The strange case of the return of Jonathan Creek

Maybe it was the Winter Olympics, perhaps it was the arrival of the second series of House of Cards on Netflix, or it could be that my trying to catch up with Top Gear via BBC iPlayer had something to do with it. Either way, I managed to miss the news that Jonathan Creek was returning for a new series until a couple of days before it was broadcast. The return of this late Nineties detective show struck me as odd, because those of us who hanker after a private investigator who sees things that others don’t nowadays get our kicks from Sherlock. Besides, the actor in the title role has moved on too, becoming that bloke who always gets the questions wrong on that over-rated panel show QI. Have I missed something?

I have certainly managed to miss the various one-off specials of Jonathan Creek that were broadcast over the past few years (the last actual series aired ten years ago), but I used to like this show so I tuned in to watch the latest offering on Friday evening. Having done so, I was most surprised to behold a Jonathan Creek who has ditched the duffel-coat, moved out of his windmill and evidently moved on from being the creative consultant to a stage magician. Even more implausibly, he’s now married to Susan from Coupling. Character development is all very well but this is taking things too far.

Worse still, us viewers were shown the crime being committed in the first ten minutes. This may have worked with Columbo, but that was how that show operated; it doesn’t work for Jonathan Creek, where the mystery was invariably of the locked-room variety (often with apparently supernatural overtones), and the highlight was always when Jonathan, having utilised his talents for lateral thinking and creating illusions, showed everyone how a seemingly impossible crime was committed. This, rather than the more conventional identifying of the motive and the culprit, was always the thing that made Jonathan Creek different from, say, Inspector Morse and Agatha Christie’s Poirot. What was writer David Renwick thinking?

Robbed of the main attraction, the show struggled on through the sight of Alan Davies riding a donkey, a less-than-subtle Sherlock piss-take – Jonathan reluctantly took on an assistant who, aside from looking like a cross between Benedict Cumberbatch and David Tennant, made observation-based deductions that turned out to be completely wrong – and a couple of puzzles which didn’t really hold the viewer’s attention. 

Not being privy to the inner workings of the BBC, I don’t know why they decided to resurrect Jonathan Creek. Furthermore, it is a mystery to me why Mr Renwick decided to mess around with the show’s formula which has worked so well in the past. But I cannot help but think that these were the wrong decisions.

When Britain won at ice hockey

Great Britain has competed in every Winter Olympics since they started in 1924, and much as though I enjoy watching it I would be the first to admit that we’re not the most successful of winter sports nations. You could, of course, argue that given the relative lack of world-class winter sports facilities in the British Isles (even the annual British skiing championships have to be held in the French Alps), Team GB has actually been punching above its weight, with the last time we failed to win any medals at all being in 1992.

A particular national success has been the skeleton (or, as I call it, the going-down-the-ice-head-first-on-a-tea-tray event), in which the British have won a medal every time this has been an Olympic sport; thanks to Lizzie Yarnold, that record is safe for another four years. This is rather appropriate, as skeleton has its origins in the famous Cresta Run in St Morritz, which was built in the 1880s in order to stop British guests in the town from sledging (or, if you prefer, tobogganing) in the streets. Unlike everyone else, the British preferred to go head-first – the point at which skeleton and luge diverged.

Other winter sports in which Great Britain has tended to do well are curling (in which the Scottish team competes under the Union Jack), figure skating and the bobsleigh. In fact, prior to Jenny Jones’s bronze medal in the snowboarding, all of Team GB’s Winter Olympic medals had been won on ice (prior to 2014, the closest the British had ever come to a medal on snow was Gina Hathorn’s fourth in the women’s slalom in 1968, although there was also the matter of Alain Baxter’s controversial disqualification in the men’s slalom in 2002).

There is, though, an unusual entry on Britain’s modest list of Winter Olympic successes. It’s from 1936, and concerns the matter of a gold medal in ice hockey.

