Daily Mail, 12 May 1997, by Peter Paterson
"I detect some magic"
-----------------------------------------------------------

Jonathan Creek (BBC1), 

[...]

ALL too rarely, something with a freshness of approach comes 
along which puts to shame the awful monotonous me-tooism of 
much of the television output. This weekend it  was a new 
detective yarn, *Jonathan Creek.* 

TV detectives may differ slightly in their musical or 
sartorial tastes, but the pattern right across the genre is 
wearisomely familiar. Private eyes have to leave the police 
panting in their wake as they solve the crime and hand the 
villains over to justice. 

Police detectives need to overcome the inertia and 
opposition of their seniors in the force, if necessary by 
disobeying orders, before being proved to have been right 
all along. The formula is as rigid as a mathematical 
equation. 

Because of low expectations, I caught myself rehearsing some 
quip about *Jonathan Creek*, Saturday a five-part murder 
mystery series, being up the creek. I couldn't have been 
more wrong: it has a charm, and above all, a novelty that 
was so refreshing that I'm probably tempted to give it 
higher marks than it really deserves. 

It stars two actors best known as comedians - Caroline 
Quentin, of *Men Behaving Badly fame*, and Alan Davies, who 
made his name in stand-up comedy and is something of a TV 
beginner. She plays Maddy Magellan, a writer of books 
exposing police bungling. 

He is the eponymous Creek, technical assistant to a 
magician, devising the tricks which pay for his boss's 
chauffeured Rolls-Royce and varied love life. I called this 
a murder mystery, but it's really much more of a black 
comedy, as might be expected from a series written by David 
Renwick, who gave us *One Foot In The Grave*. 

Maddy recruits the lateral-thinking Jonathan as a walking 
data bank when she is investigating the shooting of artist 
and philanderer Hedley Shale (Colin Baker). The victim was 
found dead at his home, The Wrestler's Tomb - that's quite 
an improvement, even if it has much the same spirit, as 
Dunroamin - with a bound and gagged French model, Francesca 
Boutron (Saskia Mulder) beside him. 

The police, otherwise virtually invisible throughout the 
story, had arrested a burglar - discarded jewellery was 
found on the lawn, and Saskia said that an intruder in a 
black hood had committed the murder. Once at the police 
station the suspect - this was among the better jokes - 
asked 'to exercise my right to an investigative journalist': 
hence the arrival of Maddy on the scene. 

The next four Jonathan Creek stories will run to 50 minutes 
apiece: this 'feature length' introduction almost ruptured 
itself to fill 1 1/2 hours, and involved a tale of such 
complexity with so many red-herring sub-plots, that it left 
me reeling. In future it should be a tighter ship. 

Director Marcus Mortimer concentrated ruthlessly on his two 
leading players, reducing everyone else, including the 
excellent Sheila Gish, as the artist's widow, and Anthony 
Head (of Gold Blend ad fame) as the magician, to mere 
ciphers. But at least that allowed Davies and Quentin to 
establish themselves as Creek and Magellan. I predict they 
will soon attract a loyal and substantial following, though 
the process might have been easier and more certain if 
*Jonathan Creek* hadn't been banished to the desert of 
Saturday night. 



-----------------------------------------------------------
                     Bentley's Bedlam
            http://www.BetsyDa.com/bedlam.html

This website is for information and entertainment purposes only 
and is not intended to infringe on copyrights held by others.