Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat are huge admirers of Doyle’s work, and that passion for the canon also encompasses the huge swathe of film and television versions that have reinforced, developed and occasionally challenged our perceptions of the great detective.

Nobody seriously expected the show’s writers to go for the obvious Holmesian targets so soon, but Moffat has said that he didn’t see the point of delayed gratification, so the big guns were rolled out after all.

My predictions for series two were, to my great surprise, not too far off the mark. We got the ‘really, really big, scary dog’ – well, sort of. ‘The Woman’, Irene Adler also popped up right on cue, and stirred up a hornet’s nest of controversy into the bargain.

As for the deadly snake summoned by a nefarious stepfather? Well, you may have missed it, but in the montage of cases Watson writes up on his blog as A Scandal in Belgravia opens, one headline stands out: The Speckled Blonde, a rather cheeky reference to The Speckled Band, in which the reptile and its dastardly owner made their appearance.

Another of Watson’s accounts is titled The Geek Interpreter, a decidedly cheeky nod to Doyle’s version of events, in which the interpreter was, in fact, Greek, while The Naval Treaty becomes The Navel Treatment. None of these stories appear to have anything to do with their namesakes (especially that last one…). They’re just fun in-jokes for those as mad about Doyle’s work as the show’s creators.