Alan Davies

Alan Davies interview

Alan Davies discusses his new comedy tour, which features show dates in Wales, and about growing older in the land of comedy.

Cardiff Comedy Festival preview

Wales' biggest festival of laughs returns in July with TV star and legendary stand-up Alan Davies headlining at the Wales Millennium Centre's Donald Gordon Theatre.

Brick Lane Comedy Festival announced

Ed Byrne, Al Murray, Adam Buxton and Alan Davies have been signed up to headline the inaugural Brick Lane Comedy Festival.

The comedy crime series Jonathan Creek returns for its first outing since 2010 and it's still as baffling as ever, although there have been a few changes...

The main change is that Creek (Alan Davies) has left the world of magic and his windmill home for an ordinary working life in an office, having married a lady called Polly (Sarah Alexander). While Polly goes away on a business trip, however, his sidekick Joey Ross (Sheridan Smith) tells Jonathan about a murder case involving an old friend's vanishing corpse in a locked room. Creek decides to dust off his duffle coat to take on the case - one that involves an old acquaintance of his: overbearing cop D.I. Gideon Pryke (Rik Mayall).

This episode had its ups and downs. I did feel myself giving a bit of a cheer when I saw Creek going through his wardrobe and pulling out his trademark duffle coat. The supporting cast performed well, although given that included the likes of Mayall, Joanna Lumley and Nigel Planer it's not surprising. What was surprising, however, is that given how energetic Mayall usually is it was interesting and refreshing to see him perform a role which demands almost no movement. There were some funny moments too, such as when Joey believes she has discovered a code, only to find out that Creek has solved it already. The way it's revealed was hilarious.

However, in terms of the case itself, there were some flaws in it. My brother was watching the episode as well, and remarked on one of the clues, which was a pair of footprints right up against a wall. The way the footprints were formed we by a pair of shoes being dropped from a high window and landing perfectly next to each other just in that spot. As my brother pointed out, surely the shoes would not have fallen straight to the ground, but tumbled as they fell.

So in this case, the performances as we good, but the writing could have been better. A new series is in the works so hopefully the show will return to form.

I hope Mr Hall, the BBC's new Director-General, sat down that Monday evening and watched Jonathan Creek and quietly applauded. I can't remember a 90 minutes - actually I can, Doctor Who last week, but this one isn't really for children - I enjoyed so much. Oh, bits are always beseechingly silly. And it comes along so seldom that we're almost bound to enjoy it. But this was still a winning showcase for simple, entertaining, catch-all British drama. So we got a jaunty-spooky theme tune reminiscent of Harry Potter, we got Joanna Lumley, we got both Rik Mayall (still impossibly handsome and delightfully hammy) and Nigel Planer off The Young Ones, a body that had escaped from a locked room, Sheridan Smith playing feisty-naughty modern, as is her winning wont, another body felled by a gargoyle pushed off a mansion (that was Midsomer or possibly Wycliffe), some good gags about academics and, of course, Alan Davies.

His Jonathan is married off now (to the very sexy Sarah Alexander) and has, and you can't quite blame him, thus reluctantly had to put on a suit and get a good job in her daddy's advertising agency. For a few minutes he actually looks rather cool and rather suited in fact to both the Don Draper comportment and life. But soon, excuses combine to let him dig out the old duffel and go off to solve impossibly complex cases with the singular hangdog exuberance that holds the whole extraordinary thing together. Some serious bits, too, not least when Ms Lumley, playing a lifelong atheist, suddenly realises, and with a certain horror, that everything she has ever believed might not be true. This occasional series might not change the world, but it should change the way we remember just how solidly good simple entertainment on the BBC can be when it has the guts to go with its own happy formula.

With David Renwick's planned ITV sitcom frustratingly canned due to a creative dispute with channel bosses, Creek is the only outlet for one of the masters of TV comedy writing. The long-awaited Easter special saw Alan Davies and Sheridan Smith return, supported by Joanna Lumley, Rik Mayall and Nigel Planner, for a typically tricksy locked-room mystery.

You'd think that after 16 years and 28 episodes, Jonathan Creek might itself creak a little - how many more variations on the locked-room mystery can there possibly be? - but nothing could be further from the truth.

Plenty of fun is still to be had from the deliciously contrived plotting, melodramatic scenarios, star turns in supporting roles and sharp scripts peppered with neat comedy touches. Who cares that some of the exposition is so tortuous it borders on actor abuse?

A feature-length special, The Clue of the Savant's Thumb waits a full 15 minutes before the show's magician/sleuth hero makes an appearance. Instead, viewers are treated to a suitably overheated flashback preamble, set in 1968, involving sadistic nuns, hysterical teenage girls, stigmata, drug-induced visions and an unexplained death at a gothic mansion turned convent school.

And this was just the warm-up to the main event, in which the blood-drenched corpse of a legendary television producer disappears from the aforementioned locked room.

Alan Davies once again provides the calm centre around which all the mayhem revolves, with Joanna Lumley linking two of the three mysteries - writer David Renwick is never less than generous with his plotlines - and Rik Mayall still managing to deliver his trademark, wildly over-the-top performance, despite being cast as a wheelchair-using detective paralysed below the neck.

Jonathan Creekused to be on every week - and, OK, it was a decent enough show for a Saturday night.

These days it pops up once in a blue moon, as a one-off episode like tonight's (9pm, BBC1), and for reasons I can't quite fathom, it's trumpeted as some kind of major TV event.

All right, maybe I'm being a bit harsh. Maybe my opinion is clouded by the fact Alan Davies gets on my wick.

But packing an episode with guest stars - tonight's include Rik Mayall, Joanna Lumley and Sarah Alexander - and giving this plot more twists and turns than a twisty-turny thing, can't disguise the show's basic weakness.

Namely, that the "body mysteriously vanishing from a locked room" business, though admittedly only one element of this latest case, is kind of tired now.

Alan Davies and Sheridan Smith are reunited for a one-off 90-minute special of paranormal sleuthing.

And the even better news is that they'll be shooting three more episodes in the autumn.

It's been more than eight years since a full Jonathan Creek series - and creator and writer David Renwick has come up with a brain-boggling puzzle and guest stars to tempt viewers back.

A dead man (Nigel Planer, no less) who's been seen and photographed by witnesses vanishes out of a locked room where the door is being guarded by none other than national treasure Joanna Lumley.

Also back in the fray is Rik Mayall as detective inspector Gideon Pryke, who last appeared in an episode called The Black Canary in 2008.

His circumstances have changed too - rather drastically. Since we last saw him, he's been left paralysed from the neck down apart from the use of one finger, which he uses to operate his wheelchair and to search for information on the internet.

For Joey Ross (Smith), who teamed up with Creek for the two specials in 2009 and 2010, the case is too tantalising to pass up.

But when she tracks down her old pal she's amazed at the new life he's carved out for himself since they last tackled a riddle.

And his reaction to the mystery sounds like a lament that could have come from any crime or detective writer.

"There will be an explanation," the sleuth calmly predicts. "It will all be very weird and wonderful and once you've fathomed it, everyone will be deeply underwhelmed and you'll wonder why you bothered."

Alan Davies: I'm usually the butt of my own jokes

The star of Jonathan Creek talks QI, his cancelled series Whites and finding his way in the world of comedy.