in in The Great Game who was going to blow up! I’m seeing a whole sub-plot here now!
SUE: I should change my car!
STEVEN: I’m becoming obsessed with John’s coat now. I’ve never really noticed it before, and now I’m just thinking, ‘Why’s it got all those bits on it? What do they all do?’
MARK: Hooray! It’s Rupert! (In his American voice) It’s Rupert Graves.
RUSSELL: Was he tanned-up or was he tanned anyway?
MARK: He’d just come back from Guadeloupe ...
RUSSELL: [Filming] Death in Paradise, wasn’t it?
MARK: ... and it was impossible to ignore ...
SUE: ... so we said, ‘Write it in!’
RUSSELL: Oh, okay! So you actually wrote it in because of the tan!
MARK: And I tried to make it more canonical because [Sherlock] says, ‘You’re brown as a nut,’ which is what Stamford says about Watson ...
STEVEN: ... in A Study in Scarlet.
MARK: Lestrade is in the original story very briefly. Last year we had a decision to have a different inspector in episode two to vary it, but we’d already started to realise how lovely it was to have a team; and actually the idea that he’s been sent down by Mycroft to spy on him somehow actually appeals to Sherlock.
STEVEN: First of all we didn’t want it to be the same inspector, because it wouldn’t always be the same policeman, but once we hit on the idea, they always make sure it is ’cause Sherlock has to be ‘handled.’ And really because Rupert is so good, and such a leading man that it really makes it feel as though there’s another series going on somewhere called ‘Lestrade’ ... where he unsuccessfully solves crimes, then goes home to his wife: ‘Didn’t solve it again; it was rubbish’!
MARK: It’s gonna be on Monday nights.
(As Sherlock makes John a cup of coffee)
MARK: I like this very very much, ’cause it looks like a clumsy attempt by Sherlock to do the basic niceties, and he’s actually poisoning him!
STEVEN: Yes, he’s actually taken a step further into the darkness.
RUSSELL: How did you come up with the gay landlords of the pub?
MARK: The gandlords? That was Sue’s idea, because I think the first draft, I wrote a sort of blousey landlady, and again it was one of those things to think about to make it more modern. You’re already in a sort of spooky village; you don’t want it to be a sort of Hammer-like landlady. I remember you saying, ‘A gay couple have moved down.’ It’s not a gay agenda, Russell. A charming spring and autumn relationship. Little John and Littler John!
RUSSELL: D’you think people have gone back and discovered the stories because of the series?
MARK: They definitely have.
SUE: Well, you did a signing the other day, didn’t you, and it was huge.
RUSSELL: Signing what: DVD covers?
STEVEN: They’ve reprinted the stories, but with Martin and Benedict on the cover. And we’ve done Forewords.
MARK: We had two hours solid signings, amazing.
STEVEN: Of skinny Russian girls, to be honest! They were all girls. Audience profile writ large – girls.
MARK: There were four men, two of whom said, ‘I’m here on behalf of my girlfriend’!
STEVEN: Same girlfriend!
MARK: I know that the sales of the books of the original stories have gone up. I had an incredibly moving letter from a woman whose son is profoundly dyslexic who has never read a book; and he’s read ’em all now because he loves the show. It’s fantastic for people to go back to Doyle because of the success of our shows.
STEVEN: And the one thing that we’ve actually declined to do – or have done – is that there’s going to be no novelizations of this. There’ll be no book version of this.
RUSSELL: The scripts’ll never get printed?
STEVEN: Oh, I wouldn’t mind the scripts being printed, that’d be fine, but they shouldn’t be adapted as novels. If you want to read Sherlock Holmes novels, you should read the originals; you should read the Doyle ones.
RUSSELL: Have the other episodes been released as scripted books you can buy?
SUE: We’re talking about putting them online, actually.
STEVEN: We did a script book of Doctor Who the first year, and it didn’t really sell. Also, they are immense. No matter what you format them as, there’s a lot of stuff there, and that’s a hefty tome.
