Jonathan Creek, Series One (1997)

Jonathan Creek (Alan Davies) uses his considerable powers of logic and imagination to invent tricks and illusions for the sleazy stage magician Adam Klaus (Anthony Head, in a hilariously slimy one episode performance). Sometimes, that’s bad news for potentially levitating elephants. Over the course of the first series’ five episodes, Jonathan finds himself roped into solving various locked room mysteries and impossible crimes by Maddy Magellan (Caroline Quentin), an investigative reporter specializing in using means foul or fair to uncover miscarriages of justice. The two also develop the will they/won’t they dynamic apparently beloved of all TV and romance writers.

This long-running – in the weird, sporadic way of BBC TV shows – mystery series is particularly beloved among mystery and crime fans who prefer the strange mental contortions of the locked room mystery style to grittier or more realistic fare. Even though I’ll probably never stop loving my hardboiled detectives, I’ve grown much fonder of this sort approach to crime over the years, particularly since the purer strains of this approach often show a deep love for the outré, the bizarre and the grotesque that fits very nicely indeed into my tastes. One must just give up on ideas on murder methods being probable and often on the niceties of characterization as well.

The latter isn’t a problem for Jonathan Creek, however. Writer, creator and what the Americans would call show runner David Renwick uses his comedy background to populate the world of bizarre crimes Jonathan Creek takes place in with characters who are usually ever so slightly off. This solves a couple of problems impossible crime can run into rather nicely for the show. The improbability of murder methods and their constructions is easily waved away now: these weird numpties populating the series would never murder anyone in a sensible and direct way, so the building of fake rooms and overcomplicated alibis seem perfectly logical in context. Furthermore, the humour helps the series avoid turning into a sequence of scenes of a guy explaining and theorizing about a crime at the audience. There’s still quite a bit of that, but it is organically integrated into proceedings where the next gag is seldom far away, and where the interplay between Jonathan and Maddy keeps the explain-y scenes light without needing to make them stupid.

Renwick’s jokes hit more often than not, and even when they tend to rather broad satire – particularly of showbiz and popular culture - and the easy gag, they are typically nicely timed and simply work.

Apart from its mysteries and the fun character interplay, the show also puts rather a lot of effort into bits and pieces of weird worldbuilding – Klaus’s stage show and some of the background of fictional 70s rock act Edwin Drood are particular highlights in this first season, though the titular House of Monkeys of the last episode is nothing to sneeze at either. This actually increases the impression the show takes place in a rather fun parallel world that’s exactly like ours (well, the one of 1997), just with a much better quality of murders.

At the same time, the mysteries and their solutions are often as fun and clever as they are improbable; even this early on, the show also seems to find proper delight in playing with certain genre expectations while keeping very strictly to those you can’t play with without breaking the locked room/improbable crime genre.