Speaking to Empire magazine recently, Moffat teased: “We’ve done the biggies: the woman, the hound and the professor. Now things are moving on, with John Watson getting married. Sherlock, being the way he is, wants everything to stay the same. But real life is flowing around him.”

Discussing Watson’s discovery that Sherlock is in fact still alive after the events of Series 2’s finale, Gatiss commented: “[Sir Arthur Conan] Doyle skirted around it, but this is a different world. You can’t just lie to your best friends about being dead.”

The reveal will feature in the first episode of Series 3, ‘The Empty Hearse’, written by Mark Gatiss.

Gatiss also joked about fans’ reaction to ‘The Reichenbach Fall’: “When Conan Doyle killed him off, he was attacked in the street. We’ve had the modern version of that: good-natured attacks on Twitter.”

> Find out all the details on Series 3 so far in our summary.

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> Order Series 3 on DVD on Amazon.

> Buy the Series 1-2 boxset on Amazon.

Watch the Series 3 teaser trailer…