Is “cup of tea”...code?
I’ve seen a few people complain that this post I made is not actually a shout out to the fandom TJLCers, but rather a completely arbitrary statement and we are Reaching. To counter, in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (dir. Billy Wilder), the answer to this question is yes, absolutely.
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes has been cited as a major source of inspiration by both Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat, and they both admire Billy Wilder’s work, so any similarities between the two cannot be treated as a coincidence. The universe is rarely so lazy.
I invite you to pull up a copy of the movie online (or, if you’re more inclined to a more legal way, pop a DVD in) and skip ahead exactly 20 minutes. This my friends, is the most important part in the entire film. A woman asks Sherlock Holmes to be the father of her child. He declines for Reasons. Those Reasons are explained with the conversation he has with this woman’s translator:
ROGOZHIN: [...] and we considered Tschaikowski -- HOLMES: Oh, you couldn’t go wrong with Tschaikowski -- ROGOZHIN: We could -- and we did. It was a catastrophe. HOLMES: Why? ROGOZHIN: You don’t know? Because Tschaikowski -- how shall I put it? Women are not his glass of tea.
Tschaikowski is gay. That’s what that means. It’s not hard to infer. Things didn’t work out because couldn’t get it up with the Madame because he’s not attracted to women. This same analogy is used minutes later to imply that Holmes himself is gay (for Dr. Watson):
HOLMES: The point is that Tschaikowski is not an isolated case. ROGOZHIN: You mean, you and Dr. Watson -- ? (Holmes nods) He is your glass of tea? HOLMES: If you want to be picturesque about it.
“Cup of tea” is absolutely code. It was code in TPLoSH, and it is code in BBC Sherlock. This line was inserted by the writers to draw a direct connection to this scene in TPLoSH. It doesn’t actually matter if the writers put this line in for specifically for us or not, but because they did, we know that tea is an important metaphor now, and probably always has been. We’ve been right to look at drinks all along. We've been two steps ahead of the rest of the fandom this entire time.
TL;DR - We were right about tea being gay and now antis are mad.
[This scene also contains the “I’m not free” line, as seen in John’s texts when he breaks it off with E, but that’s something for another meta.]
[TPLoSH transcripts taken from here]









