I was curious about the Alan Davis tv series Jonathan Creek. Alan is the regular guest panelist on Qi and he's enjoyable there. I've seen a bit of his stand up comedy but I haven't seen him in much where he actually acts. Jonathan Creek sounded like the best bet, which was great because the library had the complete series. I put the first one, from 1997, on my queue and it came the other day. I watched all 5 episodes pretty quickly. I really enjoyed them. It's a bit slow, there's a lot of talking, walking, driving and detecting but usually it's interesting and quirky enough to keep my interest. The show did really well in the ratings, starting at 9.68 million viewers and averaging about that for the rest of the season. That's the kind of ratings Doctor Who gets at times.
The creator, David Renwick, wanted to make a British Columbo with unusual and impossible murders. He did a good job at that while still making his detective unique and interesting. Each story has a puzzle to work out and Jonathan is the guy with the brains to do the job. Not that it's a job Jonathan wanted. He's got his magic thing going and since he's a bit of a low key kind of guy he doesn't like the spotlight much. He's quite happy to live in his windmill some 35 miles out of London. It's nice inside. Caroline Quentin plays writer Maddie Magellan and she's pretty much the opposite of our hero. In fact, she's a bit of a nightmare. She campaigns on behalf of wrongfully charged criminals but she lies all the time so she can get close to people. She'll break into your house if she thinks there's a story home. She'll steal from you or trick you into doing something without telling you what you're getting into. She's the reason Jonathan gets drawn into the first mystery. The murders are all different and interesting. You can see all the episodes are on YouTube so catch them while they're available.
The Wrestler's Tomb is the pilot that introduces us to Jonathan Creek. He's designs illusions for magician Adam Klaus who's played by Anthony Head. Adam has some nice stage pieces we see during the program. He was written out of the rest of the series for budget reasons. An artist is murdered and a woman is found bound and gagged in his bedroom. A petty criminal is accused of the job but he says he didn't do it. Someone did. You can find out on YouTube.
Jack In The Box finds a dead comedian in a fallout shelter locked from the inside. He had such crippling arthritis that he couldn't have pulled the trigger of the gun to kill himself. So who did? Maddie had worked to get the man who murdered the comedian's wife out of jail. Based on recent evidence he was wrongfully imprisoned. The comedian's wife has heard about Jonathan and she asks him to look over the fallout shelter. After seeing the toilet he figures it out.
The Reconstituted Corpse is about plastic surgery and murder. Nigel Planer appears as Maddie's blind date. They don't get a second date but he does help her carry up a large cabinet that dumps out a dead body when they get it into her bedroom.
No Trace Of Tracey is about a vanishing teen and an aging rock star. I actually figured out how they did part of the mystery but not who did it. There's tree lovin' going on here, so watch out. The hippy farm is builidng an ark. As you can see from the screen grab above it's not the best process shot but it gets the job done in making you think that the hippies are truely off.
The House Of Monkeys has a man murdered by a samuarai sword in a locked room. Was it ghosts? Hell no! Jonathan nearly gets killed by a gorilla and that turns out to be the clue to the whole thing.
There's plenty of interesting places to visit and nice big houses. The one the artist lived in was pretty interesting. I found the show well worth watching. There are three more seasons and some specials. It maintained a fairly good rating over the 16 years since it started and a fifth season is coming out next year.
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