Nowadays, Great Britain tends not to qualify for the Winter Olympic ice hockey tournament. Team GB – and unlike in football and rugby, it really is Team GB for this sport – is currently ranked 22^nd in the world, and with 12 countries taking part you can see how the numbers don’t add up. If we’re going to be honest, and we might as well be, Team GB got through the pre-qualifying for Sochi 2014 but lost out in the final qualifying tournament in Riga last year; specifically, we lost to Latvia (who qualified), France and Kazakhstan (6-0, that last one).

Back in 1936, though, things were different. The Bavarian skiing resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen hosted the games, and although the controversy associated with Nazi Germany hosting the Olympics is usually attached to the summer games of that year, which were held in Berlin, there was a fair amount of that at Garmisch-Partenkirchen as well. Perhaps the most noteworthy story concerns ice hockey, with the inclusion of Rudi Ball in the German team. He’d played for Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s but as he was Jewish he’d been dropped after the Nazis had come to power. However, he was considered to be one of the best ice hockey players in Europe, and amid much controversy – including threats from his team-mates to refuse to play if Ball didn’t play – he was reinstated, apparently striking a deal whereby his family could leave Germany if he played.

Canada were the favourites to win the ice hockey (not everything was different), and the tournament itself had what would seem today to be an odd structure, with the semi-finals and the final being group stages. Confused? Me too! Of the 15 teams that entered, eight progressed to the semi-finals (which were played as two groups of four), with four making it to the final which was a round-robin in which the scores from games played in previous stages between teams who’d made it that far were counted. This particular rule would become apparent as a result of the Canada-Great Britain game in the semi-finals.

That, by the way, was the crucial game. If the Americans had their miracle on the ice in 1980, this was Britain’s.

But, before we get to that, just how British was the British ice hockey team of 1936?

It’s a good question, as whenever this particular gold medal gets brought up (which, to be honest, isn’t very often), the usual accusation is that the British simply recruited some Canadian expats to play under the Union Jack. Great Britain had entered the Winter Olympic ice hockey tournament before, winning the bronze medal in 1924, and the team then had indeed been composed almost entirely of Canadians – either military officers stationed in Britain or students studying at British universities, the Winter Olympics being an exclusively amateur affair back then. For 1936, though, the British Olympic Association decreed that every member of the British team had to be not just British subjects, but British-born.

Although it was never going to challenge football as the most popular winter spectator sport, ice hockey enjoyed something of a boom in Britain in the 1930s. The brains behind promoting the sport in this country was a man called J.F. ‘Bunny’ Ahearne, who in 1934 became the manager of the British national team. He recruited Percy Nicklin, who had moved to England in 1935 to coach the Richmond Hawks after a successful coaching career in his native Canada, to help him find players in Canada (the only obvious source of good players) who would meet the British-born requirement. As coach, Nicklin was to be the driving force behind the team he assembled.

The thirteen-strong team that Ahearne and Nicklin got together for the 1936 Winter Olympics varied in age from 39 (Carl Erhardt, the captain, who was actually older than Ahearne!) to 18 (Jack Kilpatrick). One of them, Archie Stinchcombe, could only see out of one eye as the result of a childhood accident. As it turned out, only one member of the team had actually been born in Canada – Gordon Dailley, who had moved to Britain in 1933, apparently by working his passage across the Atlantic on a cattle boat; he was deemed to have qualified by residence. Of the others, ten were British-born but Canadian-raised (sources do vary, though, with Wikipedia claiming that Gerry Davey was born in Canada, whereas the British Ice Hockey Hall of Fame has him as being born in Essex). Some had already moved back to England before Nicklin began to build his team; Jimmy Borland, for example, had been playing for the Great Britain team since 1934.

The story of Edgar Brenchley, though, was typical of the team; born in Kent, his family emigrated to Canada when he was a child and he was brought up in Niagara. A promising amateur player, he played for an American team before moving back to England in 1935, when he started playing under Nicklin for the Richmond Hawks at the same time as Johnny Coward (born in Ambleside, raised in Fort Frances, Ontario) and Jimmy Foster (born in Greenock, raised in Winnipeg).