MARK: I think in sales terms they’re interesting to other writers or prospective writers.
STEVEN: Once they were interesting, when you couldn’t get even a video; that was the only version of the show you could take home.
(As Sherlock talks to Major Barrymore)
MARK: This is the alien reference from Nixon. We had a debate – they were called Stan and Ollie, I think ...
STEVEN: Yeah, for ages.
SUE: And they were worried about the international [recognition of the names].
Sue really likes the wipe from the scene of Henry unable to sleep in his house, to the lift doors opening at Baskerville to reveal John.
MARK: Now, this is the second big suspense sequence and was originally written ... here we go, this is a long story! This is what DVD commentaries are for! This was originally written to take place in a cold storage meat locker, and it was all part of the vegetarian/meat axis – that they went to this place to investigate the fact that the pub was actually buying meat. But it was the thing of wanting to come up with ... I thought, ‘I don’t think I’ve seen that before’ ...
SUE (interrupting as John goes into the side room of the lab): This was shot really late in the studio.
MARK: ... on the same night as Lara’s wardrobe.
(He continues with his story.)
MARK: ... and Sherlock was experimenting on him, so he wanted to put John in a certain place to observe him. We went to recce a meat storage locker in Bristol and ...
SUE: ... it was cold, wasn’t it?!
MARK: D’you remember the one they said, ‘Pop in there for a second,’ and it was something like an Edgar Allen Poe story where you go in for a joke and they just close the door. There was an ultra, ultra cold one for, like, instant freezing. I’ve never experienced anything like it. You just go over the threshold and you go ... (he gasps in shock) ... and then flee back out. But we went through all that, and then we went for the second recce. That’s when they told us that it would take twenty-four hours to cool it down, and we’d have to pay for a week.
SUE: And we wanted to get all the breath ...
MARK: ... and it wouldn’t show. It’s so cold it doesn’t show. It’s like the Antarctic – you need moisture, so you actually have to put moisture in the air to make it show. And by then it was like, ‘Shall we do it somewhere else?’!
SUE: But also this .. the light – was that Paul’s idea that light can be as frightening and scary ...
MARK: ... rather than darkness. Yes, absolutely. And the silence as well. Let’s have a moment of silence.
(They all fall silent for several seconds.)
RUSSELL: Naah, it’s not working.
RUSSELL: So this music is all scored by ...
MARK: No, the music you’re listening to is the temp music.
STEVEN: So again, faithful viewer, you are hearing the right music; we are hearing the wrong music. I don’t know why we’re bothering to tell you anything! We haven’t even seen the show you’re looking at! That’s the truth! No-one in this room has seen the show that you are looking at. We are explaining to you a show that you have seen and we haven’t!
MARK: We’re actually just watching drawings.
SUE: The storyboards!
MARK: I think Martin’s fantastic in this scene. And, again, playing a very practical, rational man who is scared out of his wits and he can’t quite work out why. And using the phone ... we had a little key light, I think, but it is actually mostly the phone providing the only light source.
SUE: Fabian, the DP, is great. Sometimes you could look at something – a huge lighting job – and you’re like, ‘Well, we can’t afford that,’ and then he’d say ... for instance, the one with Irene Adler in the execution thing ... and he goes, ‘Or I could light it with the lorry lights,’ and you go, ‘Oh, that sounds better!’
MARK: What I’m really pleased [about] is just how scary [the scene is]. It’s the most horrific of Sherlock Holmes stories – although horror is a big part of ... it runs like a scarlet thread through Doyle – is actually that these sequences are really successful. And then there’s a silly story about a rabbit! But this is also true! In my researches, I discovered that a scientist and an artist collaborated to make rabbits glow in the dark – just for fun!
RUSSELL: And did it work?
MARK: Yeah! It’s a jellyfish gene.
(While talking about casting the parts)
RUSSELL: How many Henrys did you see?
MARK: Mmm... Only one.
RUSSELL: Not me. Someone else.
MARK: Yeah!
