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.
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