On this day in 1891, Sherlock Holmes fell to his apparent death at the Reichenbach Falls, as depicted in the pages of ‘The Final Problem’.

From wikipedia:

Out of many waterfalls in the Bernese Oberland, the Reichenbach Falls seems to have made the greatest impression on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories, who was shown them on a Swiss holiday by his host Sir Henry Lunn, the founder of Lunn Poly. Sir Henry’s grandson, Peter Lunn, recalled, “My grandfather said ‘Push him over the Reichenbach Falls’ and Conan Doyle hadn’t heard of them, so he showed them to him.” So impressed was Doyle that he decided to let his hero die there.

The actual ledge from which Moriarty and Holmes apparently fell is on the other side of the falls to the funicular; it is accessible by climbing the path to the top of the falls, crossing the bridge and following the trail down the hill. The ledge is marked by a plaque as illustrated here; the English inscription reads: “At this fearful place, Sherlock Holmes vanquished Professor Moriarty, on 4 May 1891.”

The pathway on which the duel between Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty occurs ends some hundred metres away from the falls. When Doyle viewed the falls, the path ended very close to the falls, close enough to touch it, yet over the hundred years after his visit, the pathway has become unsafe and slowly eroded away, and the falls have receded further back into the gorge.

The actual date of the ‘death’ of Sherlock Holmes in the BBC Series is a little harder to pin down. We made an attempt to find the date of Sherlock’s fall from the top of St Bart’s Hospital in this article last year.

SHERLOCK S2E3: THE REICHENBACH FALL TRAILER

Presenting the sixth in our series of exclusive trailers edited by Lee Dawson!

Nice April Fool’s by the Metro on how Sherlock faked his own death….

Read the full article here.

Easter is upon us once again and this year we decided to re-enact one of our favourite Sherlock scenes: The Reichenbach Fall….. but with eggs.

To see the full episode of SHELLOCK: The Reichensplat Fall visit our website.

A Year Ago Today….

…Sherlock: S2E3 - The Reichenbach Fall received it’s world premiere on BBC One in the UK, and we learnt that Series 3 would be made!

And so ends 2012, a packed year for BBC Sherlock and for Sherlockology itself. It’s the close of our first full year of running the website and all the connected social accounts, and ‘full’ is certainly the right word when looking back on the past twelve months.

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Although most of the team do play instruments themselves, none are professional musicians, so this is not really our area of expertise, but one of the team has in fact played the violin from an early age, so we can offer a little advise on the subject.

Learning any instrument is obviously a long process that requires lots of dedication with many hours of practice, and that is especially true when it comes to learning the violin, which takes several years of studying before making a sound you’d be proud of from it. Although what you hear in ‘A Scandal in Belgravia’ and ‘The Reichenbach Fall’ is not Benedict playing the violin but Eos Chater who taught him, he did exceptionally well to learn the basics and how to master tunes such as ‘God Save the Queen’ and ‘Auld Lang Syne’ among others. Michael Price did confirm to us on Friday at MGEITF however, that he did not play ‘Irene’s Theme’ or recite Bach’s ‘Sonata No. 1 in G Minor’ as they were just too advanced for a beginner, even one who picked it up as quickly as Benedict. He clearly mastered the technique of vibrato (well for first finger anyway), which is quite advanced and that would normally only be expected of a violin student to achieve from Grade 5 and higher. In fact Russell Crowe learnt to play the violin for his role in ‘Master and Commander’ and referred to it as “the hardest thing [he’d] ever done for a film!”

Just like Benedict, the best way to learn is for a person to receive tuition from a teacher, especially for instruments such as the violin, but lessons can be costly and to progress you will need them regularly. If you were on a budget however and wanted to play folk fiddle for example (instead of classical violin like Sherlock), much can be learned from folk sessions where an enthusiastic group of musicians would be happy to give tips and pointers. You would have to be pretty brave to walk into a folk session as a beginner not able to play anything at all, but if the person had a couple of folk tunes up their sleeve, a big friendly smile and genuine interest, it might well be enough.

We would certainly recommend exploring this option if lessons were not financially possible. Sessions normally happen in pubs and many towns have regular ones that are advertised in local papers, music shops or online. This obviously applies to the UK and Ireland, but other countries may vary, depending on how popular folk music is.

YouTube has many videos on how to play the violin, from the very basics of how to hold your instrument and bow, all the way to advanced techniques. As for ‘teach yourself violin’ books alone however, we would personally steer clear of this route as it could do more harm than good. Practice is essential after all, but not if you are practicing how to do it incorrectly over and over again. There are many of these types of books available though on Amazon, which come with CDs to play along to, but if you have no other choice than to go down this route, then we would recommend you visit your local music shop and ask advise from them for the best one to go for. Violins themselves can be purchased fairly cheaply, but again visit a music shop rather than buy online, so you can make sure you choose a violin that you are comfortable with and is suited to you as well as your budget.

Hope this helps a little and if you do choose to begin learning the violin, we would like to wish you the best of luck. It is a really beautiful instrument and if it’s good enough for Sherlock Holmes, then there can be no better recommendation than his!

N.B. If anyone who plays the violin is reading this and has some good tips to share, please do contact us and we’ll include them.

UPDATE: ‘I happened to know a website that allows beginners, as well as experts, to improve and learn violin skills. The website is called fiddlerman.com. It’s easy, free and has been very useful to me.’ - label22.tumblr.com

If you weren’t able to join us yesterday for our live webchat with Radiotimes.com, either due to technical gremlins or a lack of space in the room - it was VERY popular - they’ve now put the complete transcript up on their website for repeat reading.

So go and see how we thought John made it over that fence in The Reichenbach Fall, how we’d like to see Irene Adler return to the series, what original stories we would love to see adapted for the series, and plenty more besides.

You can access the complete transcript here.

snogandagrope:

Sherlock’s survival secret already filmed!

It can be revealed the secrets of his survival have already been filmed – as TV producers were worried the location might change its appearance before the next series starts shooting in full.

But the big question is: does Sherlockology know how its hero survived? “If we do we wouldn’t tell,” said Coomber. “And we don’t like to speculate as although the media was on fire with suggestions Steven and Mark are such great writers I am sure whatever they come up with will be amazingly clever. “But I do know this – the solution has already been filmed. The cast and crew did it very soon after the ending of the final episode, to ensure there were no continuity errors in how the location looked.”

Sherlock’s survival secret already filmed Article from Kent News

We should add that unfortunately this statement has been misquoted a little by the journalist who wrote this article, as although the Sherlock team has made it known that some footage for series three was filmed during the making of series two for the purposes of continuity (locational and otherwise), sadly there is no confirmation that the ‘entire’ solution has been filmed already.

When you say “A Scandal in Belgravia photoshoot”, do you mean the official images? If so, we’re afraid to say we know of no official online gallery that contains ALL the previously released shots.

Unfortunately only a limited number of the on set and promotional imagery has been released online and in print, as there were literally hundreds taken during series 2. Sadly however, most will never be released.

Sherlockology will be adding a number of galleries to our site soon including the full collection of released images for series 1 and 2, and also a number of previously unseen official promotional and behind the scenes shots from both series. We’ll announce across our social media platforms (Twitter, FaceBook, Tumblr and Instagram) when these additional sections of the site have been added.

In the meantime, we have quite an extensive collection of photographs we took from series 2 during the making of A Scandle in Belgravia and The Reichenbach Fall on FaceBook.