The New Sherlock Special Trailer Has Dropped - Watch It Here Now

We've got no idea how Benedict Cumberbatch found the time to film this. But we're very glad he did

When you consider the fact that Benedict Cumberbatch is currently starring in Hamlet, raising his first child and enjoying his first year of marriage, it seems slightly incredible that he's managed to brush his teeth over the last 12 months. Let alone film a 'Sherlock Special'.

But rather than dwelling on his intimidating-sounding schedule, let's just cut straight to the Sherlock Special itself.

Due to air at Christmas this year, the one-off episode features Benedict as Sherlock Holmes and Martin Freeman as Doctor John Watson, and is reported to be followed by a three-episode-long series later in 2016. And while it's hard to deduce much from the trailer, we have managed to work out that the BBC have clearly invested in a particularly convincing smoke machine.

Which is the kind of observation we like to think Sherlock would be proud of himself.

That's not the only remarkable thing about the impending episode. While previous series of Sherlock have been set in the present day, the Sherlock Special takes place back in 1895. Meaning the costumes are slightly more impractical. And the facial hair is much better.

‘It’s not suddenly going to be a different show,’ says Mark Gatiss, one of the show’s writers. ‘It’s essentially our Sherlock as if we’d always done it set in 1895. It has the same sensibility. The language is obviously slightly different but we wanted it to feel as funny and as vivid and as getable as our modern-day one. Otherwise it would be a sort of dusty period piece which is not what we are interested in… What we initially did was to come up with modern equivalents for all the Victorian things, so in this we go back to the original. The texting is sending telegrams. We just reverse engineered it to how Conan Doyle did it.’