Alan Davies

Alan Davies interview

Jonathan Creek returns - and when he isn't solving fiendish crimes, Alan Davies is relaunching his stand-up career.

The 5 best episodes from Alan Davies's detective

Jonathan Creek is back and this time he's sticking around for a little while.

Jonathan Creek: The Letters of Septimus Noone - review

Alan Davies slips back into the title role more easily than he sits on a pony. As his wife Polly, Sarah Alexander brings a sprightly canter to an old dobbin of a show. If anything it's the audience - especially those who weren't wearing their rose-tinted glasses - who'll have felt the most out of place.

There's a wonderful dig at Sherlock in the opening episode of this comeback series, which sees Alan Davies making his return.

Jonathan Creek finds that he has unwittingly acquired a crime-fighting apprentice - a young man with a scarf and a talent for noticing stuff. It's hilariously done, and later Creek creator David Renwick also pokes fun at Poirot and his imitators in a scene where all the suspects are gathered together. We're also treated to a clever pastiche of an Andrew Lloyd Webber-style musical, but these aren't the only unusual features about this episode.

Ali Bastian guest stars as the leading lady in a West End show with a classic locked room mystery who is later found stabbed in her very own locked dressing room. But what's most striking in this whodunit is that, for once, we are shown exactly how the crime was committed, by whom and how it was covered up. All we have to do is wait and see how Creek will work it out for himself.

Creek's improbably lovely new wife Polly (Sarah Alexander) is still getting used to this slightly bizarre world. But when she finds a secret box of letters in the massive Tudor mansion she has just inherited, she finds out that being married to a super sleuth might come in handy too.

Return of Jonathan Creek: why do we love it so much?

Nearly seventeen years after the first episode aired, Alan Davies' duffel-coated sleuth is shuffling back onto our screens.

Alan Davies interview

"He's certainly punching above his weight in the wife department," laughs Alan Davies, 47, who has played Jonathan Creek since 1997.

Alan Davies interview

TV Choice caught up with Alan Davies on set...

Jonathan Creek makes fun of Cumberbatch's Sherlock

He is sporting a long black coat, has a thick crop of dark hair and an obsessive an eye for detail. But this man is not Benedct Cumberbatch's Sherlock (in case his sideburns didn't give it away) but a criminology student called Ridley in a deliberate mickey take that features in the upcoming return of Alan Davies's rival BBC One crime series Jonathan Creek.

Alan Davies Après-Ski review

Sadly, Alan Davies doesn't possess the wit to bounce off them like Graham Norton, if this evidence is anything to go by.