The REAL warring family pair who inspired Mycroft and Sherlock: How Holmes's feud with his scheming sibling is based on the troubled past of the creator's own brother

Mark Gatiss based relationship between Holmes brothers on himself

Gatiss writes, produces and plays Mycroft on the BBC success show



The most corrosive love-hate relationship between two brothers since Cain and Abel had nine million TV viewers on the edge.



The rivalry between the Holmes boys reached new intensities last Sunday, as Sherlock drugged his older brother Mycroft to steal a laptop full of government secrets — and was ordered to go on a suicide mission as punishment.

If the dynamic between the siblings took a more central role than ever, then that was no accident. For as Steven Moffat, who co-produces the show, says: ‘Mycroft is a very complex character. Somehow, he’s the key to Sherlock.’

Key player: Mark Gatiss and Benedict Cumberbatch play battling brothers Sherlock and Mycroft, a relationship inspired by Gatiss's own childhood

How true — and in more ways than one. For ‘Mycroft’ read ‘Mark Gatiss’, the 47-year-old actor who plays him. Here is the man who is key to understanding the whole Sherlock revival.

For what many casual fans do not realise is that in addition to starring in the series, Gatiss is also its co-creator and chief scriptwriter.

To have created, written and starred in the most succesful BBC drama series for years would be a remarkable enough, but that is by no means Gatiss’s only claim to fame. Indeed, last year saw him become one of the most successful actor-writers of his generation.

In addition to Sherlock, he was heavily involved in the 50th anniversary celebrations for Doctor Who. Having written for the show ever since its revival under scriptwriter Russell T. Davies, Gatiss penned An Adventure In Space And Time — a drama about the Doctor’s early days at the BBC — as well as two new episodes of the latest series.

He adapted and directed an M. R. James ghost story, which was a highlight of BBC2’s Christmas Day schedule, as well as writing and presenting a documentary about the author.

Complex character: Mark Gatiss is not only playing Mycroft Holmes, he also created the show with Steven Moffat, produces it and writes the script Steven Moffat, who co-produces the show, says: 'Mycroft is a very complex character. Somehow, he's the key to Sherlock'

An episode of Poirot’s final series similarly came from his pen. Oh, and all the while he has been starring in a sell-out production of Shakespeare’s Corialanus at the Donmar Warehouse — the latest in a line of classical theatre roles.

That he has also written three novels, based around the adventures of a detective called Lucifer Box, is almost surplus to requirements.

Small wonder, then, that one broadsheet newspaper this week used one of its editorial leader columns to declare Gatiss ‘a national treasure’.

Such popular acclaim might never have come his way had it not been for a passing comment made on a train journey from Cardiff to London in 2009, when Gatiss was travelling with Steven Moffat, his long-term collaborator on Doctor Who.

Gatiss remarked on the coincidence that in 1881, when the first Sherlock Holmes story appeared, Dr John Watson was a war veteran who had been wounded in Afghanistan. Nearly 130 years later, the British Army was fighting in the same distant outpost: perhaps, he mused, a modern-day Watson was there.

Inspiration struck both men. ‘It was a lightbulb moment,’ Gatiss says.

What followed was the most critically lauded TV show in years, and one which saw the affectionate loathing between Sherlock and Mycroft develop to a new intensity.

In one telling scene at the start of the latest series, Mycroft picked up a large white teapot and announced: ‘I’ll be mother.’ To which Holmes retorted: ‘And there is a whole childhood in a nutshell.’

Such psychologically laden lines have prompted some to suspect that Gatiss has commandeered one of literature’s best-loved heroes for some personal family therapy. For Gatiss’s own childhood was marked by a complex relationship with his parents and a bitter rivalry with his own older brother, all set against a truly gothic backdrop that was to inspire his lifelong fascination with the macabre.

When Gatiss was born in Sedgefield, County Durham, in 1966, his brother Phillip was three years old. They grew up in the village of School Aycliffe, north of Darlington, where their father was a mining engineer.

As the pits closed, his father joined his mother working at the psychiatric hospital opposite their home.

Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat came up with the idea of Sherlock while on a train to London after having worked on Doctor Who in Cardiff

The hospital, once known as Aycliffe Colony for the Mentally Defective, became Mark’s second home. He and Phillip used the swimming pool there, had their haircuts done by staff, and watched films in the hospital’s cramped cinema.

One of Gatiss’s earliest memories is of seeing Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, surrounded by people whose illness had left deep marks on their faces.

‘I was almost as frightened of the people sitting around me as of the Child Catcher [the film’s villain],’ he recalls. ‘The faces and personalities were true northern Gothic.’

