talent for the least visible purpose or reward." Others critics complained that the series was not an exact adaptation of the novels. Nigel Farndale in The Telegraph stated "I struggled with Dirk Gently...It had nothing to do with Stephen Mangan's considerable comedic talents, still less with Darren Boyd who plays MacDuff, the Dr Watson to Dirk's Holmes. It is more to do with my devotion to Douglas Adams, upon whose comic novel this series is based...in Douglas Adams, 90 per cent of the pleasure is in the prose, the narration, the felicities of language." Tom Sutcliffe in The Independent felt that the programme's qualities were "spread a little too thinly over a nonsensical thriller plot' and that "laughs... were far too widely spaced in a script that could have done with a lot more editing." Several critics compared the production with the big-budget BBC One detective series "Sherlock", the second series of which was broadcast in January 2012. Writing in Metro, Keith Watson said "There's no doubt Sherlock has raised the detecting duo bar on TV...it's more than a match for Sherlock on the dialogue front, neatly catching the surreal humour that was the Adams trademark...but there was no disguising the fact that Dirk Gently was a five-star script being filmed on a one-star budget, making it look like a designer label knockoff when set against the production values lavished on Sherlock." The first episode had 737,000 viewers and a 3% audience share. Series one, including the pilot episode, was released on DVD on 26 March 2012 by ITV Studios Home Entertainment. Cancellation It was announced on 28 May 2012 that no further episodes had been commissioned. Stephen Mangan wrote on Twitter: "It gives me no pleasure whatsoever to report that the BBC have decided not to make any more Dirk Gently." An article in the Metro noted that after Mangan's tweet, the show quickly became one of the top trending topics in the UK and an online petition was set up opposing the decision. A BBC spokesman stated that as a result of the cuts initiated by the "Delivering Quality First" process, BBC Four is concentrating funds on purchasing imported shows: "We've loved having Dirk on the channel but the licence fee freeze means less British drama on BBC Four...In future we will focus on the best dramas from around the globe, like The Killing and Borgen, whilst BBC