This piece of evidence suggests Sherlock could be coming back to TV sooner than we thought

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The surprise news comes from an interview with Chris Georgiou, whose Bloomsbury business Speedy’s Café has become a well-known feature in Sherlock, appearing as part of the fictional location for the detective’s Baker Street flat and even providing sustenance to cast members between takes.

If course, that means Georgiou has become fairly close to the Sherlock production team, and is given a head’s up when they might need it for filming again – and apparently, that’s sort of happened already.

“I probably shouldn’t be saying this,” Georgiou told Time Out, “but I’ve heard they’ll be coming back for a fifth season.”

Now, of course this isn’t entirely a surprise, as Moffat and Gatiss have been careful not to rule out a Sherlock return, saying that it probably will happen at some point several times over the last few months.

“Nobody has ever closed the door on Sherlock – we just say the same thing all the time and it gets quoted different ways,” Moffat told RadioTimes.com earlier this year.

"We haven’t got an immediate plan, but I would remain surprised, given the collective enthusiasm we have for it, if we didn’t do it again."

“When, I don’t know,” he continued. “I think maybe the time for a longer gap is upon us, I don’t know. A longer gap? They’re always long gaps!”

“We’re doing Dracula, which is going to take two years at least,” Gatiss added.

“We’re not going to do Sherlock whilst we’re doing Dracula. So it’s not going to happen in the immediate future. Never say never, but no – we don’t have an idea [right now].”

“I could see us making more Sherlocks,” Moffat concluded. “I could see us making Sherlocks way in the future.

“It’s not the kind of show that has to come back all the time. It can revisit. Every time Sherlock comes back it’s a reunion show.”

However, the suggestion from Georgiou is the most concrete indication we’ve had for a while that such a return is actively being planned for, with a vague idea of when it could actually happen (the interview took place in May, so it’s fairly recent).

It’s also worth noting that Georgiou could be speculating himself, but given that Sherlock’s production team have had to work quite closely with the location in the past (and the fact that he claims to have “heard” the news) it doesn’t seem out of the question that they’d have given him a sense of whether they’d need to use Speedy’s again.

We’re sure this doesn’t mean a new series of Sherlock is heading to screens any time soon – Dracula hasn’t even started shooting yet, and there’s the small matter of Moffat’s HBO TV series to consider – but it’s good to know the first plans for its return may already be afoot.

This article was originally published on 3 August 2018