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In:Dialogue across Media
Edited by Jarmila Mildorf and Bronwen Thomas
[Dialogue Studies 28] 2017
► pp. 37–54

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Dialogue and character in 21st century TV drama

The case of ‘Sherlock Holmes’

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Published online: 19 January 2017
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ds.28.03ric
The successful British-made TV drama series Sherlock (BBC 2011-present) is one of the latest in a long sequence of dramatisations of the Victorian short stories and novels by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. This chapter discusses some passages of dialogue from the first episode of this series, demonstrating how the character is created and maintained, focusing in particular on Sherlock’s antisocial tendencies, his eccentricity and his remarkable deductive powers. The analysis further seeks to isolate the distinctive contribution of dialogue in this respect from other aspects of audiovisual production, drawing as appropriate on the sociolinguistics of stance, politeness theory and conversational analysis.
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