RUSSELL: He pulled out, and then ...
MARK: ... and then, ‘Who’s in the building?’!
MARK: [The Mind Palace] came about because I remember having in the midst – probably in Cornwall – in the midst of an absolute crisis of intractability, I said, ‘But he’s got to find out what it is, but he can’t just bloody look it up. What is it?’ and you said, ‘Why don’t we do a Mind Palace?’ ’cause we’d both read Derren Brown’s book.
RUSSELL: What, the Mind Palace isn’t a Conan Doyle thing?
STEVEN: No, no. It’s a really interesting idea. It’s how you store information in your brain.
MARK: Hannibal Lecter does it, and it’s a real idea.
RUSSELL: Have you ever done it?
STEVEN: No, I’m far too stupid.
MARK: But it is a real technique.
STEVEN: I think we should revisit it – if you did a visualisation of Sherlock actually walking around it while talking to somebody, then you cut to them listening to him and he’s sitting there with his eyes shut.
MARK: We talked about that, but we couldn’t afford it!
They shot the scene of Henry running across the moor at about four o’clock in the morning.
(As Louise Mortimer sits on the floor sobbing after Henry has nearly shot her)
STEVEN: Mark, d’you remember: she died; and she died at the read-through, and it was ages later ...
MARK: That’s right, yes!
STEVEN: And we were never happy, were we?
SUE: ’Cause we suddenly realised [Sherlock] was having breakfast at the end and you think ...
STEVEN: ... he failed, that was the thing. If she died, he failed. And it’s so much better this way.
Russell remembers shooting a scene where Frankland was telling Henry that he had to kill the hound.
STEVEN: One of the most intractable things about this intractable story was the sheer amount of sodding explanation we had at the end. How many times ... we added, we subtracted ...
MARK: There was an extra explanation that in the end it was just because Henry’s father had had an affair. We talked about it very early on: ‘What about if the end of this ghost story is just a tiny domestic thing?’
STEVEN: I think the thing is, we realised we were adding an explanation when the audience had already figured out for themselves [that] it was to do with the thing and they were happy. [The new explanation] didn’t really go anywhere.
MARK: I remember having a lot of fun with this Thatcher thing, and then, of course, that a man like Barrymore [Mark accidentally says ‘Stapleton’ but he means Barrymore] would actually put ‘Maggie.’ It actually came from the fact that Thatcher herself always called Churchill ‘Winston,’ and I hate that. I hated it.
RUSSELL: Why?
MARK: It was like she was on first name terms with him, and she’d never met him.
MARK: I was gonna say earlier about the chemical formula. It would have been so perfect – it nearly was – if H.O.U.N.D. actually was Hydrogen, Oxygen, something ...
RUSSELL: Urine ...
STEVEN: Nettles ...
MARK: I tried so hard; I spoke to every chemist I could find and it was always ‘C’-something-‘H’. It just wouldn’t quite work. It was such a shame, ’cause that would have been extremely neat, even for a made-up drug.
MARK: We did actually ... ’cause dodgy Photoshop is a bugbear of mine; actually it’s rather good in this, thank God ... but we did actually stage a photoshoot with Clive Mantle with the team with a wig, wearing proper drag queen lifts to make him younger. He looked utterly bizarre!
RUSSELL: So that’s a real photo, then?
MARK: That’s Clive’s picture from the eighties, yeah.
RUSSELL: No, no, I mean of the actual crowd.
MARK: We staged that. People came in with the sweatshirts on, and we did originally put Clive in the back ...
SUE: The wig looked like he had a cat sitting on his head.
MARK: That was the Cat of the Baskervilles.
RUSSELL: Did you get a sweater each?
