David Renwick

Radio Times review

When we first see Jonathan Creek, there's something horribly wrong. In place of the familiar shabby duffel coat, he's wearing a suit and apparently doing something "grown-up, responsible and creatively challenging" in the world of marketing. However, after Joey Ross brings news of a corpse that's mysteriously disappeared without a trace despite being locked in a study guarded by his wife, the detective is straight back on the case (and in his usual attire).

This locked-room scenario is one that writer David Renwick has employed before, but this time he throws in all sorts of murder-mystery clichés, including a spooky country house; memories of a macabre death at a Catholic girls school 50 years earlier; and a sinister local society. It's a confusion of every Midsomer Murders and Agatha Christie you've ever seen, with elaborate interlocking clues and dead ends.

But alongside Alan Davies and Sheridan Smith is a cracking supporting cast that includes Joanna Lumley, Nigel Planer and Rik Mayall who ham it up beautifully.

Creek creator David Renwick delivers a new feature-length case for the inquisitive illusionist. At the home of a politically charged polymath, a body is discovered which mysteriously appears to be more mobile than your average cadaver. Paranormal investigator Joey Ross tries to coax Creek out of retirement in order to undercover the truth. Alan Davies and Sheridan Smith are joined by a guest cast including Joanna Lumley, Nigel Planer and, making a welcome return to our screens, Rik Mayall.

David Renwick interview

We spoke to wonderful TV writer David Renwick about bringing back Jonathan Creek, scrapped sitcoms, One Foot in the Grave and more...

There weren't many duff notes in Friends, the slick NBC sitcom that ran and ran from 1994 to 2004 and, for those of us with homes full of teenagers, is still running and running. But one of its duffest notes was the casting of Helen Baxendale to play Ross's British wife, Emily. Nothing against Baxendale, but amid all that sassy American humour, she seemed as flaccidly English as a stale Rich Tea biscuit surrounded by freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies.

In fairness, that was kind of the point; we weren't meant to warm to Emily. And Baxendale, deliberately, didn't get many killer lines. But it wasn't just that; whip-smart, wisecracking American humour just doesn't sound right emerging from a British mouth. For the same reason, Daphne Moon (Jane Leeves) was my least favourite character in the otherwise sublime Frasier. It's not that British actors aren't capable of wonderful TV comedy, just that the dialogue in the best US sitcoms is rooted in New York-Jewish traditions of razor-sharp put-downs and one-liners. Think Woody Allen and Neil Simon. On British television, comic dialogue has a different rhythm.

Anyway, all of this brings me to Episodes, in which Matt LeBlanc (dim, amiable Joey in Friends) plays a heightened version of himself in the latest example of what is rapidly becoming a TV genre all of its own: celebrities indulging in a game of double-bluff with us, playing themselves as slightly more neurotic and prima donna-ish than they actually are, which of course suggests that they're not neurotic prima donnas at all. Steve Coogan did this beautifully in The Trip recently, as did Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm. In Episodes, it is LeBlanc's turn. He plays Matt LeBlanc, hugely rich and successful thanks to Friends, who to the horror of married British comedy writers Beverly and Sean (Tamsin Greig and Stephen Mangan) is cast as the lead in the US version of their hit UK show. They wanted their British lead, a fruity RSC type called Julian (Richard Griffiths). But they get LeBlanc.

So far, so good. It's a great idea, with great opening credits: a script flying from London to LA. And there are certainly precedents for television successfully turning a mirror on itself; The Larry Sanders Show of blessed memory did it exquisitely. Moreover, there's something painfully real about British comedy writers being lured to LA by the sweet blandishments of network bosses and the promise of a Spanish-style hacienda in Beverly Hills, only for the semi-detached back in Chiswick to seem even more alluring once the dream starts to sour. You should hear the British writing duo Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, who did the whole hacienda thing, on the subject. Yet I find myself unable to give a fat thumbs-up after the opening Episodes, and the problem lies with Greig and Mangan, or at least with their script. In a British context, they're both terrific comic performers. Greig was pitch-perfect as the hapless heroine in David Renwick's wonderful Love Soup. But here, trading waspish one-liners in the land of Jack Benny and George Burns, they seemed out of place. And although that's the whole point - that they are out of place - they should at least be talking like Brits, not Americans.