Of the two with no Canadian connections, both were defencemen; Erhardt had learned how to play as a result of having been sent to school in Switzerland and had played for his country since 1931, while Bob Wyman – who for a time held the British half-mile record in speed-skating – had learned how to play in London, although funnily enough he played for a team called the Grosvenor House Canadians.

All of those selected for the British team played in what was then the newly-formed English National League in the 1935-36 season – representing teams like the Wembley Lions, the Harringay Greyhounds, the Brighton Tigers and the Richmond Hawks (the Grosvenor House Canadians had by that season become the Wembley Canadians, later to be renamed the Wembley Monarchs). None of these teams exist anymore; the fluctuating fortunes of ice hockey – a minority sport in Britain – meant that teams tended to fold when the leagues in which they competed did. Today, London doesn’t even have a team in what is currently the Elite Ice Hockey League.

The Canadian hockey authorities did not take Nicklin’s recruitment drive lying down, and things probably weren’t helped by the fact that the French team had had the same idea. As far as the British were concerned, though, the Canadian Olympic Committee only protested against the inclusion of two players, Jimmy Foster and Alex Archer. Both had been suspended by the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association in 1935 for leaving Canada in order to play ice hockey elsewhere, and they were subsequently banned by the International Ice Hockey Federation, only to be reinstated after the Canadians withdrew their protest shortly before the Winter Olympics began.

In the event, Foster – Nicklin’s first choice as goaltender – played a crucial role in Great Britain’s success at the Winter Olympics, only letting in three goals and recording four shutouts, an impressive feat in a tournament that averaged over four goals per game (in total, of the 31 games he played for Great Britain, 16 were shutouts). His ever-presence in the side meant that the reserve goalie, Arthur Child, didn’t play a game and therefore wasn’t eligible for a medal. Archer, a right-winger and a former two-times Manitoban All Star, also played in all seven games, scoring two goals.

The Canadian selection policy back in those amateur days was to have the country be represented at the Winter Olympics by the previous year’s Allan Cup winners (to this day, the Allan Cup is the trophy awarded to the national amateur men’s champions of Canada). For the 1936 Winter Olympics, though, the 1935 Allan Cup winners were unavailable, so Canada was represented by the runners-up, the Port Arthur Bearcats. This did not stop them from being tipped to win gold.

In the first round, GB beat Sweden (1-0) and Japan (3-0) to progress to the next stage. Elsewhere, Italy recorded a surprise win over the USA while Canada swept all before them, scoring 24 goals in their three first-round matches. The pre-tournament favourites were living up to expectations.

The two met on 11^th February in the semi-final group stage. Great Britain went ahead in the first minute thanks to Gerry Davey, who had fallen ill but had got out of his sick bed to play. Canada soon equalised but GB’s defence, especially Foster in goal, prevented the favourites from adding to their considerable goal tally. The score remained at 1-1 until well into the third period, when with 90 seconds left on the clock, Edgar Brenchley scored to make it 2-1 to the British.

Subsequently, a 1-1 tie against Germany and a victory over Hungary (5-1, compared to Canada’s 15-0 thrashing of the same side) saw Britain make it to the final.

Once in the final group, GB didn’t have to play Canada again as the semi-final result was taken forward. This has been cited by some as evidence of British skulduggery, but those were the tournament rules (similarly, the USA didn’t have to play Czechoslovakia again) and the Olympic authorities stuck to them despite Canadian protests.

Having defeated Czechoslovakia 5-0, GB tied 0-0 against the USA in a game that went through six periods before a tie was declared (this being the days before sudden death and shoot-outs). This assured GB of at least a silver medal. All that stood between them and the gold was the USA, who could win the gold themselves if they beat Canada by at least five goals. Exhausted by the six-period game against the British, though, they lost 1-0, this result meaning that Canada won the silver and the Americans the bronze.

As the Winter Olympics doubled as the World Championships, this meant that for the first (and only) time, Great Britain were the world ice hockey champions.

Carl Erhardt retired from playing after the Winter Olympics. At 39, he remains the oldest person ever to have won a gold medal in this event. Most of the team played in the World Championships the following year, when GB (the hosts) won the silver medal, a feat they would repeat in 1938; both times, Canada won.

