The game, Mrs Hudson, is on

In many ways the BBC's Sherlock, another re-imagining of Sherlock Holmes, is a lot like Doctor Who. Apart from sharing writers (Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss) the relationship between Holmes and Watson feels the same as the Doctor and his assistant. The brilliant but strange adventurer and his slower but indispensable companion - it works. You could almost imagine the roles reversed - Matt Smith as Sherlock and Benedict Cumberbatch (you can go far in life with a name like that) playing the Doctor. Another similarity is that, like Doctor Who, this is very good television. The century-old characters now seem young and fresh, in episodes based loosely on the old stories. This new Sherlock Holmes is a brilliant, horrible, likeable sociopath. He doesn't understand people and keeps human heads in his fridge. Like a Time Lord without a time machine, he sits around bored until something happens. And when it does he plays a game called Extreme Deduction, the synapses firing off in his mind at the sight of a dead body or a pair of shoes. John Watson just tries to keep up (Martin Freeman almost escaping the role of 'that guy from The Office'). The three episodes were like little films, lasting a chunky ninety minutes and twisting around clever mysteries. The second episode was a bit of dip, adopting Conan Doyle's shady foreign criminals who were shady just because they're foreign, but outside that it's expertly crafted stuff.

Moriarty serves as the Big Bad for the series, stepping out of the shadows at the end with bombs plots and sniper rifles. It troubled me a bit though. Wasn't Moriarty just a device Conan Doyle invented to quickly kill off Holmes? There was no mention of him, and then suddenly he turns up in 'The Final Problem' as the 'Napoleon of crime'. Not really a great literary villain, more of a means to an end. I wonder if the whole thing has just taken on a mind of its own, like the characters exist outside of the original writing as endlessly repeated cultural figures. Anyway, Sherlock is the modern British take on the whole thing, and it's quite good.