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"It&amp;#039;s time for the great detective to bid adieu once more - the second series of Sherlock comes to an end this Sunday night. The genius crime-solver (Benedict Cumberbatch) is forced into a deadly confrontation with his arch-foe (Andrew Scott), but will either man survive the Reichenbach fall? To mark this year&amp;#039;s momentous finale, Digital Spy caught up with series co-creator Steven Moffat to chat about Moriarty, the possibility of a third series and the future of John and Sherlock&amp;#039;s relationship... First of all, how long did it take you to come up with the resolution to series one&amp;#039;s cliffhanger? &amp;quot;I always felt that coming up with the cliffhanger resolution was actually relatively easy. In my mind, I thought &amp;#039;Maybe we don&amp;#039;t even resolve it that week, maybe we just cut to them having an adventure and we go back to it&amp;#039;. For me, that cliffhanger really was an impasse, at which point everyone would just back away. &amp;quot;But it became such a big deal that we actually had to do something - the most unexpected thing. I remember the three of us - Mark [Gatiss] and I and Steve Thompson - were out one night and just thought, &amp;#039;What if the phone rings?&amp;#039; It&amp;#039;s ridiculous, it&amp;#039;ll be funny. &amp;quot;I mentioned this to Sue [Vertue] - my wife, the producer - and she&amp;#039;d just heard the funniest story about a funeral where the service started, and someone&amp;#039;s phone started playing &amp;#039;Stayin&amp;#039; Alive&amp;#039; - I said, &amp;#039;That&amp;#039;s the one!&amp;#039; I&amp;#039;m very proud of it. Of all the things that people had been wondering about for over a year, I don&amp;#039;t think they expected the Bee Gees!&amp;quot; Did you feel any pressure this year after the enormous success of series one? &amp;quot;I did a sitcom - Chalk - that wasn&amp;#039;t very successful, and we did a second series knowing that the first series had tanked. That was pressure! Coming back to a second series of something that&amp;#039;s been so beloved - there&amp;#039;s pressure, because there&amp;#039;s always pressure - but it&amp;#039;s incredibly exciting. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s a new spring in the step of the show, I think, particularly with Benedict. As he brilliant as he was, suddenly he knows he&amp;#039;s a star. Same thing happened with Matt Smith - you saw it in last year&amp;#039;s [Doctor Who] Christmas special. It was the first time Matt had played the Doctor knowing that he was a hit. You&amp;#039;re seeing Benedict flourish into it, and just being such a star.&amp;quot;  And were you nervous about tackling the most iconic stories in the Holmes canon? &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re fanboys of Sherlock Holmes, so we can&amp;#039;t wait! Someone asked [myself and Mark] what we do when we disagree, and we realised - slightly chillingly - that we never do! We can barely get the sentence out before the other&amp;#039;s completing it. We&amp;#039;re so in concert on this stuff, and we&amp;#039;re interchangeable in interviews. I swear, he could take over this interview and you wouldn&amp;#039;t know the difference, except I&amp;#039;d suddenly have become better looking and better dressed! &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re very, very old friends, so we&amp;#039;re having about as much fun as we could ever imagine having! I remember once, back in [BBC Wales studio] Upper Boat, you had the TARDIS in one studio and the next studio was 221b Baker Street. Mark grabbed my arm and said, &amp;#039;It&amp;#039;s like a map of our brains!&amp;#039;&amp;quot; Having been a success, was it easier to forget the likes of Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett, and write your own take on Holmes? &amp;quot;To be honest, I don&amp;#039;t think we ever really forget them, because we love them. I still watch Sherlock Holmes films, if anything with more excitement, because I&amp;#039;ve been there. I still watch old Doctor Who and think, &amp;#039;I&amp;#039;ve actually done that&amp;#039;. I admire Basil Rathbone&amp;#039;s Sherlock Holmes, Jeremy Brett&amp;#039;s Sherlock Holmes, Robert Stephens&amp;#039; Sherlock Holmes [from 1970 film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes] so, so much - [this