One of television's biggest cliffhangers since who shot JR? will be solved on New Year's Day when millions of Sherlock fans find out how the master detective survived his rooftop leap at the end of the last series.

Fans tuning in to the last series saw Benedict Cumberbatch's character seemingly lying dead on the pavement after tumbling from the top of a building, before resurfacing very much alive and watching over his own grave.

Ahead of the first episode of the new series on New Year's Day, fans have gone online with their own solutions filling internet forums with ingenious and often unlikely theories.

Some of the most popular include Sherlock diving into a passing laundry truck or fooling doctors by placing a squash ball under his arm pit which can make it seem like his pulse stopped.

The show's co-creator, Steven Moffat, said making up theories is "much more fun than being told" and his partner on the show, Mark Gatiss, admitted the hype from the fans put pressure on them to come up with a suitable solution.

He said: "We knew right from the start how we were going to do it.

"But we had absolutely no idea it would take on the epic proportions it has so that really by the time we came to actually do it we really had to address the fact it had become so huge and there are only so many ways you can jump off a building onto the pavement."

Moffat said he had been surprised by the fans' response to the show and its stars - Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman.

He said: "The response was huge, it almost instantly became a sort of national institution and Benedict went from being that bloke with a funny name that people looked blank about when you mentioned him, he went from that to star more quickly than anything I've ever witnessed.

"He was a star in one day."