MARK: Tragically, no. I’m still angry about that. I tell you what: there was a moment here, a rare moment where the brilliant design department did a total Spinal Tap moment. Obviously the whole point of young Henry seeing Frankland killing his father and seeing that H.O.U.N.D. face – the face of the dog – and, in his mind, making that into the monster, is that it’s that size on the T-shirt. And they showed me the photo of the team and they all had these grey sweatshirts on and I said, ‘Are you gonna put that in in Post?’ and they went, ‘Oh, no no no, it’s there,’ and they got the T-shirt out and the logo was the size of a Kappa. It was that big, like Adidas ... I’ve said two brand names, they’re both gonna be cut out! ... the logo was tiny, like nipple size.
SUE: That’ll be cut out.
MARK: I was like, ‘Ah ...’
(As John finishes his call with Louise and then tells Sherlock, ‘He’s attacked her.’)
STEVEN: For a moment I thought that was, ‘He’s a tractor,’ in a remarkable twist!
MARK: That was the strangest of all the intractable things – that Henry was a tractor!
STEVEN: ‘Mark, this new draft ... I don’t think it’s gonna work!’
MARK: Have you ever seen that Sherlock Holmes Jack Russell series? There’s a series where a little dog investigates with a deerstalker hat on. And actually some of them are quite close to the originals, but with a dog!
(Stephen cackles with delight.)
MARK: And one of them is Irene Adler!
STEVEN: No! No!
SUE: Is it a female dog? A dachshund or something?!
MARK: ‘To Sherlock Holmes, she was always a bitch.’
The climactic scene in Dewer’s Hollow was shot over two long nights.
SUE: D’you remember it rained so hard we couldn’t film?
MARK: Oh, yes!
SUE: Yeah, I didn’t like that Hollow. It was my least favourite location. It was just a death trap!
STEVEN: We actually talked about doing it at the tor. It was about the fog, wasn’t it? We needed a punchbowl so that the fog would collect, ’cause if it was exposed like that, it would never work.
SUE: I remember seeing somewhere on the tor when we were going, ‘But it might collect here.’
MARK: ‘If this person is standing in a very specific place, having a bath ...’
MARK: And then this final end came out of a conversation about a sort of double whammy, that actually wouldn’t it be brilliant if ultra-rational Sherlock says, ‘There never was any dog,’ and you just hear ... (he howls) ... and it’s all back on again.
STEVEN: We also sort of imagined that the audience would be watching this and thinking, ‘Oh, so there wasn’t going to be a hound,’ and you think, ‘That’s quite clever but it’s not very exciting ... Oh, yes there is.’
MARK: And then he says, ‘But it’s just the ordinary one,’ and then it isn’t that!
SUE: Yes, unfortunately what we’re seeing is not ...
STEVEN: Tragically, viewer, what we’re looking at is really not what I hope you’re looking at!
RUSSELL: We’re looking at Tom and Jerry.
STEVEN: Benedict is looking very, very alarmed by, frankly, some drawings!
RUSSELL: Have you used CGI in other episodes?
SUE: There’s always bits of CGI, yeah.
STEVEN: But not at this level.
MARK: It’s mostly about things like the exploded house last year. You create damage to things or fade things back, like greenery in the summer.
RUSSELL: This [where Sherlock sees Moriarty wearing the gas mask] ... Andrew wasn’t there, was he?
MARK: No – this was done under a tent in North Gower Street many months later. This was the third part of the double whammy, wasn’t it – ‘What if he rips the mask off and it’s Moriarty?’ because the drug’s had the effect on him. Actually, that reminds me of something ... (He falls silent for a while.) It’s not the shopping; [but] it’s not for commentary.
SUE: D’you know what? That sounded like it’s something that’s gonna cost me money.
MARK: No, it will just be strangely preserved for all time as a thought.
STEVEN: Now it’s just a mystery: what did Mark remember?
MARK: I remember poor Clive did the whole thing with the gas mask on, and it was, like, suffocating him. It was like a gimp mask. He did a lot of action, none of which we ever see!
MARK: So this was obviously an equivalent of the Grimpen mire which is usually where Stapleton – who’s usually the baddie – ends up ...
(He pauses as he realises that we haven’t got to that bit yet.)
Steven (in a whisper): Timing.