He acknowledges that it also explains his adult obsession with monsters, demons and derelict buildings: ‘It definitely left its mark. I’ve always liked the macabre.

‘I was always drawn to the supernatural, anything odd. I liked “stepping out of the sunshine”.’

To the young Gatiss, his father was a forbidding figure. ‘I realise now that was mainly because he worked so hard. He wasn’t unkind, but he was a presence. When our mum said, “Wait till your father gets home”, it definitely worked.’

But it was his relationship with his brother that left the most lasting scars. The boys detested each other and fought frequently. Though they would stick up for each other in playground scraps, at home, Phillip would punch and bully his little brother.

‘We only stopped hating each other recently,’ Gatiss says. ‘We never had anything in common. He was painfully shy and found his expression in lashing out at people.’

Gatiss, meanwhile, found another escape: the stage. During his first year of drama college, he met Reece Shearsmith, Steve Pemberton and Jeremy Dyson. The four began writing and performing a ghoulish sketch show called The League Of Gentlemen.

It developed into a radio sitcom about the inhabitants of a morbidly gruesome village on the remote Yorkshire Moors, a backwater called Royston Vasey. The motto on the village signposts promised ‘You’ll Never Leave’, and the population of serial killers, psychopaths, cannibals and lunatics made sure of that.

After the show won the Perrier comedy award at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1997, it transferred to BBC2 TV.

All the actors played multiple roles, often in drag. Gatiss’s best characters included Hilary Briss, the butcher who kept cuts of human flesh for special customers; Iris, the cleaner with a disgustingly lurid lovelife; and Val, the obedient housewife whose husband is obsessed with bodily functions.

Such dark humour would hardly make Gatiss the natural choice to pen the revival of a children’s classic. But having been obsessed by Doctor Who as a child, he had supplemented his wages as an actor in the early 90s by writing four Doctor Who novels.

Redbeard: The young Sherlock appearing in flashbacks, bullied by an adult Mycroft, was played by Gatiss's co-creator Steven Moffat's son

When the show was revived for TV by producers Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat, Gatiss was the first writer they hired. His first episode featured Simon Callow as Charles Dickens, starting a pattern that has seen Gatiss cast actors that he admired in his youth as stars for his projects.

The credits for his Christmas Day dramatisation of M.R. James’s spine-chilling story The Tractate Middoth read like a geek’s dream dinner party: there was Eleanor Bron, who starred with The Beatles in Help!; former Doctor Who assistant Louise Jameson; Una Stubbs from Til Death Us Do Part, and Roy Barraclough, the former Coronation Street actor who did a famous drag double act called Cissy and Ada with comedian Les Dawson.

Murder and mystery have been a recurring theme: Midsomer Murders, Inspector George Gently, Poirot, Marple, Jekyll… Gatiss has been involved with them all, as writer or actor.

His fascination with Victoriana and Dickensian horror spills over into real life. At the Islington house he shares with his civil partner, actor Ian Hallard, he constructed a mad scientist’s laboratory in the cellar, complete with blood-red walls, yards of glass tubes with coloured liquids bubbling over bunsen burners, and a stuffed cat.

He met Hallard, who is eight years his junior, online. He claims it is the younger man’s pristine spelling and grammar that attracted him. They were married in 2008 at the Middle Temple in the City of London.

Gatiss says he always knew that he was gay, though he had a girlfriend as a teenager, and that he accepted his real sexuality after a single afternoon of self-doubt.

‘I don’t think I was ever “in” with my friends,’ he says.

Coming out to his parents was, however, much harder.

It was only after leaving home that he plucked up the confidence to tell his mother the truth. She begged him to say nothing to his father, and promised she would break the news herself.

A year later, Gatiss realised they had dealt with the problem by denying it to themselves, and he had to go through the ordeal of coming out all over again. That taught him, he says, never to put off difficult emotional decisions.

Gatiss’s open homosexuality has led some to detect a gay frisson between his characterisation of Holmes and Watson. It’s a running joke that Inspector Lestrade and his colleagues regard 221b Baker Street as a gay love nest, and in the latest series landlady Mrs Hudson was incredulous at Watson’s protestations that he was getting engaged … ‘to a woman’.

Purists have balked at such liberties with Conan Doyle’s creation, but they are part and parcel of Gatiss’s creativity. Homosexual undercurrents, vicious sibling rivalry, gothic shadows: these are the ingredients of his adolescence which today underpin his adult success.

His next role — as a banker called Tycho Nestoris in the U.S. drama Game Of Thrones — has helped heal the rivalry with his brother.

After decades of animosity, the two are back in contact and Gatiss says Phillip, now a postman, was ‘so excited’ to hear Mark has a part in the show that he loves.