Still, it's early days. I have a feeling that Episodes will get better the more LeBlanc gets involved. And there have already been some lovely gags, like the friskiness that gripped Beverly and Sean when they saw that the vast bath in their rented Beverly Hills home could easily accommodate both of them, only for it to wear off while they waited for the damn thing to fill.

And difference was the secret of a wonderful weekend of popular drama on BBC One. Jonathan Creek remains indefinably cross-genre. It is a mystery series without detectives, an X-Files saga for sceptics. It is a comedy that can scare you rigid. At its centre is a romance that never happens. I don't know how long it takes David Renwick to devise his meticulous Creek plots but in last night's not a line was wasted. Even the ones apparently there just to be funny had hidden purpose. "They think there might be an early malignancy knocking about there somewhere," said Ian McNeice's hypochondriac priest of his ample body. But he really was ill - although he performed a little resurrection from the pulpit at the end.

The episode was called The Judas Tree and its plot would not have worked without its Bible references or its Roman Catholic dramatis personae. Yet only a very solemn Christian would object to its showing on Easter Day. In any case, from the moment of Creek's first party trick - divining from his maligned sidekick Joey's appearance exactly what she had been doing that day - this was, more than anything, a Sherlock Holmes story.

The Judas Tree was one of David Renwick's convoluted, gothic puzzles, shot through with comedy. There was, for instance, something really nasty in the woodshed. The murderer, who was also a detective writer, spelled out the dark art of bamboozlement: "The trick is to fool the reader into trusting all the wrong people, and then - in the most innocent and everyday details - sow the seeds of terror." Agatha Christie, however, once said that the best murder was simply to push someone down the stairs. Watch out for the white Persian cat, which at one point is quite obviously thrown on to a table by the cat wrangler, and bitterly resents it.

In the months since Jonathan Creek was last on our screens, writer David Renwick seems to have spent a lot of time with the Sherlock Holmes casebook. Guest Paul McGann remarks on the "lingering air of Victorian mystery" and he's not kidding. From spooky stories about people succumbing at precisely predicted times of death to Jonathan discerning sidekick Joey Ross's (Sheridan Smith) current occupation from the redness of her fi ngertips, this one-off special has the defi nite feel of a Baker Street consulting room about it. Not that this makes it any less enjoyable. Indeed, all the hoodwinking and sleight of hand will keep you on your toes right up to the big reveal. Alan Davies remains extremely likeable as the duffel-coated sleuth, his delivery of those twisted lengths of explanatory detail being so good that he even gets the opportunity to do it twice over. The only flabbiness in the plot comes from the appearance of Adam Klaus: Stuart Milligan brings a wolfish smoothness to the part of the high-profile magician, but his subplot goes nowhere and detracts from an otherwise well-burnished brainteaser of an episode.

Alan Davies ('Jonathan Creek')

After the huge success of the 2009 New Year special 'The Grinning Man' it seemed inevitable that it wouldn't be long before Alan Davies put on his famous duffle coat for another Jonathan Creek mystery. Written and directed by show creator David Renwick, the forthcoming Easter special 'The Judas Tree' will see Sheridan Smith re-teaming with Davies to investigate events at a house called Green Lanterns. We caught up with the show's leading man to find out what we can expect.

Alan Davies: "Terrible Climate Of Fear"

You can count on QI and Jonathan Creek star Alan Davies to give an honest opinion. Last month I took part in small round table interviews in London with Alan, co-star Sheridan Smith and writer David Renwick ahead of the new Jonathan Creek film - The Judas Tree where Davies spoke about "the terrible climate of fear" in British TV today.