Sherlock fans furious after BBC series Apple Tree Yard turns out to be not Sherlock

Apple Tree Yard is filling the Sunday night slot previously occupied by the detective drama series

A scene from Sherlock

Apparently still in denial after what some fans felt was an unsatisfactory conclusion to Sherlock season four, some audience members are trawling other BBC shows in the hope that they might magically reveal more of Benedict Cumberbatch.

It seems that Sherlock obsessives tuned into new BBC drama Apple Tree Yard, which is filling the Sunday evening slot that used to be taken by the detective series, in the hope that it might be a secret episode. Seriously.

And boy were they livid when it they found out it wasn't.

One fan tweeted: "Imagine: Apple Tree Yard stops in the middle of the episode, the screen turns black, the Sherlock theme starts playing and episode 4 begins."

Other fans were upset at the fact that two heterosexual characters have sex in Westminster, after waiting for Sherlock and Watson to suddenly profess their undying love to one another, to no avail.

'Johnlock', the name given to the hoped-for romance between Sherlock and Watson, has been a long-running annoyance for showrunner Steven Moffatt, who has consistently ruled out such a relationship taking place between the pair on his show.

At a panel where he discussed the representation of the LGBTQ community in sci-fi TV, some fans interpreted his comments to mean a Johnlock romance might actually happen.

Moffatt then said that he felt fans were "trivialising it beyond endurance".

"We've explicitly said this is not going to happen - there is no game plan - no matter how much we lie about other things, that this show is going to culminate in Martin and Benedict going off into the sunset together," Mark Gatiss added.

"They are not going to do it. And if people want to write whatever they like and have a great time extrapolating that's absolutely fine. But there is no hidden or exposed agenda. We're not trying to f**k with people's heads. Not trying to insult anybody or make any kind of issue out of it, there's nothing there.

"It's just our show and that's what these characters are like. If people want to do that on websites, absolutely fine. But there's nothing there."