There is war in Afghanistan whilst London is an overcrowded “cesspool” with ridiculous house prices, forcing the compromise of unutterably weird flatmates.

This special episode of Sherlock (BBC1) was supposed to be set in the Victorian age yet it seemed little had changed apart from the clothing. It felt like the same old London and the same old Sherlock, but this time stripped of the gimmick of the modern day. But wasn’t that what made the series bold? Here it was neither the past nor the present, doing neither one thing nor the other, stuck in the middle like a bloodless Lib Dem.

The Abominable Bride began with a frenzied woman in a wedding dress who embarked on a shooting spree before killing herself. A few hours later, still in her wedding dress and draped in a veil matted with ugly red stains from where the bullet exited her skull, she was seen wandering in the mist with a shotgun and promptly killed her husband.

With a dead woman murdering men, hapless Lestrade, of the “impossibly imbecilic Scotland Yard”, went to Baker Street for help. She was as “white as death! Mouth like a crimson wound!” he told Sherlock. Here we go, I thought, dabbling in high Victorian, hifalutin language, but Sherlock neatly stepped in to save us from it: “Poetry or truth?” he mocked.

With a dead woman under arrest and chained to a mortuary slab a tremendous story was set up – and then whipped away. Maddeningly, Mycroft appeared and we veered off in a prancing tiresome exchange about plum puddings and paranoia. The scarlet thread, so enticingly laid at our feet, was snipped clean and we were left wandering aimlessly through the show, looking for it and watching the clock. Just tell the story, I begged the TV. There’s nothing old-fashioned or plain in that. It’s not a defeat or a concession. Tell a good story!

Just as I was losing patience, Eustace, a new character, spied the dead bride wandering in the fog and we were back to some kind of coherent plot. In a misty hedge maze, the bride lifted her veil and whispered that he will die tonight. You’ll forgive me for saying I thought of nothing but Scooby Doo at this moment: what’s she got under that veil? A mask, perhaps? And under the mask the face of an evil janitor, surely…

Eustace’s wife sought help from Sherlock who was delighted, intending to use the man as “bait”, and so began a crime caper in a grand Victorian house, but even then the plot wasn’t allowed to simply be a rollicking good story because the old Moriarty storyline intruded, offering nothing for the casual viewer and employed only for the obsessive fans, weighty with their hashtags and various “eeeeeks” and “OMG”s. At this point, the show gathered its fans to its chest and froze the rest of us out. You mean you’re not obsessive? You mean you don’t sleep in a deerstalker? You mean you haven’t watched every other episode? Well, go home. We don’t want you and we don’t need you. How very self-important!

And the niggling sense that this story couldn’t decide what to be, let alone how to tell it, was confirmed when we leapt forward to the present day: it had all been a dream! Ta da! It resorted to the same trick I used when writing stories in Second Year English, back when I was at the tremulous, adolescent stage of abandoning Point Horror books and considering the leap to the big Stephen Kings.

Yes, Sherlock is stylish and has a uniquely impish tone, and there was some brilliant camera work - swooping, freezing, juddering – which was made all the more clever because of the story’s antique setting.

But, oh, it suffered from a meandering and wandering plot, and invoked the dreary feeling that schedules need to be filled and so everything, from this to the sprawling 20-episode Dickensian, is to be stretched and tugged and teased for as long as possible. Drag it out and call it a “special.” Stretch it thin and fill its draughty spaces with ornate Gothic imagery: candle-flame, torchlight, fancy rugs and tasselled curtains, lace, mazes, mansions and ghosts. And tag on some nice little frills of feminism at the end, just so fans can swoon and praise it for its deep themes.