Hate watch: Jonathan Creek

In a new feature on the popular culture we’d prefer to forget, BEN THOMAS comes to bury ‘The Clue of the Savant’s Thumb’.

People beg me to explain something, but it’s the last thing they want to hear. Because you’re disproving a miracle. Houdini walked through a wall two bricklayers built on stage. People swore he had the power to dematerialise. To find out he used a trap door under a carpet is too mundane, you feel cheated. That’s all magic is, an illusion. It doesn’t make the illusion magic.
Jonathan Creek, ‘The Wrestler’s Tomb’ (1997)

Would it be fair to describe the BBC television series Jonathan Creek as ‘mannered’?

I mean it as the highest of compliments. I think it’s something to do with the heightened dialogue of the show’s writer David Renwick. The way characters speak in his work is entirely unnatural, but it sounds so pleasing to the ear that the artifice is half the fun.

It’s notable that Jonathan Creek works almost immediately from the pilot, ‘The Wrestler’s Tomb’ (1997). It’s 98 per cent there. But for a few wrinkles, the elements are functioning from the get-go.

Caroline Quentin is, of course, fabulous. Hack writer Maddie Magellan is a monster: ruthless, manipulative and selfish; a bully and a glutton. But Renwick writes her with just enough humanity for an actress of ability to flesh her out into a breathing character. Such a shame that Quentin has been almost entirely squandered by writers and directors since.

Alan Davies does exactly what’s asked of him. That’s not a dig. Alex Jennings, Nigel Planer, Nicholas Lyndhurst and Hugh Laurie were considered for the part, but anyone else playing Creek would be unimaginable now. He catches the decency and pedantry of the character. The duffle coat was Davies’ own, apparently.

It’s odd seeing Anthony Head (R.I.P.) playing lecherous stage magician Adam Klaus in the pilot. He’s not quite right. Too handsome and charming. A bit too Teflon. Stuart Milligan, who took over for the second series, is far more fun. Just good-looking enough, but more brash, flawed and seedy.

The mystery of the first episode is entertainingly tricksy. It’s not one of Renwick’s greatest and it fails to fill the ninety-minute runtime, but it’s good enough to give a flavour of how Creek’s mind works. The script hops effortlessly from sparkling wit to broad farce. It’s all very satisfying. And Colin Baker gets killed off within the first ten minutes. As he should.

This is the formula that endures throughout the next four series and a handful of specials. Caroline Quentin departs, but that leaves room for Julia Sawalha to come in as Carla Borrego in ‘Satan’s Chimney’ (2001). Carla may be less blatantly awful than Maddie, but she’s still wonderfully shallow, acidic and insecure. And her disastrous and loveless marriage to Brendan Baxter brings in Ade Edmondson as a regular. He’s awful in the most watchable way.

The fourth series wobbles on its axis at times. The tone turns darker and crueller, and that sometimes clashes with the whimsy. The scene where incompetent conjurer Kenny Starkiss, a semi-regular played by Bill Bailey, appears to be dragged off to be murdered by sex traffickers is a case in point. And the last episode, ‘Gorgon’s Wood’ (2004), features a disfigured prostitute, her violent pimp, and heavily implied uncle/niece incest.

At times, series 4 simply isn’t fun. But it also presents one of the strongest and most sustained runs of mysteries for Jonathan to solve in the show’s history. And the protagonist is still the same lovable eccentric: a magician’s assistant who lives in a windmill, and who often seems almost weary with dealing with the day-to-day uncanny.

You wouldn’t meddle with that, surely?

Poor man was living in a windmill, weren’t you, when I first met him. Thinking up conjuring
tricks for a living. So you know, bit of a reboot required there.
Jonathan Creek, ‘The Clue of the Savant’s Thumb’ (2013)

There was a ten-year gap before the programme returned for its fifth and final series. During this fans had to make do with occasional festive specials, among them ‘The Clue of the Fucking Savant’s Thumb’, broadcast on 1 April 2013. The date should’ve given us a hint of what was to come.

Adam Klaus has performed a disappearing act (possibly for the best, post-Operation Yewtree). Jonathan’s no longer a magician’s assistant. He’s sold his windmill, hung up his duffle coat, and works in corporate marketing. He’s also trapped in a lop-sided marriage with Polly, a joyless shrew who seems to have loathed his past vocation. She’s played by Sarah Alexander, who usually brings a light touch to similarly brittle and humourless characters, but is just doomed here. Her character has essentially broken Jonathan Creek.

Only it wasn’t Polly. David Renwick broke Jonathan Creek in an act of unwitting self-sabotage. Jonathan was a Pooterish Peter Pan, sustained by his life-long love of the golden age of stage magic. Having him turn his back on that provokes the same heartbreak as a child outgrowing Father Christmas. There’s a mild catharsis in seeing him pull on the duffle coat one last time at the end of the episode, but it’s fleeting. Jonathan Creek has put away childish things and we’re all the poorer for it.

Maybe this was supposed to be the end, but this new, unwanted status quo continued for another four episodes: one three-part series and one last, unloved anniversary special. Perhaps Renwick needed to shake things up for his own sanity? He’s on record saying that coming up with new ‘impossible’ mysteries was increasingly tortuous, and that he suffered from writer’s block throughout his career. He was teetering on the brink of retirement, but the demand for new Jonathan Creek was still there. The puzzles in the last short run of episodes have been described as ‘mundane’. Possibly mundane was all that was left in him?

Back to ‘The Clue of the Savant’s Thumb’. I can try to look for positives. It’s moodily shot, especially the opening montage (Renwick directed the three 2009-2013 specials himself, and he has a good eye). Sheridan Smith returns as Joey Ross, Jonathan’s sidekick in the specials, and she brings her usual abrasive energy to the role. It’s the last story to be built around a proper locked-room mystery, which is nice, even if the resolution is vaguely ridiculous (forgivable) and unsatisfying (less so). And Rik Mayall returns as D.I. Gideon Pryke.

His character first appeared in the Christmas special, ‘Black Canary’, broadcast on Christmas Eve 1998. And that story is perfection. A mysterious suicide in the snow outside an old country manor is rendered inexplicable by some missing footprints. The guest cast are perfect, not least Murray Melvin as Lionel Prekopp ― what a face and voice! He looked and sounded like he’d emerged from an unmarked grave.

But the flaming brandy on the Christmas pudding is Rik Mayall as D.I. Pryke. It’s an understated yet dominant performance as the investigating officer who’s even more brilliant than Jonathan. And what makes it a still more impressive showing is that it was filmed only four months after Mayall’s quad bike accident. It was a resurrection.

So bringing back Pryke was an obvious choice. Only, since ‘Black Canary’, the detective has been paralysed by a sniper’s bullet and spends the entire story stuck in an electric wheelchair. Like Ironside Plus. One of the most brilliantly physical comic actors of his generation, and Renwick makes his character paraplegic? What the actual fuck, David? What the actual fuck?

I’m tired now. ‘The Clue of the Savant’s Thumb’ is on BBC iPlayer for another month if you want to watch it. After that I hope they purify it with fire.

Find more writing from Ben Thomas at his blog summers2theb.

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