Interview: Alan Davies reflects on his career

I had quite a traumatic childhood and a problematic home life. Mum died of cancer when I was six, leaving Dad to raise me and my older brother and younger sister. None of us really liked each other, which was rather difficult.

Alan Davies: We're making a mess of our culture

Having graced the stage and small screen for more than two decades, Alan Davies has seen a fair few changes--both professionally and personally.

Jonathan Creek review

It's not easy pulling off the classic Christmas combo of spooky and cosy, but this special makes it look (super)natural.

Jonathan Creek Christmas special review: Daemons' Roost

This year's Jonathan Creek Christmas Special proves that there's life in the old duffel coat yet.

Kicking off with a gloriously lurid tribute to the heyday of Hammer horror, the latest mystery for Alan Davies's mooching sleuth sees him drawn to the seemingly cursed country seat of Daemons' Roost to reconnect with a previous client. Along with wife Polly (Sarah Alexander), he inevitably digs up much more than he bargained for. Warwick Davis provides enthusiastic comic support as an illusion-loving vicar, while Creek's much-missed duffle coat makes a cameo.

Jonathan Creek special review

Well, Jonathan Creek's 2016 Christmas special, 'Daemon's Roost', is neither festive, nor particularly special but it is the best that the show has been in recent years. Although if you recall 'The Sinner & The Sandman' you'll know that that's not a particularly high bar to vault.

Jonathan Creek, review

A creaky return for Alan Davies's amateur sleuth in the spooky seasonal thriller.

After two year's away, Jonathan Creek is back with a 90-minute special, reuniting Alan Davies with Sarah Alexander.

According to legend, a 19th century sorcerer named Jacob Surtees would summon the powers of Hell to terrorise and subjugate his victims at his home, Daemons' Roost. Contemporaneous accounts describe his impossible feats of telekinesis, which have remained unexplained to this day.

One hundred and fifty years after his death, the house is occupied by another, equally macabre, figure: veteran film director Nathan Clore (Ken Bones), whose output of horror movies in the 1970s generated its own brand of terror.

With his health failing, Clore has summoned home his stepdaughter Alison (Georgie Lord), to finally share with her the chilling truth of what happened to her family there when she was a child.

However, days before her arrival Clore suffers a debilitating stroke, rendering him paralysed and unable to communicate the truth Alison has hoped to learn.

Within the house the ghostly presence of Jacob Surtees can still be felt, as Alison and her husband Stephen (Emun Elliot) unearth clues to the mystery that become more challenging and opaque, the deeper they probe.

Stephen's own life has been marred by tragedy. When his first wife Imelda was found poisoned to death in a bizarre locked room case it was only through the deductive talents of Jonathan Creek (Alan Davies) that the puzzle was eventually solved.

Can Jonathan assist again? Or perhaps his wife Polly (Sarah Alexander), and her understandable aversion to hideous deaths, will persuade him to pass up the challenge - especially as there's already a psychopathic killer on her husband's trail, with a score to settle.

Best last-minute DVD comedy stocking fillers

There's a sackful of comedy DVDs to keep us in stitches over Christmas. Tim Oglethorpe and Nicole Lampert pick their favourites. Includes Michael McIntyre, Alan Davies and Sarah Millican.

The 50 funniest films... chosen by comedians

For Sarah Millican it's the Coen brothers, while Stewart Lee laughs out loud at Festen. From the canonical to the controversial, and in no particular order, we asked 10 standups to pick 50 movies that make them giggle...