David Renwick

Radio Times review

Yes, the good news is that June Whitfield appears in this final episode, not once but twice, playing twins Heidi and Laurel (note the names - they prove significant). Unfortunately, their storyline turns out to be something of a sideshow, in an episode that offers another rattle-bag of curiosities.

Writer David Renwick has reached the point (if he didn't years ago) where all connection to reality has been severed and we're left with tales driven purely by puzzles, puns and misunderstandings.

So Jonathan's wife Polly, for instance, does something rash that you feel sure she would never do. The point of her character is that she's sensible and sane, if inclined to overreact to things, as she does when Jonathan greets an old acquaintance - an attractive weather presenter - a little too warmly.

The main mystery involves the wife of a government minister who is kidnapped, then forgotten about for half the episode as we detour into the world of the Creeks' eccentric cleaner (Josie Lawrence). A priceless watch, a heron, lousewort, tights and an Aladdin's lamp are also involved.

How Jonathan Creek is inverting the English whodunnit

Creator David Renwick upset some fans of the detective drama by showing whodunnit (and how) near the beginning, rather than the end, of the latest episode - but it's so well written that it's still great fun watching Creek unravel the mystery.

Jonathan might be missing his windmill this week as he discovers the highs and lows (mostly lows) of being part of a rural community.

He and Polly have moved into that massive country pile she ­inherited from her father and, although we're not told where it is, I wouldn't rule out Midsomer.

It's full of colourful, slightly odd ­characters, but one of the things that makes Jonathan Creek different is that it serves up a mystery that's not preceded by the word "murder".

This is so rare in television when you think about it (though Sherlock is rather good at it too) we should encourage more writers to follow scriptwriter David Renwick's example.

After all, death is such a downer, isn't it?

Anyway, the locals have welcomed Jonathan and Polly wholeheartedly - even to the point of including their portraits as part of a new religious painting, much to the embarrassment of Jonathan.

But the big mystery this week revolves around a retired mystic called Astrodamus.

He was ­generally thought of as being pretty rubbish but a discovery this week seems to suggest he made the most ­extraordinary prediction in the history of predictions.

You can rely on Jonathan to get to the bottom of this puzzle - but even if he doesn't it's not a matter of life and death.

Hooray for that.

Radio Times review

David Renwick beckons us back into the world of his reluctant detective for the first new series in a decade. And what a horribly strange world it is, full of knowing puzzles and macabre games.

Creek's new wife Polly (Sarah Alexander) is less than keen: "I sometimes wonder, Jonathan, exactly what I married! Free admission for life to the twilight zone?"

This first instalment is typically high black comedy. The main story revolves around an actress in a West End musical (listen out for some fine pastiche Lloyd Webber) who is stabbed in her dressing room, while locked inside - the victim of a seemingly impossible crime.

But that case is just a frame on which to hang all sorts of other treats and tricks, including a lovely bit with a young would-be detective who makes a string of Sherlock-style deductions... that are completely wrong.

It's great fun, and the story becomes like an ingenious music box packed with little clockwork mechanisms. There's a grinning corpse, a mystery letter, a demonic child and a nasty moment with a tuba that is pure, horrible Renwick.

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.

"Every time I see it I'm re-astonished by it," says comedian Steve Punt of the Rons' renowned Mastermind spoof. But as its writer David Renwick reveals, he came close to tearing it up: "I thought the premise was too contrived." It's these insights that have lifted this retrospectacle from papery clipathon to something more substantial. An influential 1937 photo of Ronnie Barker's dad provides another little frisson.

The final part focuses on the duo's song-and-dance finales and serials such as "The Worm That Turned" (set in a dystopian future of 2012!) and "The Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London Town" (written by Spike Milligan with a pseudonymous Barker). It rather glosses over the eye-watering sexism of some of the Ronnies' sub-Benny Hill fare. But the mini-scoops make this a must-see for comedy completists.

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.

As I dozed during Jonathan Creek (BBC1), there was a moment of clarity. Such moments are created by a kindly god so you can finish crosswords or work out whodunnits. It became obvious who decapitated Nigel Planer and stuck the head on a scarecrow's body. It was Rik Mayall. The motive? Payback for those dismal veggie stews Planer's hippy Neil served Mayall's punky Rick in The Young Ones.

When I awoke, it became clear this hypothesis was wrong. The murderer could have been anybody but Mayall. Planer's smug polymath could have been rubbed out by his wife Joanna Lumley. Or terminated by her bit on the side so he could continue to marvel at Lumley's plummy articulation during pillow talk. Or by the usual suspects - sinister villagers, mad nuns, God. But not Mayall. He was the cop investigating the murder, after all. Hold on, though. Wouldn't that be perfect cover?

In any case, there were bigger mysteries. All those household names, all David Renwick's writing talent. For what? The disinterring of a three-years-cold corpse of a TV series whose historic function is to incite couples wending their way up the little hill to Bedfordshire to have exchanges such as the following. "Was it the crazed nun who reached through the portrait of Saint Barnabas to strangle Sheridan Smith?" "You idiot, it wasn't the nun. That was half a century earlier."

Renwick had a lot of fun with his script, though. There really was a character called Jacqueline Hyde, who didn't appreciate why Creek found her name funny. Planer's reading included a book called Cerebral Entropy in the Era of Fox News, though not its companion volume, Brain Shrinkage in the Era of Paranormal Hokum.

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."