WITHOUT A PADDLE

Jonathan Creek: The Case of the Savant’s Thumb, should have been a scrummy Easter TV treat. Instead it was like one of those really cheap Easter eggs you get which have the thinnest of shells on the outside and absolutely nothing at all inside.

I’m sure it must have seemed like a good idea at the time to build a story around a group of psychotic nuns at a 1960’2 girl’s school who decided it would be acceptable to drug their charges with LSD so as to induce a vision of Jesus. Add some nonsense with bees in jam jars and then fast forward to present day and have the adopted daughter of one of the girls behead her father after he died during a bizarre chainsaw accident. 

The accident, of course, wasn’t an accident, it was orchestrated by two of the most ridiculous and inept Secret Service Agents in the world who thought a comedy sketch show was a real recording of politicians behaving badly and set out to bump off anyone connected with it. Still with me? Good. The beheading by the dutiful daughter was necessary in order to fool her mother into believing that her husband’s body disappeared from a locked room, thus proving the existence of some higher power because her faith in such things had been eroded by those psychedelic nuns. Throw in a ludicrous rustic Magic Circle and a lusty farmhand and voila, Jonathan Creek rides again.

Except he didn’t. The biggest mystery here is not the barmy collection of old tosh that posed as plot, but why David Renwick has decided to treat his most memorable creation so shabbily. Conan Doyle at least had the decency to chuck Sherlock Holmes off the Reichenbach Falls when he wanted to kill him off. He didn’t turn him into an Accountant and let him die a slow, lingering death from embarrassment.

The thing about Jonathan Creek is that he’s always been a misfit. A duffel coated genius who lived in a windmill and devised seemingly impossible illusions for an ego-centric magician.  This time around, Renwick decided to have him grow up, get married to a token blonde, move to suburbia and take a job as a corporate dogsbody in his father in law’s business empire with back to back meetings and presentations instead of doing what he was born to do.  The Jonathan Creek we all know and love would have gone bout of his mind in five seconds. 

The odd social faux pas aside, (did I mention the transexual married couple at the posh cocktail party? Sorry, must have slipped my mind), I began to wonder if this wasn’t some gigantic set-up and the Jonathan Creek we were watching was actually some evil doppelganger bent on ruining our hero’s reputation. But, no, it was all for real apparently. The duffel coat did make a triumphant return and seemed to be the only member of the cast who had a clear idea of what they were doing.

It seems clear from this mish-mash of disconnected and ludicrous ideas that the inspiration boat has well and truly sailed. On this evidence, another Jonathan Creek episode seems remote. If it does happen it will be a resurrection worthy of Lazarus. Now that would be a trick worth seeing.