MARK: Talking about ringing the changes, the [version of The Hound of the Baskervilles with] Richard Roxburgh ends up with Sherlock in the mire, which I remember thinking at the time was rather good because, again, when people know the story so well it ends up just playing itself out; and to actually end up with your hero drowning in the quicksand was rather good.
(As the dog – which they thought was dead – growls)
STEVEN: Hello.
MARK: He’s back! Now I feel sorry, you know, for the dog, ’cause once it’s revealed not to be a monster dog, they just shoot it. I think it’s sad. I’m a dog owner.
SUE: You wrote it!
STEVEN: There was a real tone of reproof there, I have to say, Mark!
MARK: It’s my inner voice.
SUE: The dog was actually filmed in the studio, on some leaves that we gathered.
MARK: It’s a shame, because it was an incredible black Great Dane – quite rare – glossy, beautiful thing. It was a show dog, wasn’t it? It just laid down ... You know when you see something – probably Hound of the Baskervilles, some other version – and you see it and you think, ‘Why is it facing that way? Why didn’t we get a good hero close-up?’ It’s because you have a forty-stone dog which will only lie down in one particular way! And that is ultimately the way you’re going to shoot it, and that’s exactly what happened. It was so beautiful, but that’s the way it was going to lie down, and so it laid at sort of forty-five degrees with its head away from the camera, and that’s all we could do!
MARK: They did something very unusual. They mapped digitally the entire Hollow, the whole landscape – first time I think they’ve done that ...
STEVEN: ... ever done that for television, yeah. Normally they would just CGI a dog and they would attempt to adjust it to the terrain as seen in the film, but here they didn’t just make the CGI dog, they made a CGI Hollow so that all its movements would match the ground, which isn’t done for television.
MARK: Although I think we should actually go back and just say it’s real. Why don’t we say it’s real?
STEVEN: A real monster.
MARK: Start again.
RUSSELL: Well, this is all a rehearsal, isn’t it, what we’re saying?
SUE: We’ll do it again in a minute.
STEVEN: Can you remember all of that?
STEVEN: Now, this originally had a different ending. Originally you wrote it as Jim Moriarty going into the Tower of London. Then we realised the time frame wasn’t right for the start of Steve [Thompson]’s script which started considerably back in time.
MARK: And then it became a backwards throw to Scandal – the idea that Mycroft had brought him in ... It’s what happens when you make stories back to front. But sometimes it can work really well because you actually get to front-load the story arc.
STEVEN: You’re right: I have been helping immensely by always being late with my scripts!
MARK: Bless you for that!
STEVEN: Yes. If not for me, eh?
MARK: This is also, fact fans, true about hallucinogenic drugs, particularly those used with aerosol dispersants, that you will be perfectly all right and you will excrete it, by whatever means – usually sweat – within about twenty-four hours. So they won’t be permanently affected by this made-up drug!
STEVEN: Well, that’s a comfort!
MARK: Now, as we’re unfortunately not able to do a commentary for The Reichenbach Fall, we must briefly talk about – quickly – how brilliant Andrew [Scott] is.
SUE: Oh, he’s stunning.
STEVEN: Astonishing. What you see in Reichenbach – it’s a tour de force.
SUE: But he is purely evil, isn’t he?
MARK: But not in real life!
STEVEN: Well, actually, I dunno – maybe he is. What do we really know about Andrew Scott?
MARK: Well ... I know a few things.
STEVEN: God! Is that gonna be filed alongside your opinion that you’ve learned?
MARK: That’s the other thing I’ve gotta remember, yeah.
SUE: I remember you saw him at some theatre or something, and somebody tripped over in front of him and he just said to you [in a whisper], ‘I did that.’
MARK: Just before we started filming Reichenbach, he sent me a picture of him outside Tower Bridge just going ‘Mwahahaha’ – obviously without the laugh, but it was implicit [that] he was laying plans for us all.
A full list of episode transcripts, DVD commentary summaries/transcripts, and transcripts of the DVD special features can be found here.