Last summer CultBox visited the Sherlock set in Cardiff during the filming of the second series and chatted with writer Mark Gatiss about his episode, The Hounds of Baskerville.

The Hounds of Baskerville airs at 8.30pm on Sunday on BBC One.

“It’s a funny thing really. It’s the most famous story because it was written after Doyle had killed Sherlock Holmes off, then he wanted to write this ghostly story about a phantom hound and decided to do it as a past adventure. It was the biggest publishing phenomenon ever; it’s incredible, that’s why people know it so well. So we had to do it!

“It’s quite intimidating because it is so famous. In a funny kind of way, I felt there were several touchstones in the original book that I had to keep in a way that you wouldn’t with other stories.

“There are certain things with The Hound of the Baskervilles that you have to have, so I tried to keep them all in, not necessarily in the same order. One of the most fun things is that because it’s so famous and it’s been done so many times people think they know the story well. So at any stage where you can actually just flip it or surprise people, that was very fun.

“One of the things that’s worked so well for us on the show is modern equivalents. Sometimes it’s very straightforward, you know. This young man of 30-odd is not going to smoke a pipe; it becomes nicotine patches.

“Sometimes they’re slightly more difficult to get, but what we talked about with Hounds is that we are still a very credulous people but we’ve sort of substituted ghost stories for conspiracy theory and suspicion of government.

“In a way it’s just as nonsensical, but everybody believes in the JFK assassination, all those sort of things. That’s become our modern myth, so it’s sort of more in that direction. It’s still spooky, but it’s as spooky as you could imagine people would fall for in this day and age.

“The key thing to me was to just go for it as a horror film, because it’s rarely done.”

> Order the Series 2 DVD on Amazon.

Listen to Mark Gatiss discuss the episode…

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