Rik Mayall

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.

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.

Jonathan Creek is a changed man. He's got a fancy new office and a new job to go with it. But he can't shake Sheridan Smith's Joey Ross off that easily. When a dead body vanishes from a locked study, it occurs to her that the mystery would be right up Creek's alley. But can she persuade him to get back in the game?

While we were only able to view a ten-minute taster of this feature-length Easter special, we're guessing she manages it. Featuring guest turns from Nigel Planer, Rik Mayall and Joanna Lumley, this should whet the appetites of the devoted (of whom there are a surprising amount) for the new three-part series planned for next year.

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.

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."