Lucy Worsley admits to lifelong crush on Sherlock Holmes ahead of documentary

Lucy Worsley has spoken of her “lifelong crush” on Sherlock Holmes ahead of a BBC documentary exploring the fictional private detective and his creator.

The 49-year-old historian and TV presenter will host Killing Sherlock: Lucy Worsley On The Case Of Conan Doyle as the BBC also releases a new adaption of one of the author’s ghost stories starring Game Of Thrones actor Kit Harington.

Worsley will look at British writer and physician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “extraordinary love-hate relationship” with the master of deduction, Holmes.

She said: “I have had a lifelong crush on Sherlock Holmes, so it was the biggest pleasure imaginable to explore his life, death and resurrection.

“While exploring his life and times, I also got a real and sometimes troubling insight into manliness, Empire and Victorian values.

“I find his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, to be a complex, contradictory and endlessly fascinating character.”

Worsley will explore Sir Arthur’s personal history along with the wider time period in the three-part series by tracing his early history as a medical student and “unpicking his early stories and revealing the dark underbelly of late Victorian Britain – from drug use to true crime”.

During his life, the writer met with a social club, the Crimes Club, where new criminology theories and cases were discussed, and had a “growing disenchantment with his detective creation”, according to the BBC Two documentary.

The series also explores Sir Arthur’s work as a legal advocate in what he saw as miscarriage of justice cases – as well as his turn to spiritualism, public disagreements with magician Harry Houdini and death of his son, Kingsley, following him serving during the First World War.

The programme contrasts the author’s declining public appeal with Holmes finding a “life beyond his author, on stage and screen” which since the very early days of cinema has seen the friend of Dr John Watson played by Basil Rathbone, Francis Ford and John Barrymore.

More recently, British actor Benedict Cumberbatch has taken on the main role in BBC series Sherlock, while Hollywood star Robert Downey Jr has played the eccentric detective-for-hire in action films Sherlock Holmes and Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows.

Amanda Lyon, executive producer at BBC Studios, said: “Examining the dual biographies of Holmes and Doyle is a fascinating way to reconsider these detective stories, and Lucy is the ideal investigator.”

Worsley has previously explored the life of another crime writer, Agatha Christie, the creator of amateur sleuth Miss Jane Marple and Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, by talking to experts, fans and descendants as well as taking a look at archives.

Agatha Christie: Lucy Worsley On The Mystery Queen also delved into Christie’s 1926 disappearance following her marriage falling apart.

To accompany Worsley’s latest documentary series, Sherlock co-creator Mark Gatiss will be adapting Sir Arthur’s Gothic horror short story Lot No 249 for Christmas – starring Harington and White House Farm actor Freddie Fox.

The story “revolves around a group of Oxford students, one of whom undertakes research into the secrets of Ancient Egypt which become the talk of the college”.

Gatiss said: “It’s a serious delight for me to delve once again into the brilliant work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, this time for the Christmas Ghost story. Lot No 249 is a personal favourite and is the granddaddy (or should that be Mummy?) of a particular kind of end of Empire chiller: a ripping yarn packed with ghastly scares and who-knows-what lurking in the Victorian closet.”

Both Killing Sherlock: Lucy Worsley On The Case Of Conan Doyle and Lot No 249 will air on BBC Two and BBC iPlayer over December.