show] hasn&amp;#039;t tarnished the joy I take in that at all. &amp;quot;But at the very beginning, we had a moment of trying to decide how Sherlock would talk in the modern world. You can&amp;#039;t make him talk like a completely modern person, so how far do we go? &amp;quot;Mark was the first person to put pen to paper this year and he was struggling to find the modern Sherlock&amp;#039;s voice again. By the time I turned up to do mine, I&amp;#039;d been pre-warned, &amp;#039;You&amp;#039;ll find it harder than you think to get that feeling back&amp;#039;. &amp;quot;But I think Sherlock&amp;#039;s shifted slightly this year - I think he&amp;#039;s shifted slightly more Victorian, just a little. We were always very cautious in the first series that he never sounded like he&amp;#039;s giving a lecture, but Benedict&amp;#039;s got that beautiful voice and you sort of want him to give a lecture! So we&amp;#039;ve shoved him a little bit that way.  &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s really only a matter of phrasing. I mean, I don&amp;#039;t believe that a modern young man would actually say &amp;#039;Elementary&amp;#039; - I just don&amp;#039;t. But I believe that he would say something equivalent. If you look at the Sherlock Holmes [adaptations] that have failed - and there are quite a few - smugness and prissiness are the two things that really kill him. &amp;quot;Basil Rathbone is amazing - he&amp;#039;s never smug and he&amp;#039;s never prissy. He actually seems like quite a bloke, quite a geezer. You think he&amp;#039;d probably punch your lights out! And yet he does all of the deductions very authoritatively.  &amp;quot;Whereas Jeremy Brett has a completely different take - it&amp;#039;s a very audacious and very clever take, but you still never feel that he&amp;#039;s prissy or smug. And Benedict has just made him such a leading man. He&amp;#039;s just flourished and made him a romantic lead.&amp;quot;  Moriarty returns in force this week. This show&amp;#039;s take on the character is rather unusual... &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s an odd one with Moriarty. I think with Sherlock and John, we&amp;#039;ve actually stayed quite close to the original, but just modernised them. The scenes with Moriarty in the original are brilliant, but every single super-villain who&amp;#039;s ever in comics or novels or movies ever since has been an imitation of him. &amp;quot;If we did Moriarty that way now, he would look like a hoary old take-off of a super-villain. That&amp;#039;s not going to work - it&amp;#039;s been done brilliantly too many times and spoofed too many times, we couldn&amp;#039;t do that. So we just thought, what would really scare Sherlock Holmes? &amp;quot;Andrew Scott became a star - which he absolutely deserves to be - on the basis of being in the last three or four minutes of Sherlock. His screen-time was tiny but it&amp;#039;s a measure of that man&amp;#039;s extraordinary talent that he&amp;#039;s become such a big deal so quickly. He&amp;#039;s a genius.&amp;quot; Are you planning to make a third series of Sherlock? &amp;quot;If he survives!&amp;quot; But are there still elements from the canon that you&amp;#039;re desperate to adapt? &amp;quot;If he survives... there&amp;#039;s a whole bunch of details that have never been mentioned before in any film - stuff that we love. The meeting [between Sherlock and John] - I think it&amp;#039;s maybe, in the 200-odd Sherlock Holmes dramatisations, it&amp;#039;s maybe the third time it&amp;#039;s been done. And it&amp;#039;s a great first meeting - it&amp;#039;s a flat-share. It&amp;#039;s flat-share detective thriller comedy - how can you not do that?! &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know if we&amp;#039;ll do anything with this, but the fact that Doctor Watson is married for loads of the stories is really interesting. He and Holmes don&amp;#039;t always live together and I think that&amp;#039;s become a lazy way of doing Sherlock Holmes - they always live together. They didn&amp;#039;t actually and why would they? Nobody flat-shares forever, so there&amp;#039;s loads of details we can get in there...&amp;quot; Sherlock concludes on Sunday (January 15) at 9pm on BBC One. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.digitalspy.com/tv/sherlock/interviews/a359357/sherlock-steven-moffat-interview-holmes-might-not-survive/>