Joanna Lumley

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.

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.

The last time we met the veteran solver of impossible mysteries was three Easters ago and the intervening years have seen a disconcerting transformation. Suited and booted, his curls now swept back in greying executive waves, it seems Creek (Alan Davies) has sold his soul to Mammon, or the advertising industry at least. But can he resist the lure of his favourite old-style puzzle - yet another locked-room mystery? His on-off sidekick Joey Ross (Sheridan Smith) sums it up: "A dead man in a room, seen and photographed by witnesses, evaporates into thin air. Walls, floors and ceiling are all rock solid. No way could he have got out the window or through the door which was being watched the whole time. And yet..." (No change in the basic plot then.) Creek professes to be uninterested in the affair until he learns that the victim was celebrated intellectual Franklin Tartikoff (Nigel Planer), and the chief witness his famously matter-of-fact wife Rosalind (Joanna Lumley). But meanwhile Creek's paraplegic arch-rival Gideon Pryke (Rik Mayall) has got his sole functioning digit wrapped round the investigation. A starry cast, a festering rivalry, a mind-boggling puzzle; for many the perfect Easter Bank Holiday drama.

Joanna Lumley: 'I'm obviously up for an Ab Fab musical'

Joanna Lumley has revealed that she is interested in future Absolutely Fabulous projects.

Joanna Lumley has no plans to retire as Patsy

Ab Fab star Joanna Lumley has insisted there is plenty of puff left in Patsy - as she vowed to never retire.

Before Ab Fab and national treasurehood, Joanna Lumley was in some pretty ropey things and before that she was a mildly exploited swingin' London model. Her directorial debut in the Little Crackers series looked back at that period but what charm it possessed was spoiled by the unnecessary behind-the-scenes report which followed, adding nothing but gush.

In her at once frothy and bleak episode of Little Crackers - a Sky1 strand of short autobiographical dramas directed by a different star each night - Joanna Lumley sought to persuade us that as a teenage model she had been a) gawky and shy, and b) routinely called ugly by photographers.

These two ideas may sound no more believable than wrestling, but in interviews she's insisted they're true. Apparently in the Sixties all female models were taunted by the men taking their picture. "Close those legs," sneered the photographer in Lumley's short, "I know you're not used to it."

In those days, fashion photographer was the ideal job for a misogynist, allowing him simultaneously to ogle and bully women without fear of reprisal. In Lumley's short, though, there was reprisal, in the form of a magazine editor who fired the photographer after he bullied the teenage heroine. The editor was played by Lumley. Effectively she'd arrived from the future to save herself.

After the success of Chris O'Dowd's Moone Boy and Kathy Burke's Walking And Talking it was hard not to expect big things from Sky1's latest lot of Little Crackers.

But I can't see any of this year's first batch making it to a full series. Joanna Lumley's much-hyped look back at her early modelling days was particularly uninspiring. But with efforts from the likes of Paul O'Grady, Sharon Horgan and Jason Manford still to come this week perhaps we shouldn't give up all hope just yet.

Sky's seasonal Little Crackers series returned with an autobiographical short about a Sixties model, directed by Joanna Lumley, who took a small cameo role herself as a fashion magazine grande dame. "Baby, Be Blonde" was an innocent affair, as guileless as a teen-magazine photo-romance. It told the story of a Lumley-like ingénue, briefly tempted by the magical glamour conferred on her by her new blond wig (suddenly men are whistling at her in the street) but then rebelling against the oafish sexism of a Baileyesque photographer, in the interests of sisterhood and solidarity. Lumley went through all this at the time, so I guess she's got the details right. But I still found it tricky to buy the notion of the hottest young snapper on the block doing a shoot for a knitting pattern catalogue.