After that, some of the gold-winning players continued to play in Britain while others returned to North America – Brenchley found himself playing for the Atlantic City Seagulls in 1939. Most of them would serve in the Second World War. Jimmy Chappell took part in the D-Day Landings. Bob Wyman became a lieutenant-commander in the Royal Navy. Johnny Coward, whose 1936 sweater can be seen today in the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto, served in the Royal Military Police and went back to Canada, and a job in a paper mill, after the war. Gordon Dailley went on to serve in the Korean War as well, and rose to the rank of colonel in the Canadian Army; later, he founded Canada’s first drive-through safari park. Jimmy Foster went back to Canada to work in an aircraft factory. Alex Archer, who scored 82 goals in five seasons for the Wembley Lions, carried on playing until 1945, when he fractured his skull in an international against Sweden; he then went into coaching. Erhardt, considered by many to be a fine all-round sportsman, went on to establish the British Water Ski Federation. Ahearne would become the president of the International Ice Hockey Federation. Three players – Gerry Davey, Archie Stinchcombe and Jimmy Chappell – played for Great Britain at the next Winter Olympics, in 1948.

That was the last time a British ice hockey team qualified for the Winter Olympics.

Sources:

British Ice Hockey Hall of Fame

Greatest Hockey Legends

BBC: “British skate to victory”

Various entries on Wikipedia

Toblerone-topped caramel cheesecake

I never used to be much of a fan of cheesecake. It was heavy, overly sweet and I always thought that there were better dessert options available (the fact that they were invariably topped with a fruit compote didn’t help their cause with me, it must be said).

My views on this form of dessert have softened over the years, though, and the main reason for this is the Toblerone-topped caramel cheesecake. This is one of many recipes that we have that we clipped out of food magazines, although what makes this one different is that it was from an advert (for, as will soon become apparent, Philadelphia cream cheese). It is, quite frankly, amazing, and if that wasn’t enough it’s really easy to make – there are just eight ingredients!

One of these, as the title of this post suggests, is Toblerone. Toblerone is fantastic. In my opinion, anything that involves that triangular Swiss chocolate (with nougat, almonds and honey) bar cannot possibly be bad.

As with any cheesecake, the first thing to prepare is the base, which consists of ¼ cup of butter and 1¼ cups of Oreo biscuit crumbs.

Now, I do not have a problem with the North American way of measuring out ingredients by volume (a cup being around 250 mls) rather than by weight, but only if it’s limited to dry goods (rice, sugar, etc) or liquids. When it comes to butter, I’d much rather stick to weighing it out rather than trying to jam the stuff into a measuring-cup to ensure that I’ve included the correct amount.

Once melted, the butter is mixed with the Oreo crumbs. This lines the bottom of your springform pan (the recipe recommends a nine-inch one).

For the next stage, 750g Philadelpia cream cheese, ¾ cup of brown sugar and one tablespoon of vanilla are beaten together. Once they’re combined, three eggs get added one at a time. When it’s done, add this mixture to the springform pan.

This is baked for 40-45 minutes, at 180°C, then cooled and refrigerated for at least 4 hours (should you wish to make it a day in advance, it’s OK to keep it in the fridge overnight).

Just before serving, it’s time to add the pièce de résistance. The cheesecake is topped with ⅓ cup caramel sauce (that’s what the recipe said; I found it needed a bit more than that) and sprinkle 100g coarsely chopped Toblerone pieces on top of that.

Best. Cheesecake. Ever.

Walk the Lines

I recently chanced upon a hardback copy of Walk the Lines by Mark Mason in a charity shop, and after reading the description on the dust-jacket, I thought I’d buy it and give it a go.

This book is a travelogue about walking the length of all eleven London Underground lines. In other words, London – and a fair bit of its outskirts – by foot. It’s undoubtedly an eccentric challenge, but it presents us with a very insightful view of modern London in all its forms – suburbs, industrial estates, open fields, the inner city and the point at which a poor area ends and an affluent one begins.

