LUCY WORSLEY INVESTIGATES SHERLOCK AND ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE FOR BBC SERIES

BBC Arts announces a new series, Killing Sherlock: Lucy Worsley on the Case of Conan Doyle, made by BBC Studios. Coming to BBC Two and iPlayer this December.

Sherlock Holmes is the world’s most famous fictional detective and features in more than 60 original stories, as well as countless adaptions.

For over a century, he has intrigued and excited his fans with his intellect and powers of deduction, and he made his creator – the author Arthur Conan Doyle - rich and famous. But the writer came to hate his fictional character.

Over the course of three episodes, historian and lifelong Sherlock Holmes fan Lucy Worsley investigates the extraordinary love-hate relationship between Holmes and Doyle, detective and author, in a unique parallel biography of Sherlock Holmes and the complex man who created him.

Lucy Worsley says: "I have had a LIFE-LONG CRUSH on Sherlock Holmes, so it was the biggest pleasure imaginable to explore his life, death and resurrection. While exploring his life and times, I also got a real and sometimes troubling insight into manliness, Empire and Victorian values. I find his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, to be a complex, contradictory and endlessly fascinating character."

This series follows in the footsteps of Agatha Christie: Lucy Worsley on the Mystery Queen with Lucy scouring archives, meeting experts, descendants and fans. Weaving together historical context with personal history to explore Doyle and his creation within the seismic world events and changes going on around them.

Lucy unearths Sherlock’s origins in Conan Doyle’s early life as a medical student, unpicking his early stories and revealing the dark underbelly of late Victorian Britain – from drug use to true crime.

She explores Doyle’s growing disenchantment with his detective creation and desire to distance himself from Sherlock, taking on the role of detective himself, in one of the most important legal cases of the twentieth century.

And investigates the darkness of his later stories, mirroring the reality of Doyle’s life after the loss of his eldest son, his turn to spiritualism and declining public appeal and spat with a very famous magician. Sherlock Holmes, by contrast, found a life beyond his author, on stage and screen.

Amanda Lyon, Executive Producer, BBC Stuios, says: “Examining the dual biographies of Holmes and Doyle is a fascinating way to re-consider these detective stories, and Lucy is the ideal investigator.”

Killing Sherlock: Lucy Worsley on the Case of Conan Doyle (3x60’) is a BBC Studios Specialist Factual production for BBC Two, BBC iPlayer and PBS.