Jonathan Creek and the Vanishing Mental Moneyshot

Some time ago, whilst watching UKTV Gold, I made a wish upon a star for the BBC to make more Jonathan Creek. It’s an odd TV show, because no matter how good any given episode is, it has severely limited repeat viewing value. The earliest episodes are over ten years old, and even though I can now, in my mature and wizened state, appreciate them as good television, whilst simultaneously laughing at the sartorial follies of the 1990s, I still know how they’re done. There is no mental money shot.

You could make this claim for all mystery fiction bar Columbo, but I would argue that the locked room mystery subgenre suffers more from this than its less nerdy brethren. A puzzle is implicitly involved. The emphasis is on the howdunnit as much as the whodunnit, and picking apart an open problem for which there is no apparent rational explanation is what makes it so satisfying, like untying a particularly stubborn knot which seems to defy Euclidean geometry.

As you may have gathered by now, I quite like Jonathan Creek, although even I will admit it was limping along by its fourth season, in part because Julia Sawalha’s character didn’t fit into the show’s premise as well as Caroline Quentin’s, and in part because the series was just getting a bit tired and emotional. When I first got cable TV, in amongst the sea of reruns I was occasionally pleasantly surprised to stumble across an episode I hadn’t seen before, but this event became more and more rare as time went on. Eventually I resigned myself to the depressing fact that watching it would forever be nothing other than mental masturbation without climax, and the frustration of this led me to change the channel in disgust whenever I caught a glimpse of a familiar scene. It was at this point that I made my wish.

Anyway, last night my wish came true. A brand new, one-off, feature length Jonathan Creek Christmas Special, The Grinning Man, written by the show’s original creator David Renwick. OK, so it didn’t have Caroline Quentin in it, but it didn’t have Julia Sawalha in it either, so it could go either way. I watched it, and it was…alright, actually. A literal locked-room mystery, with a nice grim tone set straight from the start. The blonde from Two Pints of Lager… can deliver good dialogue as well as needless fishwife-screeching, and her character actually works as a gobby know-it-all foil against our titular protagonist.

It was far from perfect. For a start, it was two hours long on the BBC, with work the morning after. I’m not sure they could have trimmed it down to the magical 90 minute mark, but by 1h45 it was starting to groan a bit. Also, I figured out about 60% of the salient mystery elements long before they were revealed in-show. I’d love to claim my powers of deduction were responsible for this, but it was mostly down to televisual mystery storytelling convention. When the camera lingers unnecessarily over a seemingly irrelevant object in the first ten minutes of the episode, it might as well flash up an enormous neon sign reading “PLOT DEVICE”. This isn’t necessarily the TV show’s fault, but there’s only so much fourth-wall etiquette the viewer can apply without resorting to outright delusion.

Still, it was a force for good over a season of ambiguous Christmas television. There’s no word of a new series, and that might be for the best. All the obvious quality material was consumed early on in the show’s history, and I’d much rather leave it where it is, with the hope of future one-off specials produced over a long, quality-assuring gestation period.

There are two fundamental rules when performing magic: never tell them how it’s done, and never repeat the same trick twice. Jonathan Creek breaks the first rule as a matter of course, and when it comes to the second rule, some tricks are simply unrepeatable. If the BBC and The Honourable Mister Renwick wish to prove me wrong, they’re quite welcome to try.