It’s not just about the places, mind you. On the way, Mason meets an interesting range of people, including the City of London planning officer, a novelist, a trainee cabbie and an actor from The Archers who did the ‘mind the gap’ announcements for part of the Piccadilly Line. He gets to climb up the NatWest Tower and Barnet Church. And he even manages to walk to Heathrow Airport.

As one would expect, there are some great pieces of Tube trivia here – for example, when the Metropolitan Railway opened in 1863, the Prime Minister (Lord Palmerston, who was 78 at the time) refused to attend on the grounds that at his age, he preferred to spend as much of his time above ground as possible. There is also an explanation for the convention of standing on the right on escalators. On a wider note, there’s a useful definition of what constitutes a modern-day high street from a man who, over the course of this book, has walked along rather a lot of them: “A high street ain’t a high street unless it can sell you a rawlplug.” (By this definition, I am pleased to report that High Road in East Finchley meets his requirement.) There is also plenty of food for thought for people who like maps, and in this sense Mason goes beyond the ‘I went to Stanfords to buy my maps’ travel-writer cliché.

Now an account of a series of walks, however interesting, may get dull after a while but Mason mixes things up to keep the reader interested. He is at various stages accompanied by fellow-walkers. He turns his Circle Line walk into a Circle Line pub crawl. Later on, he does the Jubilee Line by night, offering a nocturnal perspective on London. And by spreading his walks over several months, we see the city (and environs) through different seasons as well. Each walk tells a different story about the same metropolis.

I really enjoyed this book, despite the fact that Mason is rather disparaging about Edgware (perhaps inevitably, it gets compared to that other Northern Line northbound destination, High Barnet, and comes off second-best). This was a good idea for a book, and in Mason’s hands it’s a very good read. If you live in London, or are interested in London, you’ll find something to like here.

A study in Sherlock

So after a wait of two years, it was over before we got half-way through January. I refer, of course, to the third series of Sherlock, which I had been keenly anticipating for several months.

(Before I go any further, I should warn you that this blog post contains various plot-spoilers, and if you haven’t seen the third series of Sherlock yet you may wish to stop reading at this point. You have been warned.)

On the whole, and I speak as a bit of a fan, I was pleased with what I saw. The first hurdle for this new series was always going to be the explanation of how he faked his own death (“short version: not dead”) and this part was well done, I thought, with plenty of nods to various online conspiracy theories (can you even have a conspiracy theory about a fictional TV drama? You can, apparently, if it’s Sherlock) before coming up with an explanation that referred, as the writers had promised, to events that had taken place earlier in the final episode of the second series. The clues were always there, apparently.

The only jarring note for me as far as Sherlock’s return went was not Martin Freeeman’s dodgy ’tache but he question of Tube trains – a pivotal plot point as the great detective raced to stop a North Korean sleeper-agent from blowing up Parliament on, of all days, 5^th November. Now I know that viewers who don’t live and commute in London may not be interested, but the use of the wrong rolling-stock for a District Line train did not go unnoticed by viewers who do, and left me anticipating a completely different twist than that which did occur. A rare slip by the writers, especially given their attention to detail and the fact that they’d just added a trainspotter to the plot; if information about Tube rolling-stock wasn’t in Sherlock’s mind-palace, surely he’d know?

For me at least, the second episode dragged a bit, with a couple of interesting-looking mysteries playing second fiddle to Sherlock’s best man’s speech and a couple of funny interactions between the self-confessed high-functioning sociopath and other guests, with things not changing gear until the last half-hour. Even though they all tied together in the end for a pretty interesting murder plot (after all, everything in Sherlock happens for a reason, even if you have to remember seemingly minor points from previous episodes as became apparent in episode three), it seemed to me as though the writers were paying more attention to character development than having Sherlock go and solve some mysteries.

Ah, character development. Mary Morstan gets more attention here than she did in the books (in which, with the obvious exception of The Sign of Four, she plays a surprisingly minor role as the narrator’s wife), being in this instance a fully-fledged character in her own right whose shady past provides a key plot point in the third episode. I’ll admit I didn’t see the ex-CIA assassin thing coming, although this being Sherlock there had been plenty of clues to indicate that she was not what she seemed, for example her code-cracking abilities. We got to see Sherlock’s parents, which may be a Sherlock Holmes first (they were played, funnily enough, by Benedict Cumberbatch’s real-life parents), and even Mrs Hudson got a bit of a back-story with the revelations about her involvement in a drug cartel (“I did the typing!”).

