Alan Davies is back from his skiing holiday in Sochi and is Jonathan Creek (BBC1)
again. It's been a while. There has been the odd one-off special, but
the last time there was a series was a decade ago. That's practically a
Great Hiatus.
Sherlock Holmes gets a big nod in this one. The son of a friend of the Creeks (who becomes Jonathan's not entirely welcome work-experience boy) fancies himself as a bit of a sleuth and adopts Holmes's powers of deduction. For example, he knows that Jonathan and new missus Polly (Sarah Alexander) have recently returned from Reykjavik, by their scars and their watches and what he can see in Polly's bag. Thing is, he couldn't be more wrong. They haven't been anywhere near Iceland. He's alway wrong: it's very funny, the best joke here. Though I also enjoyed the beheading of a pony (through bad photography), the grinning corpse, and the annoying man not watching a play but filming it on his mobile.
Oh, and it turns out that a painting on a dressing-room wall is by a lower-case painter called holmes too, once Creek has figured out that it's not by someone called sawjoy, and has been rehung, hurriedly, upside down. It's the key to solving the case: the (impossible) attack on an actor in a locked room, who is herself playing a victim in a gothic, locked-room mystery. In fact, it's The Mystery of the Yellow Room by Gaston Leroux, who's most famous for writing The Phantom of the Opera, which of course was adapted into a musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber, to whom this also nods, like a big nodding dog …
There are references and pastiches all over the place, many of which I'm probably missing. It doesn't matter. You can enjoy Jonathan Creek as black comedy, or simply as crime drama. It's all so brilliantly thought out by David Remnick, an intricate machine with hundreds of pieces that has been lovingly assembled by hand until it all fits into place and works, like clockwork (unlike Jonathan's watch, with its flat battery).
And at its heart is a likable character and an oddly captivating performance from Davies. Odd because it's understated and low-key to the point of barely being on the scale. Dogs can't see Davies when he acts. Try it – put yours in front of Jonathan Creek. See? Nothing.
Sherlock Holmes gets a big nod in this one. The son of a friend of the Creeks (who becomes Jonathan's not entirely welcome work-experience boy) fancies himself as a bit of a sleuth and adopts Holmes's powers of deduction. For example, he knows that Jonathan and new missus Polly (Sarah Alexander) have recently returned from Reykjavik, by their scars and their watches and what he can see in Polly's bag. Thing is, he couldn't be more wrong. They haven't been anywhere near Iceland. He's alway wrong: it's very funny, the best joke here. Though I also enjoyed the beheading of a pony (through bad photography), the grinning corpse, and the annoying man not watching a play but filming it on his mobile.
Oh, and it turns out that a painting on a dressing-room wall is by a lower-case painter called holmes too, once Creek has figured out that it's not by someone called sawjoy, and has been rehung, hurriedly, upside down. It's the key to solving the case: the (impossible) attack on an actor in a locked room, who is herself playing a victim in a gothic, locked-room mystery. In fact, it's The Mystery of the Yellow Room by Gaston Leroux, who's most famous for writing The Phantom of the Opera, which of course was adapted into a musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber, to whom this also nods, like a big nodding dog …
There are references and pastiches all over the place, many of which I'm probably missing. It doesn't matter. You can enjoy Jonathan Creek as black comedy, or simply as crime drama. It's all so brilliantly thought out by David Remnick, an intricate machine with hundreds of pieces that has been lovingly assembled by hand until it all fits into place and works, like clockwork (unlike Jonathan's watch, with its flat battery).
And at its heart is a likable character and an oddly captivating performance from Davies. Odd because it's understated and low-key to the point of barely being on the scale. Dogs can't see Davies when he acts. Try it – put yours in front of Jonathan Creek. See? Nothing.
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