Rebecca Moore says good looks aren't all that's needed to grab girl's attention

Stephen Moffat, writer of Sherlock and Doctor Who, recently revealed that BBC bosses were originally aghast at the prospect of casting Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes. They apparently believed that he was just not sexy enough.

You see, Moffat had promised the Beeb a very sexy Sherlock to enliven the old, fusty stories, but bosses were less than turned on by Cumberbatch, who is not – it’s probably fair to say – classically good-looking.

How very narrow-minded of the BBC indeed.

Many people with true sex appeal are not classically good-looking. The classically good-looking people are classically good looking.

They may be handsome or beautiful or various forms of both, but that doesn’t make them sexy.

However, despite being a little quirky on the looks front, Cumberbatch’s Sherlock is entirely sexy, partly due to his deep, baritone voice, and his chiselled, cut-glass features but also because as Sherlock he combines a sexy mix of intelligence, arrogance and dry wit that many people – myself included – find rather irresistible.

Plenty of sexiest man alive competitions have concurred with this sentiment. Last year, Cumberbatch was voted number one in Empire Magazine’s sexiest man competition.

Whether he quite deserved first place in front of Johnny Depp et al is another story for another day...

Well, I guess the Beeb’s initial resistance to Benedict Cumberbatch’s casting highlights that it wasn’t the first time that BBC bosses got something wrong, and it surely won’t be the last. We won’t go there now either.

I’m glad that – in this instance – the BBC learnt its lesson not to take someone at (pretty) face value.

The accepted best-looking actor for a role does not necessarily guarantee you the sexiest person for it.

A nice face will get you so far… but without the personality, gravitas and wit to carry of the complexities of a character like Sherlock, the show would have been poorer for it. And the female audience would have been markedly smaller, too, I’ll bet.