The final episode of this was, in my opinion, the best, probably due to the reptilian way in which Lars Mikkelsen played the villain. Did he really lick his victim? Yes, he did. Now, having a newspaper proprietor as the villain of the piece may be topical in the light of the phone-hacking scandal but it is not exactly an original idea (the baddie in the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies ran a newspaper empire, and had the same rimless glasses as Charles Augustus Magnussen for that matter, although he merely attempted to start a war between Britain and China to boost circulation figures rather than use his power-without-responsibility to have a go at blackmailing people). Similarly, Sherlock’s use of a pretend-relationship to gain access to the baddie’s office may have drawn comparisons with some of the more questionable things that have been done by undercover policemen in recent years, but readers of the books will note that this underhand tactic is there in “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton” (which first appeared in 1904), the short story on which it is based.

A surprising amount of the material in Sherlock is from the original stories – while watching it, I always find myself thinking of which of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s adventures this character or that reference came from. The ‘east wind’ speech at the end of the third episode is taken from “His Last Bow” (chronologically, although not in the order in which the stories were written, the last Holmes adventure), the ‘John or James’ text-message in the first episode is a reference to Conan Doyle’s occasional habit of (probably inadvertently) changing Dr Watson’s Christian name, while the hat deduction scene is a take on “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle”. In the third episode, the scene where John (it seems almost impossible to refer to the main characters in this series by their surnames, as one instinctively would when discussing the books or other TV and film adaptations) finds Sherlock in the crack-house is taken from “The Man with the Twisted Lip”, the Victorian-era opium den having been updated for modern sensibilities. Even Mary’s real initials, as shown on the memory-stick that she gives John, refer to the novel The Sign of Four, the one in which Dr Watson’s wife first appears. Moving away from Conan Doyle, there are even a couple of nods to The Day of the Jackal (how Mary obtained her new identity) and Casablanca (the scene at the airfield).

What I’m trying to say is that the plot devices used by the writers of Sherlock are not in themselves original ideas; they may have taken Sherlock Holmes out of the nineteenth century but they are being surprisingly faithful to the books. Even moving Holmes and Watson to a modern setting isn’t entirely a new idea – back in the 1940s, the Basil Rathbone version of the great detective was taking on the Nazis – but I do like the way this new, modern version of Holmes is so instinctively at home in the twenty-first century.

And why not? After all, there was also more to Sherlock Holmes than hansom cabs, fog and gaslights. Twenty-first century London has email and text-messages (which take the place of the near-ubiquitous telegrams that kept arriving at 221B Baker Street), and in the books Holmes was always keen to use the latest that modern technology and forensic science had to offer to help solve crimes. And, of course the twenty-first century Dr Watson is a wounded veteran from the war in Afghanistan, just like the original. Instead of chronicling his adventures with his somewhat unconventional flatmate for a magazine, he writes a blog (and there really is a blog to go with the show, created by the writers; for sheer detail, they’ll stop at nothing). There’s even some real-life London lore, such as the fake houses on Leinster Gardens, thrown in for good measure.

Sherlock Holmes has undergone quite the revival in recent years; as well as the BBC series with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, there have been two Guy Ritchie films with Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law as the original dynamic duo in a pseudo-late-Victorian setting, and an American TV series with Cumberbatch’s fellow-Frankenstein Johnny Lee Miller as a modern-day Sherlock who moves to New York and is assisted by a Dr Joan Watson. Thanks to all of this, sales of the original books have apparently shot up.

Here, it seems, is one literary character you just can’t seem to get rid of. Heck, even his creator had to bring him back after killing him off, and every new generation would appear to desire their own version of the great detective. We currently have three; I don’t know what that says about us, but it says a lot for the enduring appeal of Sherlock Holmes.