“More if you count the Welsh Bafta,” adds Moffat. “I would have brought them as evidence, but I probably couldn’t carry them all.” The former head writer of Doctor Who and Sherlock also has a couple of Primetime Emmys to his name, plus Royal Television Society awards and an OBE. “It hasn’t been used much until now,” he says of OBE. What I have to realize is that the 60-year-old TV writer is putting on a show. Moffat is too self-aware to make an abusive conundrum. However, this outrage, one believes, would not have happened to the actors who have found fame from his words over the years: David Tennant, Stanley Tucci, Jenna Coleman, Benedict Cumberbatch, Martin Freeman, Matt Smith, Karen Gillan, Claes Bang, Dolly. Wells, Pearl Mackie and many others. Writers, however, are never A-list. Or is it them? Moffat’s phone rings. We’re in! A few minutes later we are served and Moffat tells me that he dreams of becoming an assassin. “It bothers me at night. What would it take for a person like me to kill someone? I know I wouldn’t have the guts. And I would think that was a mistake.” “You are a very good person,” I say. “Thank you,” says Moffat. “I am, aren’t I?” Moffat’s excellent new four-part BBC drama Inside Man is about what happens when good people do something they know is wrong. One of them – an American criminology professor named Jefferson Griff, played by Stanley Tucci – is sentenced to death after murdering his wife. David Tennant is the errant vicar in Moffat’s new TV drama Inside Man. Photo: Kevin Baker/BBC/Hartswood Moffat recalls a line from his drama that explains why good people kill. “David Tennant [who plays a vicar forced into some very illegal acts] he tries to explain his moral qualms to his wife about his Christian religion, and she just says, “Jesus didn’t have children.” This line comes from Moffat’s sensibility. What would drive the author to kill? If someone had harmed or sought to harm their children. How intriguing, then, that in Inside Man, the vicar’s son is played by one of Moffat’s sons. “The other thing about killing is that it’s really hard. Doing nothing is much easier.” Moffat cites Hitchcock’s 1966 film Torn Curtain to make his point. It takes a professor (played by Paul Newman) and a farmer’s wife eight minutes and eight seconds to assassinate a Stasi agent. “I thought it was time to show that it was very difficult, very painful, and it takes a long time to kill a man,” Hitchcock said at the time. The lesson of this for Moffat is clear: solving murder is easy. committing it is more difficult. When Moffat was writing Sherlock between 2008 and 2017, he wasn’t concerned with such matters. “Sherlock appears after the crime has been committed. He arrives in time to see the body in the library and solves the crime with – ah! – guessing accurately. But actually the real drama is before it arrives. I can see why this is a good formula.” Benedict Cumberbatch and bloodhound on the set of Sherlock, 2016. Photo: BBC/Hartswood Films/PA Does he think Sherlock was formulaic? “We don’t think of shows like Sherlock as dramas,” says Moffat. “We think of them as entertainment, as puzzle boxes. There’s nothing wrong with that, or at least I don’t think so. But many people do. They see what I’m doing as just smart.” This clearly rocks, as did the reviews it got when the backlash against Sherlock’s scripted cleverness began. “My favorite review was that of Sherlock who said, ‘As always, unfortunately, it’s back to wit.’ Is it falling again?’ he growls again. “That was just my default position. Being smarter than you are. The other was: “Why can’t Sherlock be simple?” Why; Maybe because the regulars wouldn’t have made Sherlock an international success.” All of this is true, but at least one of Moffat and co-writer Mark Gatiss’s Sherlock scripts was reeked of sexism. In Arthur Conan Doyle’s story A Scandal in Bohemia, Irene Adler is an adventurer who surpasses Holmes. to the loose adaptation of this story in Sherlock, as Jane Claire Jones put it in the Guardian 10 years ago:[She is] recreated by Moffat a leading dominant position only saved from certain death by the dramatic intervention of our hero. While Conan Doyle’s original is hardly a paragon of gender evolution, you have to worry when a woman appears worse in 2012 than she did in 1891.” At the time, Moffat, predictably, disagreed. “In the original, Irene Adler’s victory over Sherlock Holmes was to move home and run away with her husband. It’s not a feminist victory.” Moffat was also criticized for writing boring female characters during his run of Doctor Who (he took over as head writer from Russell T Davies in 2008). Claire Jones accused him of pulling female characters “from a box labeled ‘tired old tropes’ (drip/show/temptation/land to name but a few)”, adding: “His consequent failure to outline a compelling central dynamic between the protagonists and his partner has seriously affected the dramatic power of the series.’ The great thing now is that I write for my own pleasure. I can write whatever I want Moffat denies this, naming two leading female characters he created for Doctor Who. “River Song? Amy Pond? Hardly weak women. It’s the exact opposite. You could accuse me of having a fetish for strong, sexy women who like to cheat on people. That would be fair.” When I remind him of these criticisms, Moffat says that some coverage has labeled him a “crazy, right-wing misogynist. I’m really none of those things. And I’m certainly not a proselytizer for submissive women, that much-hyped myth. I don’t know where it came from. I have never met a submissive woman. You walk through the front door and accept junior status. You think, “I can still beat the dog.” “Almost a Weak Woman”: River Song (played by Alex Kingston) in a 2010 episode of Doctor Who. Photo: BBC/James Stenson The opening scene of Inside Man is striking in this context, a vignette about misogyny on a train undone by a woman who is not submissive. The diaspora gazes lustfully at the passenger opposite, who will prove to be a key character in the drama, journalist Beth Davenport (played by It’s a Sin’s Lydia West). He gets up to propose to her. Everyone in the carriage feels uncomfortable, yet no one does anything. Moffat says he can relate to this mass inaction: “There’s always an argument that a lot of cowards like me would make: that if we do nothing at all, it’s just going to stop, so doing nothing is the right thing to do.” But the scene is escalating. A woman photographs the harassment. The people demand that it be deleted. “This is assault,” he tells her, grabbing the phone from her. “You invaded my personal space and I delete your attack.” He may be ill-informed about the law, but physically he is a terrifying presence. That is, until a third woman stands up and tells him she’s live streaming his assault and, with any luck, the police will be at the next station to arrest him. Emboldened, other women stand up and start filming him. The woman who claims to have alerted the police is the hero of the moment. and, in a nice bit of foreshadowing, it’s a maths teacher named Janice Fife (played by Dolly Wells) that Tennant’s vicar will later clash with. So we know what the vicar doesn’t do: he picked the wrong person. “She represents a kind of woman I know,” says Moffat. “The kind of woman who is used to manipulating fools like us with her head down and humility. The kind of woman who, when you take it a step too far, pushes right back. She’s Mrs. Pushback. I know that kind of woman for sure.” I last interviewed Moffat 10 years ago, when he had left the BBC’s 7.9 million Sunday night viewers reeling. Sherlock (Cumberbatch) had jumped off a building, apparently pushed to his death by Andrew Scott’s Moriarty. We all knew the sleuth had to survive if there was going to be a series three. But how? Maybe the corpse was Moriarty in a Sherlock mask? Maybe pathologist Molly provided a corpse to fly off the roof? No matter how many times I asked him, he would not reveal the secret. “There’s an indication that it’s lost on everyone,” he told me at the time, clearly taking pleasure in fooling not only me but millions of viewers around the world. Moffat stopped writing Sherlock in 2017, but for all that he claims he’s not interested in writing smarter, more clever crime stories (“I’ve made a conscious effort not to write as anachronistically as I have in the past”), he might. to help himself. In Inside Man, for example, Tucci’s Professor Grieff is essentially Sherlock solving crimes from his cell. Visitors bring him unsolved cases against which he pits his wits – with the help of a terrifying serial killer in the next cell who has a photographic memory and who, for reasons I can hardly explain, ate his mother’s leg. Moffat was born in Paisley, near Glasgow, in 1961. After an MA in English, he became a secondary English teacher in Greenock. His TV break came in the late 80s, courtesy of Harry Secomb. The former Goon visited Thorn Primary School in Johnstone, Renfrewshire, to film his cult show, Highway. Moffat’s father Bill, the headmaster of the school, allowed the show’s producers to…
